The Cigarette Makers: How They Get Away with murder...
Cummins, Ken
The Cigarette Makers: How They Get Away with murder... WITH THE PRESS AS AN ACCESSORY by Ken Cummins During the 1950s, when the scientific and medical evidence linking cigarette smoking...
...From its power base on Capitol Hill, the industry has been able to squelch nearly all efforts for more effective federal regulation of cigarettes...
...The manufacturers refuse to disclose to the government the identities of all but a handful of the several hundred additives used in cigarettes, invoking the need to protect "trade secrets...
...There must be a better way...
...comments Matthew Myers, lobbyist for the Coalition on Smoking and Health...
...The Seven Smoking Sisters Make Their Big Play The latest epidemic to hit the Third World has not been borne by bacteria or germs...
...This is big money, so big that it can't help affecting the behavior of those who carry cigarette advertising...
...Reynolds Tobacco Corporation, stated in a recent company publication that the escalating anti-smoking campaign has "clearly reached a point beyond reason" and is "attempting to make smokers social outcasts, second class citizens...
...And almost all newspapers accommodate the industry's wish to advertise in those parts of the paper where it feels the impact is greatest, such as the sports section...
...One is the Consumer Product Safety Commission...
...The moral imperative of doing everything reasonable and possible to reduce the staggering toll from cigarette smoking may be felt someday in the executive boardrooms of the nation's publishing media...
...During the Carter administration, FTC commissioner Mike Pertschuk, who was then chairman, pushed to investigate deceptive advertising practices in the industry...
...What is most striking about these strategies is how they so brazenly contradict the cigarette industry's past pledges...
...Besides advertising efforts that can't help but persuade young people to smoke, the industry is also trying to reassure existing smokers...
...Pertschuk also believed that the FTC didn't need to wait on Congress but had the legal authority to order stronger health warnings for cigarettes...
...By the end of the 1960s, the use of deer tongue in cigarettes climbed to an estimated 6 million pounds a year, before a cancer scare caused the industry to begin phasing it out...
...For this surgeon...
...The industry has powerful friends in two important places: Congress and the media...
...The cigarette industry now spends $1.5 billion a year to advertise in magazines, newspapers, and on billboards...
...I've asked non-smokers if seeing cigarette ads ever made them want to smoke...
...The Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare has yet to print its first antismoking poster, and a JMC leaflet continues to make the dead-pan claim that "smoking cannot be the cause of lung cancer...
...In Sri Lanka, for example, cigarette consumption is up 9 percent a year since 1972, while in Malaysia, the rate of increase has been 5 to 7 percent...
...We get 200 pages of cigarette advertising (a year...
...I had intended to request that you carry back to The Times this challenge: 1. That Thp Times write and publish an editorial entitled "Why Thp Npw York Times Advertises Cigarettes," and after a suitable period publish a representative sampling of your readers' comments on the editorial...
...Cigarette smoking is being banned from public gathering places, shopping malls, and municipal airports...
...Some of the cigarette companies' advertising suggested that filtered cigarettes were actually beneficial to health...
...But there can be no mistake about the young audience that Philip Morris was reaching when it paid an undisclosed amount of money to feature its Marlboro cigarettes in "Superman II ." The logo appears some two dozen times, and publicity photos for the movie featured Lois Lane smoking Marlboro cigarettes...
...Olympic Training Center, the Joffrey Ballet, the Marlboro chamber music tour, and numerous art exhibitions at major museums...
...Reynolds and its compatriots will succeed another way: in continuing to stifle the "open debate" that should be raging right now about how to truly deal with America's number one public health problem My understanding of the Times' policy is that the issue turns not on FIR question of potential harm to the consumer of a product (assuming that commerce in the product is legal), but solely on the taste or propriety of the ad itself...
...And given the grim perversities of cigarette marketing—the product causes the early demise of the industry's "best" customers—the industry's future growth obviously depends on getting teenagers and young adults to take up the habit...
...Newspaper and magazine publishers could easily adopt their own "voluntary guidelines" that would enforce those of the cigarette makers themselves...
...In Malaysia, about 20 percent of secondary school children are smokers...
...The small, independent farmers who barely "eke out a living" raising tobacco—at least, in the words of their advocates—are the industry's most effective lobbyists for the tobacco industry in general...
...What Congress refuses to do is far less onerous...
...Taking such a step would hardly be unprecedented...
