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or decades, the tobacco industry’s playbook in Pakistan has been one of masterful illusion, a relentless cycle of deceptive narratives designed to addict new generations and paralyse public policy. A new monitoring study by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, which tracked 201 news items and articles published by the tobacco industry and its front groups from 2022 to mid-2025, exposes this disinformation machinery in alarming detail.
The findings reveal a choreographed strategy that subverts public health and robs the national exchequer while the industry’s profits continue to climb.
The historical context of this deception is long and damning. In the 1950s, as evidence of cancer grew, the industry promoted filters as a safeguard and harm reduction device. When that ruse was exposed by the US Surgeon General’s 1964 Report blaming tobacco as the single preventable cause of cancer-related deaths, the 1970s brought light and ultra-light brands, a deliberate misdirection on tar and nicotine.
The subsequent push for “smokeless” tobacco as a harm reduction measure has now evolved into its most modern form: the aggressive promotion of electronic nicotine devices and pouches. These products, often more profitable and also carcinogenic, are sold to a misinformed public under the same old, deceitful banner of less harm. One must ask: when will the industry stop reducing harm and simply start a no-harm narrative ending tobacco products designed to kill half of their users?
The SDPI study uncovers a rigid, annual publication pattern that aligns perfectly with Pakistan’s fiscal calendar. Every November or December, a coordinated outcry from the tobacco industry, its affiliates and allies emerges about illicit trade, claiming it causes an implausibly consistent and specific loss of Rs 300 billion to the national exchequer each year.
This signature publication, curiously released by a different tobacco industry-funded organisation every year, serves a single purpose: to create a pre-budget noise of an illicit trade crisis that they falsely claim is driven by high taxes.
From January to June, , the study finds the narrative intensifying. A vast majority of the analysed articles deliberately and falsely link illicit trade to taxation, creating a smokescreen in front of the probable tax hike. They argue that any tax increase will fuel the illicit market, a classic example of the SCARE tactics identified by the World Health Organisation, which stands for Smuggling, Court challenges, Anti-poor rhetoric, Revenue loss and Employment impacts. This argument is a deliberate distraction, as illicit trade is fundamentally an enforcement and administrative failure, while taxation is a civic duty and the single most effective measure to reduce tobacco use, besides improving public health.
The logic collapses under the slightest scrutiny. Data from the Pakistan Tobacco Board shows that the total amount of raw tobacco produced as a crop has remained nearly constant. Yet, the industry claims that manufactured production has plummeted from 88 billion sticks per year to 39 billion sticks.
This decline is reported despite a crucial change in the regulatory landscape: a decade ago, only three major companies were registered with the Federal Board of Revenue as tax-paying entities, whereas by May 2025, the FBR had registered around 30 local tobacco companies, that is, almost the entire tobacco industry in Pakistan. If the formal sector has expanded so significantly, how can production have fallen so dramatically? The industry’s own figures suggest a massive, unexplained shift of production into the untaxed, unregulated domain they then blame on illicit trade.
We must demand full transparency on all industry interactions, reject the false choice between health and revenue and implement robust, evidence-based policies that prioritise the well-being of our citizens over the profits of a deadly industry.
This manufactured crisis has serious consequences. The SDPI study documents that this lobbying pressure has successfully stifled meaningful tax increases. The result is that Pakistan has among 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 over 160,000 Pakistanis annually and bleeds the economy of Rs 715 billion (as per 2019 study), every year in healthcare costs and lost productivity. The industry’s SCARE tactics have worked.
The SDPI study further reveals that once the federal budget is announced and the threat of a tax hike is averted, the industry’s narrative undergoes a remarkable change. The summer months bring a sudden pivot from the illicit trade crisis to the promise of harm reduction. Articles and opinion pieces, often seeded by the same network of industry front groups, promising a better and prosperous Pakistan, begin to promote e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches as modern, less harmful alternatives.
This strategic shift is a gimmick to re-brand and expand the market, targeting a new, often younger demographic with products that operate in a regulatory vacuum. The industry’s goal is not to help smokers quit, but to ensure a new pipeline of lifelong nicotine addicts.
Beneath this cycle of deception lies a more profound violation: the systematic flouting of Article 5.3 of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, to which Pakistan is a signatory. This article explicitly aims to protect public health policies from the commercial and vested interests of the tobacco industry.
The SDPI analysis finds it 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 precisely what the industry thrives on. To circumvent 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 entities globally, has exposed thousands of these organisations, adding 25 new ones to its database in 2024 alone. These front groups provide the industry with plausible deniability and a seemingly independent voice to amplify its self-serving arguments.
The ultimate question is, who is behind this massive illicit trade that the industry so loudly decries? The SDPI study points towards an inconvenient truth. It is incomprehensible how a smuggled product, burdened with international shipping, smuggling risks and supply chain costs, could be sold in Pakistan for as little as Rs 150 per pack.
The simple, logical answer is that a significant portion of these so-called illicit cigarettes is being produced domestically, likely by the same industry that is crying foul. A key loophole facilitates this: while the industry is mandated to put tax stamps on products for the domestic market, exports are exempt. This creates a channel for diversion and abuse, a direct violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the protocol against illicit tobacco trade.
The tobacco industry’s advocacy in Pakistan is a calculated assault on public health and good governance. It is a multi-pronged strategy that involves misleading the public, influencing policymakers with fabricated data and violating international treaties designed to save lives. The SDPI study is a clear call for accountability.
Three observational studies are now under way to assess other industrial violations, including sales to minors, particularly through online channels where age verification is often weak or nonexistent. It is time for the government, the media and the public to see this annual theatre for what it is: a profit-driven scheme that sacrifices Pakistani lives for corporate gain.
We must demand full transparency on all industry interactions, reject the false choice between health and revenue, and implement robust, evidence-based policies that prioritise the well-being of our citizens over the profits of a deadly industry.
The writers are tobacco control advocates working for Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Islamabad.