Key Points: Tobacco control advocates can and should attend tobacco industry annual shareholder meetings.

Learning Objectives: Learn how to gain admission and what to expect at shareholder meetings.

Learn how to use shareholder advocacy in your local work.

Benefits: Gain stronger resolve in the mission of tobacco control advocacy.

Unveil the mystique of the people behind the "corporate veil" of these multi-national corporations.

Abstract

Each year multi-national tobacco companies meet to present their annual report to their shareholders, annual sales, profit margins and future growth of their lethal product are dispassionately discussed. According to Judge Gladys Kessler, these tobacco industry giants market their deadly products “with zeal, with deception, with a single-minded focus on their financial success and without regard for the human tragedy…” Several advocacy groups attend these annual shareholder meetings to bear witness for the millions of lives lost worldwide to big tobacco and to disrupt the “business as usual” atmosphere of these meetings.

Similar activities are also conducted against parent companies — General Electric, Time Warner, Viacom— of movie industry giants who continue to allow smoking in youth focused movies.

Join members of the Nightingales nurses group and advocates from across the U.S. who became shareholders of corporate giants, Altria-Philip Morris, Reynolds American Tobacco, etc…, as they share insights on how they focus public attention on the practices of tobacco & movie industries in their continued efforts in promoting the most deadly consumer products ever made.