...But on a 1982 visit to Georgia, I learned that cigarette manufacturers continue to buy several hundred thousand pounds of deer tongue each summer from local residents...
...In 1954, for example, the FDA classified coumarin, a popular food additive, as a dangerous liver poison and banned its use...
...The American Council on Science and Health regularly compares the amount of coverage that magazines give to smoking and health issues to their dependence on cigarette ads for revenue...
...Waxman's bill, for example, only requires that the warning on cigarette packages add that smoking causes lung cancer, emphysema, heart diseases, is addictive, and may result in miscarriages and premature births...
...Today, the tobacco industry may be more on the defensive than ever...
...In China, cigarette revenues are a major source of capital formation...
...The company claimed the theater ran the ad by mistake...
...Reynolds Industries Inc...
...During the same period, it published 155 articles on dieting...
...It's not just scoreboards...
...If that happens, cigarette advertising could be banned entirely...
...Compare such eagerness to please with how most newspapers and magazines restrict and even censor ads for pornography, or ads that offend certain ethnic groups or widely accepted standards of taste and accuracy...
...In two years, cigarette manufacturers now spend as much as they did during the entire two decades in which they were allowed to advertise on television.All of which, of course, has been of great financial comfort to the publications involved...
...Sincerely, George F. Gitlitz,MD No rpply October 16, 1980 John B. Oakes Editorial Page Editor [Emeritus] Thp New York Timps Dear Mr...
...and carries ads by the pageful for a product undisputed as being the number one threat to health in the country...
...The committee is the major battleground for healthrelated legislation affecting the industry...
...I had hoped to vice this challenge directly to you,in public, aloud...
...At Savvy magazine, Carol Wheeler, a freelance writer, discovered that her name had been removed from the masthead after the magazine had published her favorable review of the book, The Ladykillers: Why Smoking is a Feminist Issue...
...Even some of the nation's most respected news magazines succumb to the blandishments of the industry...
...The Lorillard tobacco company is owned by the Loew's theater chain...
...AMA officials say—not for attribution—that the magazine insisted on this...
...Cigarette manufacturers outspend all other national advertisers in newspapers...
...And that's just what they've gotten...
...Life styles are made, not born',' reads the Times's ad copy...
...Phone calls to the White House from Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina and others in Congress had been made in the intervening period, and Brandt was told to convey to Congress the message that the Reagan administration was no longer taking a position on the bill...
...But coumarin is the main ingredient in deer tongue, a swamp plant that had been widely used as a major flavoring agent of cigarettes for several decades...
...When Congress banned cigarette ads from television and radio beginning in 1971, the-industry voluntarily agreed that its print advertising would "not suggest that smoking is essential to social prominence, distinction, success, or sexual attraction ." Nor would brand ads "show any smoker participating in, or obviously having just participated in, a physical activity requiring stamina or athletic conditioning beyond the normal recreation ." Think about a few of the cigarette ads you've seen lately...
...Sometimes the media is guilty of more than sins of omission...
...Smoking in the developing countries is spreading like the plague;' Dr...
...Even on the latter point, the FTC's power is less than commonly recognized...
...You don't need a big lobby when you've got friends like Ford:' says Pertschuk...
...Tobacco Journal to solicit more cigarette advertising...
...This use of subtle advertising techniques has also returned the cigarette industry to the very medium from which it was banned with such fanfare in 1971: television...
...As it was, Crisp said, Savvy's competitors would probably use the review to lure cigarette advertisers away...
...Pertschuk still wants the FTC to investigate the complaints stemming from the merchandising practices 'apparently aimed at teenagers and children...
...Then there's the industry's strategy of sponsoring sports, entertainment, and cultural events that link smoking with athletic and artistic endeavors...
...If you believe that Philip Morris was really trying to reach the parents who took their children to watch the feats of the Man of Steel, you probably also believe that copper bracelets cure arthritis...
...But the topic shouldn't be whether cigarettes are harmful...
...Along with Time magazine, it is currently running ads in the U.S...
...But when Brandt appeared before the Senate Labor and Human Resources committee just six days later, he omitted from his testimony any mention of these two key provisions...
...to the question of whether the industry wants teenagers to smoke...
...But the industry's scientists and advertising executives concocted another gimmick to fend off the health scare: the low-tar cigarette...
...enforcing that law would prove as impossible as prohibition...
