Chitra Subramaniam | The News Minute | July 10, 2014 | 4:23 PM IST Why doesn’t Finance Minister Arun Jaitley ban the cigarette, if it is so bad? What’s the point hiking the excise duty up to 72 percent from 11? Next will be alcohol and chocolates. These are some of the question that follows increase in tobacco tax in today’s budget. The answers are simple. Till such time that tobacco and tobacco products are legal products, they cannot be banned. And this brings us to the crux of the matter – why is a product (cigarette) that kills one in two regular users a legal product? As for alcohol and chocolates, there is a safe way to consume both. There is no safe way to consume a cigarette as nobody smokes one cigarette a week – the product is designed to addict and kill. Cigarette and tobacco products – bidi, gutka etc – kill 3,300 Indians every day. The tobacco industry is like to other industry in the world. It is a death machine which running out of business in the developed world is seeking news addicts in the developing world. The tobacco industry lies about their product. They hire the best spin doctors who lie about the science. Their research tells them the nature of time-to-addiction in the brain for any community, race and social strata in the world. The global tobacco industry had a free run till 1994 when Minnesota in the United States (US) happened. In a 15-week court trial that saw the CEOs of tobacco companies testify – the case went up to the Supreme Court – the bottom was blown out of Big Tobacco Seven – Philip Morrs Inc, RJ Reynolds Tobacco Co, Brown and Williamson Tobacco Co, BAT industries PLC, Lorillard Tobacco Co, American Tobacco Co, Leggit Group Inc. Roberta Walburn – lead litigator of the Minnesota law firm Robins, Kaplan, Miller and Ciresi – blasted her way into tobacco industry vaults forcing them to release documents including scientific evidence the world had never seen before. In what was to become the fourth largest settlement in the history of the world then, tobacco companies were asked to pay $6billion to Blue Cross Blue Shield and the State of Minnesota for having lied about how they marketed their death machine. More importantly, over 40 million documents were now in the public domain – documents that told a terrifying tale of lies, deception, corruption and greed that cause death, devastation and disease. The US Surgeon General Everett M. Koop called the court case one of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century. Read the documents hereTobacco addiction is a communicated disease – it is communicated through advertising, marketing and subsidies. Adolescents who take to tobacco very often over-estimate their capacity to stop and under-estimate the addictive nature of the product. If you don’t start smoking before the age of 18, there’s a good chance you never will. This is why the industry looks for younger and younger children so addiction can install itself. Other areas will have to be worked out for jobs, agriculture subsidies, the bidi sector etc. Read our earlier piece here.Finance Minister Arun Jaitley may not yet have found the instruments to turn around the Indian economy, but he just made a huge contribution to public health in India.