By Scotty Schenck, photo editor

John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” has been increasing in its presence and influence as a news broadcast on HBO. On Sunday, Feb. 15, he decided to strike against tobacco companies using social media and a cartoon diseased lung named Jeff.

For 18 minutes Oliver provided bitter criticism of American and international tobacco companies for their activities and policies overseas. Policies that were brought under scrutiny by Oliver included those of international companies like Philip Morris International, that tried to fight movements in countries to put health warnings on cigarette packages. Additionally, tobacco companies market their products to youths in several countries.

Marketing like this doesn’t appear in America because the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act of 1969 banned tobacco advertisements on television and radio.

Public health initiatives in Australia caused British American Tobacco and Japanese Tobacco International to file a lawsuit against the country, according to Oliver and an article in the Financial Times.

“At this point, it’s safe to say if you live in an apartment with at least two other people and you ask one of them to please smoke outside you can look forward to a letter from tobacco companies very soon,” Oliver said.

The packaging of the cigarettes was called “plain packaging.” With bland colors and the words in all-caps at the top “SMOKING KILLS” with morbid pictures below of toe-tags on corpses or diseased lungs. The brand name being sold is at the bottom in thin text. The law was aimed to impede the marketing of the addictive product.

However, Australia won the initial lawsuit, where the High Court of Australia called the tobacco companies’ cases delusive and said there was a logical gap. Philip Morris Asia now threatens to take Australia to international court using a 1993 trade agreement in Australia. According to the document, Australia could not seize a company’s property if they were based in Hong Kong. Oliver then said that Philip Morris put its Australian company in “the hands of the Hong-Kong-based Philip Morris Asia division” nine months before the lawsuit. The company would then claim the marketing as property of the business.

All of this prompted Oliver to create a social media counter-strike against big tobacco: #JeffWeCan.

The hashtag is still trending three days after the show aired and the video available on YouTube has had almost 3 million views. Oliver described Jeff as “the diseased lung in a cowboy hat.” Oliver and his team paid for billboards of the cartoon put up in Montevideo, Uruguay and gave t-shirts with the brand to citizens of Togo, a country in Africa affected by the tobacco companies.

“It’s clear what each side wants. Countries want to warn their citizens about the health dangers of smoking tobacco. Tobacco companies want to be able to present branded images that they have spent time and money to cultivate. So may I suggest a compromise? I present to you the new face of Marlboro: Jeff,” Oliver said.

Photo Courtesy David Shankbone, Creative Commons