...Is deer tongue still being added to cigarettes...
...Nonsmoking employees are gaining the legal power to curtail or ban smoking in workplaces and an increasing number of corporate and public employers are listing "nonsmoking" as a qualification for employment...
...Reynolds is calling for on the health issue is unlikely...
...More alarm bells sounded within the industry when a recent Gallup poll revealed that the proportion of smokers in the population fell from 37 percent in December, 1980 to 29 percent in December, 1982—an all-time low...
...Other manufacturer-sponsored events include the Lucky Strikes darts tournament, the Kool Jazz Festival, and—no kidding—Raleigh's Children's Cancer Classic Celebrity Golf Tournament...
...The billboard industry receives half its revenues from cigarette advertisers...
...In India, filtered and unfiltered cigarettes have the same tar and nicotine content...
...Our conclusion has been, and still is, that our readers should make that decision for themselves' The Times, incidentally, appears to be making a special effort to ensure that its readers get the tobacco industry's side of the story...
...surgeon general link smoking with even more health problems—most recently, uterine cancer and birthweight deficiencies and illness in children born to women who smoke during their pregnancies...
...Edward A. Horrigan Jr., the non-smoking chairman of the R.J...
...Obviously fearful of that possibility, the tobacco industry has redoubled its efforts in Congress and the media to tell its side of the story...
...Redbook, where 16 percent of the revenues come from cigarette ads, and Ms., where the figure is about 14 percent, didn't publish a single article specifically on smoking during that period...
...Philip Morris allows the distribution and sale of toys and candy cigarettes bearing the familiar trademark of its most popular and successful brand, Marlboro...
...The disease is now showing up at a much earlier age—often in the late 30s—and if current trends continue, women will soon be more prone to lung cancer than men...
...But the FDA, also fearful of retaliation from Congress, has never attempted to classify the cigarette as a hazardous substance under the federal Hazardous Substances Act, despite a death toll from the product that is probably several times greater than that from all the other substances the FDA regulates...
...After all, if the Marlboro man exercises too much influence on the public when he's seen riding across the Wyoming plains during the Sunday night movie, is his influence really any less in a 2 page, four-color advertisement or a 40 foot billboard...
...Ford quickly moved up to chair the consumer subcommittee, a post he has used with considerable effect to block bills on stronger health warning labels for cigarettes and increased government regulation of the tobacco industry...
...An even more "radical" step—by the industry's standards, that is—would be to extend the logic of the 1971 ban on television and radio advertising to newspapers, magazines, and billboards...
...The ironies of the agency's inaction on cigarettes are legion...
...Where people are poor, cigarettes are sometimes purchased instead of food...
...So much for promises...
...The FTC's impotence, it must be said, is partly the result of its own cowardice...
...Cigarettes are a consumer product whose danger goes far beyond the health area...
...This is all the more striking when one considers the dramatic increase in the rate of lung cancer among women...
...Morton Mintz Morton Mintz is a reported (it The Washington Post...
...No reply...
...Cigarettes could be forced to pay a fairer share of the havoc they wreak on the nation's health, an idea that underlies one proposal to stave off the bankruptcy of the Medicare system by imposing hefty taxes on cigarettes...
...Not to mention friends in the White House...
...Norway, for example has banned all cigarette advertising and promotion of tobacco products since 1973...
...Atomic-age:' "scientifically designed" filters would dramatically reduce the amount of nicotine, tars, and other harmful substances inhaled when smoking...
...For example, when Wendell Ford, a Kentucky Democrat, was elected to the Senate in 1974, former Kentucky Senator Earle Clements, then president of the Tobacco Institute, went to work behind the scenes to secure Ford's appointment to the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee...
...A brief look at the federal agencies that could regulate cigarettes, but don't, is even more revealing of the tobacco industry's influence...
...A recent report of the National Institute on Drug Abuse identified nicotine addiction as our leading form of drug dependence...
...He was a smoker.Sincerely.George F. Gitlitz, MD Acknowlpdgmpnt of rpceipt of lettpr from Mr...
...Last year, Newsweek published a 16-page insert on "Personal Health Care" that was prepared by the American Medical Association under a grant from the magazine...
...Smoking already accounts for an estimated one million premature deaths each year (almost a third of which are in the U.S...
...Almost none of these publications hold the industry to its own "voluntary guidelines" against advertising that associates smoking with health, beauty, athletic ability, and success...
