The Cigarette Companies: How They Get Away With Murder, Part II
OWEN, DAVID
The Cigarette Companies: How They Get Away With Murder, Part II BY DAVID OWEN Cigarettes haven't gotten less deadly. The companies that make them have gotten better at silencing the...
...His book* is an examination of "why governments place wealth before health" and of "the political and economic mechanisms of the power of tobacco...
...The companies that make them have gotten better at silencing the press...
...In our view, smoking is an adult custom and the decision to smoke should be based on mature and informed individual freedom of choice...
...By calmly, steadfastly refusing to acknowledge that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, the tobacco industry makes its critics seem shrill and hysterical and provides smokers with the morsel of doubt they need to rationalize continuing to consume...
...The spread of smoking has been the work largely of American tobacco companies...
...Raising a family...
...One Lorillard ad shows a shirtless athlete in a locker room toweling himself off and enjoying a Kent after "obviously just having participated in" a game of tennis...
...When the dangers of smoking were first publicized, tobacco companies frantically diversified in hopes of offsetting the expected disintegration of their earnings...
...Time's letters section "is a forum for editorial response, not response to ads," according to Brown...
...Creationists maintain an equally implausible position, but they can at least point to the Bible...
...Philip Morris now sells 160 different brands in 160 different countries...
...There's a dark genius to this tactic...
...Everyone has heard sentiments like this before...
...The transcendent achievement of the cigarette lobby has been to establish the cancer issue as a "controversy" or a "debate" rather than as the clear-cut scientific case that it is...
...Time, as does Newsweek, has a lot of cigarette advertising," he said...
...By arguing that smoking isn't kid stuff, the Institute deviously reinforces the same "initiation" image that the Brown & Williamson study recommended...
...Too much emphasis is placed on insignificant legislation, and too many of Taylor's sources on the sordid politics of the industry are peripheral...
...magazines and newspapers look the other way rather than lose their major advertisers...
...more and more people are beginning to smoke each year, adding quite gratuitously to their already intolerable burden of ill health and to their enormous problems of social and economic development...
...The cigarette industry's most successful tactic, as Taylor points out, has always been "to confuse the issue by shifting the ground of the argument from cigarettes and health to civil liberties and freedom!' There the government goes again, groans the Tobacco Institute...
...Is this correct...
...This concern seems a bit sudden coming from an industry that openly violates its own "principles" and then just as openly lies about its failure to live up to them...
...Kids who smoke are the lifeblood of the tobacco industry...
...After all, smoking kills 350,000 Americans each year, just 43,000 fewer than it employs...
...Philip Morris (Marlboro, Merit), meanwhile, negotiated a $350 million merger with Rothmans International, the British cigarette giant, and undertook a $25 million plant expansion...
...But in fact all violate them flagrantly as a matter of course...
...If nothing else, the industry's claim is remarkable for its bravado...
...As long as tobacco's opponents worked through the traditional political channels," Taylor writes, "their activities posed the industry little threat because it knew how to handle the country's national and local political representatives...
...When I asked Brian Brown, the magazine's publicity manager, about these deletions, he more or less admitted that they had been made to please the cigarette companies...
...Whereas in this case I think it's true that we buckled before an advertiser, I wouldn't make that a general rule about the magazine...
...More recently, successful antismoking initiatives, like the 1983 referendum in San Francisco making it illegal to smoke in certain places, have proved that the tobacco lobby can be beaten...
...do you carry material that's insulting to the advertiser...
...It's the smoker who begins at the age of 11 and 12 who becomes the one-, two-, three-pack-a-day smoker in his twenties, thirties, and forties...
...eighth-graders don't smoke cigarettes in order to look like eighth-graders...
...J. Reynolds) show men climbing mountains, a sport that, because of the altitude, would make most smokers dizzy...
...A report commissioned by the Tobacco Institute in 1978 documented the industry's cloudy outlook but identified as a "silver lining" the fact that "the percentage of smokers in the 17-24-year-old age group is up and the amount smoked per day per young smoker is also up...
...Smoking indirectly provides livelihoods not only for "flavoring formulators and opinion surveyors" but also thoracic surgeons, funeral directors, florists, grave diggers, street sweepers, firemen, magazine editors, and a substantial fraction of the membership of both houses of Congress...
