(According to the Tobacco Manufacturers' Association, the typical price of a packet of 20 premium cigarettes in Spain is £3.78 and in Poland £2.74, compared to £8.99 in the UK. Tax now accounts for about 80% of the price of cigarettes in the UK and adult smoking prevalence – 22% for men and 17% for women – is less than half its levels in 1974. Finally, in March 2015, the British government followed Australia's example and introduced plain packaging.

Cigarette logos gradually faded from Formula 1 cars, and health warnings on packs proliferated in size and punch. In the years that followed, Western governments introduced increasingly punitive regulatory and taxation regimes. In a study of 40,000 British doctors beginning in 1951, British epidemiologists Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill demonstrated the link between tobacco smoking and disease. Since the 1950s, the world's major tobacco companies have faced one setback after another.

That's all part of that excitement, I suppose.' 'Now you've got to deliver, and the world awaits, and BAT wants results,' he says. Now 41, thickset and goatee-bearded, Wheaton was charged with steering his company's efforts to enter a field that had the potential to destroy its traditional operations. At the end of 2014, BAT rewarded his hard work by putting him in charge of their 'next generation products', responsible for devices that deliver nicotine without smoking. In the intervening years he had run the Russia office for BAT, and become the youngest-ever board member at the world's second largest international tobacco firm. 'It was quite spicy.'Įxactly 15 years later, Wheaton found himself in the middle of another potential conflict. 'We were locked in our houses with gunfire going on for three days,' Wheaton recalls. On Christmas Eve, President Henri Konan Bédié was overthrown. Abidjan, colloquially known as the 'Paris of Africa', was considered a desirable posting, but, at the turn of the millennium, a period of stability was ending. He moved to Abidjan, the commercial capital of Ivory Coast, to promote a portfolio of brands including Craven A, Benson & Hedges and Rothmans. When British American Tobacco acquired Rothmans, Wheaton was given the option of relocating to West Africa. At 23, he had joined the cigarette manufacturer Rothmans, who sent him to Dubai. At the end of 1999 Kingsley Wheaton found himself in the middle of a coup d'état.

Smoking club contraption maker