...it's advertisements for cigarettes...
...The tobacco lobby nurtures the rise of sympathetic congressmen and senators—usually from the top tobacco-growing states of Kentucky and North Carolina—into the chairmanships of key House and Senate committees...
...So soft, so pure, it's used to filter the air in leading hospitals:' the ads for Kent's Micronite filter boasted...
...Friends tell me that it was an excellent meeting...
...The ban had no effect...
...What is most alarming is the way smoking is spreading among teenagers...
...The carriers instead have been the Seven Smoking Sisters-the major tobacco companies-who have undertaken major promotional efforts there...
...Similar amounts of space are so occupied day after day, and far be it for mp to tell you what happens on Sunday...
...Toohey's less than scientific survey not only ignores a fundamental tenet of adolescent psychology—the influence of role models—but a basic fact: most smokers take up the habit in their teens and then can't stop...
...Still, Congress isn't the only institution responsible for allowing cigarettes to keep exacting their staggering toll...
...Cigarette manufacturers have chipped away at the ban in other ways...
...In the mid-1970s, consumer groups petitioned the CPSC to set maximum levels of tar and nicotine contents for cigarettes...
...Reynolds, to think she no longer worked there...
...The tobacco industry hasn't really needed reporters and editorial writers to accept its arguments...
...the sales managers and executives of their publications have been so obliging...
...the two "search and rescue" members lighting up a Winston...
...Philip Morris Inc., the nation's second largest cigarette manufacturer—it and Reynolds control two thirds of the domestic market— pours in over $14 million a year just for its Virginia Slims tennis tournaments...
...Last year Kool cigarettes were advertised in more than 3,100 movie houses, many of which were running movies that were rated PG and even G. Action for Children's Television filed a complaint against Brown and Williamson with the Federal Trade Commission after a trailer for Kool cigarettes ran before a showing of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" at a theater in Newton, Massachusetts...
...Savvy Ladykillers It would obviously be unrealistic to expect Congress to ban cigarettes...
...Cosmopolitan and Psychology Today, both of whom earn several million dollars each year from cigarette ads, have refused to run an advertisement for a national chain of antismoking clinics...
...Compared to the treatment afforded other dangerous substances, the latitude given cigarettes is extraordinary...
...There certainly is the charge that cigarette advertising causes young people to start smoking;' says Bill Toohey, spokesman for the Tobacco Institute...
...Meanwhile, periodic reports issued by scientists and the U.S...
...Last fall, for example, Hustler's Larry Flynt tried to publish a full page advertisement alleging that the CIA had engineered the KAL 007 tragedy...
...The government responded by requiring health warnings on cigarette packs and banned advertising from Ken Cummins is a Washington writer...
...it also regulates advertising practices...
...And coumarin isn't the only additive that has raised concern...
...In March, 1982 Edward N. Brandt, the assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, testified before the House Health and Environment subcommittee in support of a bill proposed by Rep...
...the agency has become little more than a study commission that sends reports to Congress to back up proposed legislative actions on cigarettes...
...Oakes: 1 regret that a last-minute emergency forced me to miss your address to the Harpur Forum this morning...
...while winning the 1982 Wimbledon tennis tournament, Martina Navratilova wore the distinctive colors of Kim cigarettes, a British brand...
...A government can get hooked on cigarette revenues as much as smokers can get hooked on the weed itself...
...The Council's 1982 survey, for instance, revealed that Cosmopolitan, which gets about 10 percent of its revenues from these ads, published just eight articles on smoking between 1971 and 1981...
...they cause an estimated 65,000 fires each year, killing 2,300 people and resulting in more than $300 million in property damages...
...Those advocates aren't large in number, but they're well-placed...
...Snow White So Fool This is not to say that the nation's cigarette makers are playing it safe...
...In Newsweek, for example, cigarette advertising has gone up 300 to 400 percent since the 1971 ban...
...The industry's sense of foreboding is perhaps best illustrated by a current advertising campaign by R.J...
...Other merchandising activities seem to be aimed at children as much as teenagers...
...One reason is that tobacco products comprise a $60 billion-a-year industry that accounts for 2.5 percent of the Gross National Product...
...But the tobacco industry long ago realized that it could live with the nettlesome news stories and strident editorials if it could be assured of one thing: being able to purchase enough advertising space in these same publications' pages...
