HER's is a career involving death threats, secret information passed from shadowy ‘Deep Throat’ figures, being held at gunpoint, and caught up in a trial in which key witnesses were murdered or mysteriously disappeared.
But it might be surprising to learn that these are not the experiences of a spy or globe-trotting investigative journalist, instead they are the experiences of a down-to-earth public health expert from Edinburgh.
Dr Judith Mackay, who studied medicine at Edinburgh University and is a member of the university’s Global Health Academy, has spent years battling the tobacco industry in Asia.
Now, for the first time the Hong Kong-based campaigner has revealed the full extent of the threats she faced in her career, during which she was branded as the most dangerous woman in the world by the international tobacco industry.
She told the Sunday Herald how she was for many years a “lone voice” in working at the forefront of tobacco control, trying raise awareness of the health risks of smoking and advising governments.
“Somebody once asked me do you have to be brave to be a tobacco control advocate today and my answer is no, I don’t think you do,” she said. “But I was the lone voice in the wilderness – I was basically the only person in Asia working on tobacco control regionally.
“The tobacco industry had just assumed it would ride its Marlboro cowboy into Asia and there wouldn’t be any opposition at all.”
Mackay, who was born in Yorkshire, moved to Hong Kong in 1967 at the peak of the Chinese Cultural revolution and spent a number of years working as a hospital doctor.
However she began to feel like the work was a ‘band-aid’ in having to treat so many people who had become ill as a consequence of smoking.
She decided to devote her career to tackling the industry full-time in the mid-1980s after a cigarette company attacked her work.
She said: “It [the company] was making a lot of threatening statements about how I was unaccountable and unrepresentative, claiming the tobacco industry was full of good sensible corporate advice. It was one of the turning points in my life.”
Mackay outlined the experiences she has gone through in a blog written for the ‘Dangerous Woman Project’ , which is being run by Edinburgh University’s Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities to collate stories of women who have been labelled as ‘threatening’.
She told how she has suffered verbal abuse over the years and in 1993, a US smokers’ rights group described her as a “psychotic human garbage, a gibbering Satan, an insane psychotic just like Hitler.”
The group also threatened to “utterly destroy” her – which was investigated by the FBI and led to her being offered 24-hour police protection by the Hong Kong government.
Mackay, who is a senior policy advisor for the World Health Organisation and director and founder of the Asian Consultancy on Tobacco Control, also had a chilling experience when she was an expert witness in a major trial involving cigarettes being smuggled into China.
The chief witness was murdered and eleven others disappeared – and Mackay discovered that she was being followed.
She helped the Hong Kong government take action against the importation and sale of smokeless tobacco, such as snuff, after she learned a ‘Deep Throat’ figure associated with the US tobacco industry had blown the whistle on a plan to immediately launch these products in the country.
In 1990, while she was working in Mongolia and staying at a government guest house, she found herself being held at gunpoint by suspicious Mongolian palace guards after going for an evening walk. She also found out there had been a cabinet meeting held to discuss whether she was a spy sent from the west.
But Mackay said her experiences had not deterred her from the fight against tobacco.
She said: “I have said – even to my lawyer – that if I were to disappear or to be found under a bus, this is not of my own doing.
“I think if anything I got very empowered by all these things that happened – it made me more determined, rather than less determined.
“But I did take some practical steps – one of which was to send our two boys when they were teenagers back to Scotland to school.
“I just felt they were safer back in the UK to finish their schooling.”
Mackay, whose husband is from Lossiemouth, still spends three months of the summer every year in Edinburgh.
The recognition for her work includes being named as one of the most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2007. She was also awarded an honorary degree by Edinburgh University in July this year.
At the age of 73, she practises tai-chi and has no intention of giving up her work.
Mackay said while much progress has been made in tobacco control, she believes she will still be tackling the tobacco industry for years to come.
“The tobacco industry is certainly as formidable as it ever was – it has just somewhat changed its tactics in terms of what it does,” she said.
“What they now do is to issue legal challenges and trade threats to governments.”
She added: “I have often said I am going to be working until I am 100 and I think that is probably true.”
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