Tobacco-related disease kills 3 million people annually around the world. The World Health Organization predicts the death toll will rise to 10 million a year by the 2020s, with 70 percent of these deaths taking place in the developing countries. Less than 5 percent of the world's smokers are American. Worldwide, more than 200 million children now alive will die from tobacco-related disease.

In Eastern Europe, men's average lifespans have dropped to the level of sub-Saharan Africa, thanks to smoking-related mortality.  The death toll from tobacco-related disease is greater than that from HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and maternal conditions combined.

U.S. Companies Target Overseas Markets

With long-term tobacco consumption rates flattening in the United States, virtually all of the market growth for U.S. tobacco companies is taking place overseas. Already, Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds sell nearly two thirds of their cigarettes in foreign markets, and earn nearly half of their profits from sales abroad.

Overseas sales are rising in the double digits annually for Philip Morris and RJR. The two leading U.S. companies saw cigarette exports rise by more than 250 percent in the last decade.

U.S. Companies' Global Expansion Means More Smokers

When U.S. companies' sales go up in foreign countries, they do much more than take market share from foreign countries: they create new smokers. In the year after the U.S. Trade Representative forced South Korea to open its market to U.S. cigarette producers in 1988, smoking rates among boys rose from 18.4 percent to 29.8 percent, according to a General Accounting Office (GAO) study. The rate among Korean girls quintupled, from 1.6 percent to 8.7 percent.

Analysts at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge have concluded that the entry of U.S. firms in Asian markets led to a 10 percent increase in smoking rates.

CNN reports that two out of three men in Russia now smoke, up from one in two a dozen years ago -- before foreign corporations entered the market. Smoking rates among women have tripled during the same period, from 10 percent to 30 percent.