...its approach is far and away the norm in the journalism business...
...the mountain climber nearing the peak of his climb in the Camel Lights...
...Obviously, few journalists parrot the industry's view on the health effects of smoking, and in general, major media such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time, and others do a conscientious job of covering such things as the latest Surgeon General's report...
...it lobbies heavily against stricter antismoking legislation and the tobacco industry has returned the favor by helping to stall antibillboard legislation in the states and Congress...
...The most obvious sign of success is the paltry number of watchdogs—and poor ones, at that— who are responsible for policing cigarettes...
...But so far, a majority of the FTC has refused to tackle this volatile subject...
...In Japan, 70 percent of adult men smoke, and deaths from lung cancer have gone up 33 times among men and 28 times among women in the last 35 years...
...Why do cigarette manufacturers go along with the price support program, which forces them to pay higher prices for their main ingredient...
...All the FTC can do is enforce the law requiring health warnings on cigarette ads and packages and verify the tar, nicotine, and carbon monoxide content of each brand...
...A 1981 staff paper, for example, concluded that the industry's ads were everything its voluntary guidelines said they weren't: an effort to portray smoking as "an integral part of youth, happiness, attractiveness, personal success and an active, vigorous, strenuous lifestyle...
...As Alan Blum of the New York State Journal of Medicine recently noted, Lorillard didn't inform doctors that their early filters also contained asbestos...
...Congress could also outlaw cigarettes in vending machines to help prevent sales to minors...
...so far, their influence has kept the industry's losses to a minimum...
...Then there are the brands like Players, Sterling, and Barclay that are being promoted as status symbols for the elegant and affluent...
...Unable to blunt the latest wave of concern with any new technological gimmicks on the horizon that will make smoking "safer',' the manufacturers have responded with a variety of merchandising strategies designed to bolster sagging sales and refurbish the industry's image in the public eye...
...The companies see the writing on the wall: smoking in industrialized countries is declining, and the Third World is their last big play...
...At present, only the Federal Trade Commission has any jurisdiction over the cigarette manufacturers...
...1 lie circumstance which preventedmy doing so was in itself ironic: As I was finishingmy round and Raw about to leave for the meeting, Ibecame involved lit a lengthy, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to recuscitate a man who had suffereda massive coronary at about 7 AM...
...and 2. That Thp Times include in that editorial a succinct, but adequate and informative, "financial disclosure," so that its, readers may know what part revenues from cigarette advertising play in the economic life of The Timps...
...And they're made more satisfying for many adults across America with The New York Times...
...The typical Malaysian smoker is puffing 44 percent more cigarettes than in 1978...
...The small farmers' heartfelt pleas strike a particular chord among Democrats, since so many are rural black farmers...
...And as such, there is perhaps no more graphic example of the media's moral myopia, if not hypocrisy...
...The snow skier in the Brights 100 ad...
...Last year, "Superman II" aired twice during prime-time on ABC, and the Marlboro references were left intact...
...the evidence that smoking causes at least 340,000 premature deaths a year is as conclusive as it could be...
...Philip Morris is headquartered in New York City, not in the tobacco growing regions, and its various holdings include the Miller Brewing Co., the Seven-Up Company, and Mission Viejo Co., a home-building firm...
...In a recent interview on ABC's Horrigan would make only one concession to the anti-smoking camp: cigarettes, he averred, "may well stain your teeth ." How has the cigarette industry managed to get away with such blatant misrepresentations, not to mention the myriad violations of its own voluntary code of behavior...
...The ads have been bitterly denounced by the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, and the American Lung Association...
...The current warning-=`The Surgeon General has determined that smoking is dangerous to your health"—is hardly a ringing denunciation...
...George Gitlitz on the paper's policy on cigarette advertising...
...The July 12 Times carried four and one-half inches of one editorial column discussing the harmfulness of cigarettes, an ad for Merit cigarettes occupied two full pages, and one for Kent five-sixth of a full page...
...I've never yet run into a person who said yes...
...There, the government-owned Japan Monopoly Corporation controls the nation's cigarette business, and like any other such company, it's not awfully eager to see a drop-off in sales...
...But a timid commission voted 4-1 that it did not have jurisdiction...
...in magazines they rank second, just behind the transportation industry...
...Far more likely, R.J...
...If smoking takes off in the developing countries, those figures will look small...