...In the smokeless totalitarian hell imagined by the cigarette industry, policemen have to spend so much time stubbing out cigarettes in restaurants that they are unable to chase down ax murderers and child molesters...
...In England in 1980, Philip Morrris conducted a direct-mail campaign inviting teenagers to join "Club Marlboro" by sending in ten Marlboro box tops...
...Nobody reads the warnings on cigarette packs...
...Smoking, it must be admitted, does generate enormous tax revenues...
...In the United States, smoking now causes 85 percent of lung cancer cases, 30 percent of all cancer cases, and a total of 350,000 premature deaths every year, including deaths from emphysema, bronchitis, pneumonia, and heart disease (but not including 2,000 deaths from house fires caused by careless smoking or as many as 5,000 deaths among nonsmokers who breathe in smoke that others exhale...
...Why don't you ask someone who is qualified...
...It was not until 1982 that- a bootleg tape of the film finally surfaced in the United States...
...As Elizabeth M. Whelan pointed out in The Wall Street Journal, the text made no mention of smoking except in a brief "lifestyle" quiz, which awarded two points to readers who were "almost always" careful not to smoke in bed and implied (incorrectly) that smoking only low-tar cigarettes, or fewer than ten high-tar cigarettes a day, is not unhealthy...
...Do cigarette companies want kids to smoke...
...Helmut Wakeham, vice president for "science and technology" at Philip Morris...
...In one of the Institute's ads, the chairman of the National Black Police Association is quoted as saying that laws supporting nonsmokers' rights "are a waste of law enforcement time...
...In 1978 the tobacco industry defeated an antismoking referendum in California by spending $6.4 million to tell the public that the new law would cost $20 million to put into effect...
...We are medically unqualified to comment or make judgments," says the chairman of the British tobacco lobby...
...Egyptian workers now spend a fifth of their income on cigarettes...
...As the tobacco industry likes to say, "weigh both sides before you take sides...
...Truth is no match for deceit that gives no quarter...
...A photograph shows a kid's dresser drawer with a pack of cigarettes tucked in among some gym shorts and a scuffed-up baseball...
...This article was originally commissioned by The New Republic, but Martin Peretz, the magazine's owner and editor-in-chief, killed it after it bad been set in type...
...Even the Tobacco Institute's ad follows it precisely: "Driving...
...show any smoker participating in, or obviously just having participated in, a physical activity requiring stamina or athletic conditioning beyond that of normal recreation...
...The October 8, 1984 issues of Time contained an 18-page advertising supplement called "Lifestyle/Healthstyle: Strategies for a Healthier, Happier and Longer Life...
...According to the Department of Health and Human Services, smoking annually costs Americans $13 billion in medical bills, $25 billion in lost productivity, and $3.8 billion for Medicaid and Medicare...
...The industry, its confidence shaken, was afraid that if it pushed too hard it would lose leverage on issues it really cares about, like antismoking programs aimed at school children...
...Is their "decision" to ruin their health really based on "mature and informed individual freedom of choice...
...In its 1982 survey, the American Council on Science and Health concluded that articles on smoking in Time "were few and, when present, almost encouraged the smoking habit...
...Smoking, in the words of the surgeon general, is the "chief single avoidable cause of death in our society!' (See "The Cigarette Makers: How They Get Away With Murder," Ken Cummins, April 1984...
...Time's fear of the tobacco industry is so great that the magazine deletes references to the nation's "chief single avoidable cause of death" even from advertisements paid for by other people...
...According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, which Time identified as the source of the health advice in the supplement, the original version of the text contained "many strong statements" about •the dangers of smoking...
...Despite the industry's denials, a lot of cigarette advertising is aimed at young people...
...Smoking causes cancer...
...Recent ads for Camel and Winston (R...
...politicians smile on the cigarette industry in return for the right to keep their hands in the deep pockets of the tobacco lobby...
...What was the basis for this decision...
...As the militance of American nonsmokers has increased, the industry has begun losing ground at home...
...Third World customers are becoming increasingly important to U.S...
...Marlboro, the most heavily advertised brand in the world, is three times as popular among children and teenagers as it is among adults...
...In 1964, in response to public criticism, the tobacco industry adopted nine "advertising principles" relating to young people: "No advertising shall appear in publications directed primarily to those under 21 years of age...
...All companies continue to observe the principles of this code," says the Tobacco Institute...
