Editor,

RE: "Seeing through big tobacco’s smokescreen” (The New Times, January 1). Anyone trusts any industry at their own risk; they are all in business for their own profit, not for your own good. Any good you derive from their product or service is only incidental, and is a necessary bait to get you hooked on those products and services whose revenues help fatten their bottom lines.

The tobacco industry behaviour is just one extreme case of practices that should open everyone’s eyes to this immutable fact: Left alone industry will not hesitate to do anything and push anything to make a profit, no matter the costs to the wider society.

Let industry do its thing. But even more important, Government must ensure it does all that is necessary to prevent what industry does that harm public health and safety. And, government must leave the onus on industry to prove what industry does does not harm us.

Mwene Kalinda