by Monica Chamness
Staff Writer
Jay Poole, vice president of corporate communications for the Philip Morris Companies, told members of the Rotary Club of Jacksonville Monday the company knows what it did wrong and it is trying to make it right.
“It would be disingenuous if I failed to acknowledge that we’ve made mistakes in the past,” said Poole. “Our tobacco companies stumbled in a major way during the 1980s and much of the 1990s when they didn’t answer, or even acknowledge, concerns about cigarettes.”
Philip Morris has been diversifying its product base, though tobacco still accounts for 58 percent of its operations, with a growing overseas market.
One step the company took was to form an ethics and integrity department. All employees must now answer the following questions:
Is it legal?
Is it right?
How will it look to the outside world?
“We are also planning to change the name of our corporate parent to Altria Group, Inc. in order to provide more clarity between the activities of the holding company and our operating companies,” said Poole. “Philip Morris has been living with the consequences of losing the public’s trust for some time now. As we work toward rebuilding that trust, we’ve learned tough lessons about the difference between what’s legal and society’s sense of what’s right.”
Despite several unfavorable legal rulings involving the company’s tobacco products and its youth marketing strategies, the company has no intention of dropping its tobacco products.
“There is no such thing as a safe cigarette,” said Poole. “We agree with the public health community that cigarettes are addictive. For us, responsibility means working towards reduced-risk products.”
According to Poole, extracting those elements out of a cigarette which are harmful to smokers is a complex chemical process they are working to unravel.
A Virginia native, Poole was raised on his family’s farm. He served as an legislative assistant to U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell before joining Philip Morris.