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Over the decades or so, the playbook of the tobacco industry in Pakistan has been one of great illusion, an unrelenting cycle of fraudulent narratives designed to indoctrinate new generations and paralyze public policy. A new surveillance study by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, which tracked 201 news items and articles published by the tobacco industry and its front groups from 2012 to mid-2022 to mid-2025, exposes this dysfunctional machinery in alarming detail.
The findings reveal a choreographed strategy that destroys public health and drains national coffers while increasing industry profits.
The historical context of this fraud is long and damaging. In the 1950s, as evidence of cancer mounted, the industry promoted filters as a protective and harm reduction tool. When the U.S. Surgeon General’s 1964 report named tobacco as the single preventable cause of cancer-related deaths, the 1970s brought light and ultralight brands, a deliberate misdirection on tar and nicotine.
The push for “smoked” tobacco as a harm reduction measure has now evolved into its modern form: the aggressive promotion of electronic nicotine devices and pouches. These products, often highly profitable and even carcinogenic, are sold to a misinformed public under the same old, deceptive banner of low harm. One must ask: When will the industry stop minimizing harm and begin a pernicious narrative of ending tobacco products designed to kill half of their consumers?
The SDPI study had a strict, annual publication pattern that closely aligned with Pakistan’s fiscal calendar. Every November or December, outcries from the tobacco industry, its affiliates and allies emerge about the illegal trade, claiming that it causes an incalculable and specific loss of Rs 300 billion to the national exchequer every year.
This signature publication, curiously issued each year by a different tobacco industry-driven organization, serves a single purpose: to create a pre-budget hype of the illegal trade crisis that they claim is driven by higher taxes.
From January to June, the study found the narrative to be faster. A large majority of the analyzed articles link deliberate and unfair trade to the tax, creating a cigarette screen in the face of tax increases. They argue that the tax increase will promote the illegal market, which is a prime example of a scare tactic identified by the World Health Organization, with effects on trafficking, court challenges, anti-poverty rhetoric, reduced revenues and employment. This argument is deliberately misleading, as the illegal trade is primarily an enforcement and administrative failure, while taxation is a civic duty and the single most effective measure to reduce tobacco use in addition to improving public health.
Logic collapses under the slightest scrutiny. Pakistan Tobacco Board data shows that the total amount of raw tobacco produced as a crop has remained almost constant. Despite this, the industry claims that manufactured output has gone from 88 billion sticks to 39 billion sticks per year.
This reduction is reported despite a significant change in the regulatory landscape: a decade ago, only three major companies were registered as tax-paying entities with the Federal Board of Revenue, while by May 2025, the FBR had registered nearly 30 local tobacco companies, i.e. almost the entire tobacco industry in Pakistan. If the formal sector has expanded so significantly, how can output fall so dramatically? The industry’s own figures suggest a shift in production to a large-scale, vaguely unregulated, unregulated domain that they then blame on illegal trade.
We must demand full transparency on all industry interactions, reject the false trade-off between health and revenue and implement strong, evidence-based policies that prioritize the well-being of our citizens over deadly industry profits.
This manufactured crisis has serious consequences. SDPI studies have documented that this lobbying pressure has successfully blocked tax increases. The result is that Pakistan has some of the cheapest cigarettes in the world, making them easily accessible to the youth and low-income groups.
This policy paralysis comes at a staggering human and economic cost: tobacco kills more than 160,000 Pakistanis annually and bleeds the economy of Rs 715 billion (according to a 2019 study), in healthcare costs and lost productivity each year. The industry’s scare tactics have worked.
SDPI’s study further reveals that once the federal budget is announced and the threat of tax hikes averted, there is a notable shift in the industry’s narrative. A sudden pivot from the illegal trade crisis in the summer months to the promise of loss reduction. Articles and opinion pieces, often produced by the same network of industry front groups, which promise a better and more prosperous Pakistan, begin to promote e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches as innovative, less harmful alternatives.
This strategic shift is a ploy to rebrand and expand the market, targeting a new, often younger demographic that operates in a regulatory vacuum. The industry’s goal is not to help smokers quit, but to ensure a new pipeline of lifelong nicotine addicts.
Underneath this cycle of fraud lies a deep violation: the systematic violation of Article 5.3 of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, to which Pakistan is a signatory. The purpose of this article is clearly to protect public health policies from the commercial and vested interests of the tobacco industry.
SDPI’s analysis is alarming that a large number of government officials are unaware that every interaction with the industry must be recorded and made public for scrutiny. This opacity is exactly how the industry thrives. To prevent transparency, they deploy a network of front groups and fake grassroots movements that are actually funded by tobacco industry interests.
The University of Bath’s Tobacco Control Research Group, which tracks such organizations globally, has uncovered thousands of these organizations, adding 25 new ones to its database in 2024 alone. These front groups provide the industry with a refutable and seemingly independent voice to advance its self-serving arguments.
The ultimate question is who is behind this massive illegal trade that the industry so strongly condemns? The SDPI study points to a painful reality. It is incomprehensible that a smuggled product, burdened with international shipping, smuggling risks and supply chain costs, can be sold in Pakistan for Rs 150 per pack.
The simple, logical answer is that a significant portion of these so-called illegal cigarettes are being manufactured domestically, possibly by the same industry that is crying foul. A key loophole facilitates this: while the industry is mandated to stamp products for the domestic market, exports are exempt. This creates a channel for diversion and abuse, a direct violation of the spirit of the Protocol Against Illicit Tobacco Trade.
The tobacco industry’s advocacy in Pakistan is a calculated attack on public health and good governance. It is a multi-pronged strategy that includes misleading the public, influencing policy makers with fabricated data and violating international agreements designed to save lives. The SDPI study is a clarion call for accountability.
Three observational studies are now underway to assess other industry violations, including sales to minors, particularly through online channels where age verification is often weak or non-existent. It is time for the government, the media and the public to see this annual theater for what it is: a profit-making scheme that sacrifices Pakistanis for corporate gains.
We must demand full transparency on all industry interactions, reject the false choice between health and revenue, and implement strong, evidence-based policies that prioritize the well-being of our citizens over deadly industry profits.
The authors are tobacco control advocates working for the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Islamabad.
