A Dark Side Revealed: How Indonesian Tobacco Industry Uses Social Responsibility to Build Its Lethal Hegemony Saputra, Auditya Firza.
a) Law and Economy Department, Post-Graduate, University of Indonesia, Central Jakarta, Indonesia.
b) Jakarta Legal Aid Institute, Central Jakarta, Indonesia-
Abstract
With consumer numbers uprising every year, the tobacco industry is uncontestably a bonafide business for Indonesia. Retaining the only Asia-Pacific country yet accessing Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the highly populated archipelago still lingers with a worrying smoking prevalence level, while the commodity oftentimes outnamed as the suspect behind the poverty circle. The situation worsened during the Covid-19 outbreak, as recently revealed that cardiac disease significantly increases the fatality risk of comorbid patients: excessive smoking becomes a major contributing factor. Intensely persuading youths, the subliminal tobacco advertisements always associate the product to certain social constructions, for instance, masculinity or nationalism, to be the influencing call. Encountered with the weakly enforced legal substance, low selling price, and minimum market failure intervention, the habit being seen as normal urban-lifestyle behavior. Thanks to the exaggerating narrative on tobacco excise economic contribution and philanthropic campaigns, the industry falsely admired by the public, having appeared morally supported despite all the following impact on health catastrophe. A social phenomenon, the hegemony is a complex mixture of both legal issues and socio-cultural processes. Using a socio-legal approach, this article describes critically how the industry uses the CSR campaigns, contradict to the genuine ethical principle, to create the anomaly and secure dominance. A lesson learned from the pandemic, better tobacco control instruments like FCTC is a crucial boost to recover from the situation.
