The British Museum put an end to a 15-year sponsorship deal with Japan Tobacco International over concerns that the arrangement ran afoul of an international agreement that bans advertising and promotion related to tobacco products. The United Kingdom was a founding signatory of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in 2004, and the sponsorship deal was nixed after the Department of Health and Social Care expressed apprehension to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), which provides the British Museum with around £75 million ($98.1 million) per year.As reported by the Times of London, the sponsorship deal with Japan Tobacco International has supported the British Museum’s acquisition of more than 2,400 Japanese objects as well as a curatorial post for Japanese material, an African heritage tour, and equality and diversity training for museum volunteers. In addition, “JTI, whose cigarette brands include Silk Cut and Camel, has had the run of the museum’s galleries for private events and its own filming,” according to documents reviewed by the Times.“Campaigners said that access allowed JTI to meet policymakers and ‘launder’ its reputation,” the paper reports, “and helped in the recruitment of staff who would otherwise be deterred by the tobacco industry’s culpability in millions of deaths.”The paper compared the controversy over the tobacco sponsorship to the British Museum’s contentious connection to the fossil fuel company BP, which ended after 27 years in 2023 after environmental activists had made it point of focus. In a statement, the activist group Culture Unstained said, “when it comes to corporate sponsorship, the British Museum is morally bankrupt. The health impacts of tobacco products and fossil fuel pollution are undeniable—and yet the only reason the museum seems to have ditched JTI is because they were forced to—even though the partnership clearly fell foul of tobacco regulation that has been in place for years.”