...Many newspapers across the country refused to carry the ad, their executives citing "professional responsibility?' Offensive as this ad and those for X-rated movies are, they at least have one relative virtue: their influence does not cause people to take up a drug habit that will eventually kill millions of them...
...Because, says The Timps, the ads for the former are a "blight in print Each of us has his own personal threshold for . turns the stomach...
...Pertschuk's threats quickly mobilized the tobacco lobby, and Ford fought back by threatening to restrict the FTC's power in a widerange of areas...
...When pesticides are suspected to cause cancer—the recent controversy over EDB is a case in point—the substance is often banned outright...
...the chairman of the latter group's smoking and health committee has linked the call for an "open debate" to "arguing over whether the Second World War occurred!' The ads are right in one respect: it is time for an "open debate...
...By the end of 1982, their share had risen to 59 percent...
...Marketing efforts in such countries can he pervasive...
...In 1970, the last year cigarette ads were allowed 6n television, low-tar brands accounted for just three percent of the market...
...says Michael Taube of the University of Edinburgh...
...A more highly developed country like Japan illustrates what government dependence on cigarette revenues can lead to...
...A majority of the Commission, fearful that Congress would slash its budget, backed down...
...Perhaps most ominous for the cigarette companies has been the news on the bottom line of their ledger sheets...
...We must presume our readers are fully aware of the risks of smoking cigarettes:' said John J. McCabe, an assistant to the publisher of The New York Times, responding to a complaint from Dr...
...H. Duncan McMillan, director of special projects for Newsweek, stated "there is just not enough space sometimes to do justice to all the subjects involved ." When the magazine received a letter to the editor critical of the AMA for this omission, it refused to run it...
...owns Del Monte foods, Heublein Wine and Spirits Company, and Kentucky Fried Chicken Corporation...
...Maybe...
...Their efforts also distract attention from the fact that cigarette manufacturing is hardly the province of small, struggling entrepreneurs...
...before the Federal Aviation Administration is a proposal to outlaw smoking on short-haul commercial airflights...
...Off the court, Navratilova donned a jacket that prominently displayed the Kim logo...
...ABC's 20/20 recently aired a tape-recorded conversation in which an ad executive from Cosmopolitan said, "We can't accept it...
...When it was discovered that several dozen people had died after taking Eli Lily's Oraflex, the drug was ordered withdrawn from the market and a flood of lawsuits was filed...
...The Nigerian Tobacco Corporation pays more than $50 million a year in taxes, while India collects more than $1 billion in excises on tobacco...
...Industry spokesmen steadfastly deny that its advertising and promotion efforts target young people...
...Reynolds, the nation's largest cigarette maker, sponsors the Team America pro soccer team, the World Cup soccer championships, Camel Ski Days, Camel Expeditions wilderness safaris, the Western Rodeo Series, the International Hot Rod Association, and the American Motorcycle Association—not to mention assorted fashion shows, art festivals, and music concerts...
...the rugged Marlboro man chasing a stray steer...
...Henry Waxman that would require stronger warning labels and establish a government-funded smoking prevention program...
...It's a matter of actively pandering to a major advertiser...
...Oakps' spcrptary...
...The federal agency most appropriate for regulating cigarettes is the Food and Drug Administration...
...This is not to single out the Times...
...The tobacco companies apparently reserve their most deadIy cancer sticks for Third World people like these...
...The Newsweek issue that contained the supplement also carried 12 pages of cigarette advertising...
...This compares to the $250 million it spent on television advertising the year before it was banned...
...there's really nothing to debate...
...When was the last time you watched a football game or baseball game on TV without seeing a Marlboro ad...
...cocoa, which is now a common flavorant in cigarettes, has been linked with cancerous skin tumors in mice exposed to cocoa-flavored cigarette smoke...
...All but a handful of newspapers and magazines accept cigarette ads with no restrictions on the amount of space that can be purchased...
...Thus Thp Times sharply limits advertisements for pornography, a product whose harmfulness is at worst a matter of controversy...
...A federal judge then ruled that the agency definitely did have this authority, but before the CPSC could act, the Senate Commerce Committee passed an amendment stripping the agency of its newly discovered jurisdiction...
...P. Lorillard, the cigarette's manufacturer, told doctors that the filtered Kent was the only cigarette safe for patients suffering from arterial diseases...
...Their only recent success in the West has been among teenage girls, who are now smoking as much as, if not more than, their male counterparts...
