Greece: Crisis, smoking and tobacco conflicts in social media

Greece has undergone a distressing crisis that has taken a heavy toll, devaluing lives of individuals and functions of society at large. Besides the economic meltdown, there has been an even worse crisis of values. The country currently occupies a low rank in the WHO Happiness Index (99th in 2016 and 87th in 2017), not so much because of worsening ranking in healthy life expectancy (still ranked 24th in the world in 2017) or even wealth (still ranked 44th in GDP per capita), but because of mediocre ranking in social support (ranked 80th) and extremely low rankings in freedom to make life choices (ranked 150th among 155 countries), generosity (ranked 155th, ie last) and trust (protection from corruption) (ranked 128). There has been an estimated 3% excess of deaths during the economic crisis, a dwindling population with one of the lowest fertility rates worldwide (1.3), a gross increase in use of psychoactive medications as demonstrated by measurements of drugs in the wastewater of Athens (11-fold increase in detected antidepressants, 19-fold increase in detected benzodiazepines, 35-fold increase in detected antipsychotics) and major shortages in public hospitals and social welfare. The superimposed refugee crisis is only partially under control. Finally, there is a massive exodus of highly educated citizens seeking a better future abroad. The demise of a country with a very high Human Development Index (HDI) (still ranked within the top 25 countries in the world in inequality-adjusted HDI despite the crisis, better than the USA that is ranked 28th) is not an incident of just local interest. It is pertinent for all nations dealing with high debts, instability of values and political and societal soul searching, including the USA and many other European countries. For over 2 years, I had maintained a column in The Blog section of the Greek edition of Huffington Post trying to contribute to the public debate on how to revert this sad situation. The contributed op-eds were not aligned with any particular political party, and thus, they attracted considerable attention—one of them had actually received the highest number of visits than any op-ed ever in the lifetime of this particular social media brand. The covered themes focused on the irrationality of the crisis and of the response to it. Proposed solutions focused on bolstering meritocracy, transparency, accountability and healthy democracy, seeking a new vision of excellence based on strong science, technology, innovation and catharsis from corruption. It is essential to capitalize on the major local strengths, especially the large mass of highly qualified, well-educated professionals. For example, Greeks represent about 3% of the world’s most highly cited scientists, about 20 times more than expected given the relative small size of the Greek population—but most work abroad. An early op-ed in this series proposed that the economic crisis can be reverted by preventive medicine efforts. Taking smoking alone, a decrease from the current 40% smoking rates (among the highest in the world) to 25% would result in so many lives saved and major diseases averted that would amount within 50 years to a benefit exceeding the entire current public debt. However, in the middle of the crisis, a few years ago, the prime minister celebrated that the tobacco industry is heavily investing in Greece to make it a major epicentre of its global activities. Greece has been thirsty for investments. However, not all investment will help equally, and some investments may be highly harmful. Clearly investment by the tobacco industry cannot be celebrated, in my opinion. The current prime minister, coming from a diametrically opposite party than the previous one, visited recently the facilities of a local Philip Morris subsidiary. The specific facilities specialize in the production of a heat-not-burn tobacco product (IQOS) with a 300 million Euro investment and with plans to sell product in 30 countries. Heavy campaigning in the local media has promoted that IQOS Received: 2 October 2017 | Accepted: 2 October 2017 DOI: 10.1111/eci.12841