...The open debate instead should center on why the tobacco industry still enjoys virtual carte blanche to sell and promote a lethal product that contains an addictive drug...
...The industry's advocates in the House usually gravitate to the Agriculture committee, where they've proven adept at blocking efforts to reduce the federal price support program for the nation's 225,000 tobacco farmers...
...television and radio...
...Very few have any additional requirements about disclosing health effects, and even fewer— The New Yorker and the Christian Science Monitor, for example—refuse to accept any cigarette ads...
...Wheeler says that Wendy Crisp, an editor at Savvy, explained to her that the magazine wanted a major advertiser, R.J...
...The Tobacco Institute, the cigarette makers' major lobbying arm, currently is running ads that respond with an emphatic "No...
...Am I going to jeopordize $5 to $10 million worth of business...
...The ballerina sitting in the middle of the floor, holding a Vantage Ultra Light, having just apparently completed a rigorous workout...
...cigarette manufacturers are not required to list tar and nicotine ratings, though they must use the FTC's figures if they do...
...The company's advertisements call for an "open debate" on the health effect of smoking, alleging that the link between cigarettes and disease is "not conclusive...
...It's impossible to tell...
...WITH THE PRESS AS AN ACCESSORY by Ken Cummins During the 1950s, when the scientific and medical evidence linking cigarette smoking and lung cancer began piling up, the cigarette industry quickly took to the offensive...
...Reynolds Tobacco Company...
...The "open debate" that R.J...
...The most influential congressman is Charles Rose of North Carolina, who chairs Agriculture's Tobacco and Peanuts subcommittee...
...The tobacco industry's most potent allies have traditionally been its advocates in Congress...
...In Bangladesh, smokers incur a deficit of 8,000 calories a month to support their cigarette habits...
...The company also sponsors the Marlboro Australia Open tennis tournament, the Marlboro British Grand Prix auto races, the Marlboro Cup horse races, the U.S...
...For more on the exchange between Gitlitz and the Times, see sidebar...
...In the 1960s and early 1970s, the tobacco industry grew more defensive as an avalanche of studies confirmed the link with lung cancer and identified cigarettes as a major cause of heart diseases, emphysema, and strokes...
...Last year cigarette consumption fell for the first time in more than a decade, from 634 billion cigarettes in 1982 to 603 billion in 1983...
...according to a WHO advisory panel...
...In 1981, for example, Rose convinced House Speaker Tip O'Neill to oppose any cutbacks in the price support program until at least 1985...
...They're right next to the scoreboard in every NFL city...
...If the Times really believes that an effect can ensue from the impressing of "data on the smoking public," then a much more logical first step would be to halt the flood of negative "`data," data which misinforms and misleads, data which is not data at ;ill, but False data which leads people to harm themselves-cigarette advertising...
...Roberto Masironi of the World Health Organization told attendees at the Fifth World Conference on Smoking and Health in Winnipeg last July...
...But so far, that hasn't happened...
...Toohey says that he started smoking while in college, "and I can't think of any advertising that caused it, either...
...The other major source of comfort to the cigarette manufacturers is the people who continue to give them virtually unlimited ability to advertise and promote their product: the owners of the nation's newspapers, magazines, and billboards...
...Such behavior is not just a matter of reluctantly acquiescing in the industry's "right" to advertise what is still a legal product...
...Indeed, for all the unfavorable publicity and the periodic outbursts of outrage by politicians and editorial writers, so far the threat to the industry's basic interests is small...
...In India, "one can find some kind of cigarette in every village store;' says Uma Ram Nath, a WHO Consultant...
...R.J...
...The insert advised readers on various ways to improve their health—and didn't say a word about the benefits of not smoking, and alluded only in passing to the desirability of kicking the habit...
...But the tobacco companies' economic clout only partially explains the sense of futility most of the public feels when it comes to asking what can be done to curb what many have called "the nation's number one health problem ." A more important reason is that those very politicians and editorial writers who wax so eloquently about smoking's evils belong to institutions that are working hard to keep things just the way they are...
...It's a matter of virtue by association...
...Congress likewise could make mandatory the industry's voluntary guidelines on cigarette advertising...
...In 1980, a Benson and Hedges cigarette purchased in Singapore had more than twice the tar of one purchased in Australia...
Vol. 16 • April 1984 • No. 3