...No conclusive medical or clinical proof has been discovered," deadpans Philip Morris...
...If tobacco disappeared tomorrow, therefore, we would lose "2.5 percent of America's private sector labor force!' According to an advertisement paid for by something called the Tobacco Industry Labor/Management Committee that has appeared in a number of magazines, these jobs are now "threatened...
...Another part of the equation is the jobs the Tobacco Institute didn't think to include on its list...
...News and World Report and president of The Atlantic, and asking them if he should run it...
...To develop these markets further, Congress permits tobacco companies to omit health warnings from cigarette packs shipped abroad...
...Jesse Helms likes to claim that this welfare program pays for itself, but it has actually cost taxpayers $700 million in lost principal and interest alone...
...Can we possibly afford to warn school children about the dangers of cigarettes when so many benefits are at stake...
...Like driving...
...Mademoiselle "used editorial ploys to deemphasize smoking, gave misinformation, and excluded smoking from mention on relevant health topics altogether," according to a 1982 study by the American Council on Science and Health...
...It would be a completely different story if this were editorial material," he said, claiming that Time had published "countless" stories about the dangers of smoking...
...Don't communicate health or health-related points" Brown & Williamson denies that it ever made use of this advice, but virtually all cigarette advertising is based on it...
...He is a British television correspondent whose credits include "Death in the West," a powerful documentary that juxtaposes Marlboro commercials with footage of real-life American cowboys dying of lung cancer and emphysema...
...Today the disease kills that many every nine days...
...This change has come slowly...
...In your ads create a situation taken from the day-to-day life of the young smoker but in an elegant manner have this situation touch on the basic symbols of the growing-up, maturing process...
...the industry's mathematicians had vastly inflated their projection by calculating the square root of 4 million as 2 million instead of 2,000...
...Older customers just aren't as important...
...The Columbia Journalism Review studied Time and other publications and concluded that the tobacco industry "can indeed silence the editors of American magazines...
...But these benefits, large though they may be, don't begin to make up for tobacco's huge drain on public and private resources...
...When Congress last year passed a bill requiring stiffer warnings on cigarette packs, the industry put up only symbolic opposition, arguing feebly that smokers were already familiar with the opinions of the surgeon general...
...asks an advertisement paid for by the Tobacco Institute...
...In 1975 Brown & Williamson (Kool, Raleigh) paid for a marketing study that suggested strategies for persuading "young starters" to smoke Viceroys, a popular high-tar brand...
...Despite this, the cigarette industry's 20-year war on medical fact has been remarkably successful...
...Three thousand Americans died of lung cancer in 1930...
...Hayden Mahler of the World Health Organization, "is that in those countries where poverty is greatest, where the illiteracy is most widespread...
...The tobacco industry maintains this deception with the aid of an enormous global network...
...For nearly half a century, the federal government has subsidized tobacco growers through "commodity loans" that set a minimum market price for tobacco...
...If Philip Morris really doesn't want kids to smoke, why does it use cowboys in its advertisements and plaster its logo on racing cars...
...At summer camp in Colorado many years ago, my tent mates and I used to smoke cigarettes on mountains in order to get dizzy...
...Per-capita cigarette consumption in Africa has risen by more than a third in the last decade...
...they may switch brands, but they seldom defect entirely...
...by well-meaning people who haven't stopped to consider" how their concern about smoking upsets "our brothers and sisters" in the tobacco industry, who, among other things, "marched in the Nation's Capital to support health care for the elderly...
...More than half of all smokers either don't know or don't believe that smoking causes heart attacks...
...Smoke and mirrors "I am convinced by the medical evidence and the unanimous verdict of the world's leading medical authorities that cigarettes disable and kill," Taylor writes in his preface...
...But is it really true that smokers freely choose their addictions...
...Plenty of proof has been discovered...
...The lung cancer industry's surprising health demonstrates the power of the unrelenting lie...
...In some versions of the ad, you can see his racket...
...That 14-year-old models aren't used in those ads is irrelevant...
...The film also contains an interview with a Dr...
...As Taylor would have discovered if he had looked a little deeper, the cigarette industry's arithmetic is highly deceptive...
...Smoking is a habit that begins in the young," a spokesman for the American Cancer Society told me, "and it is the young smoker who becomes the confirmed adult smoker...
...If some people openly disobey such laws, suggested one of the Institute's eerily straight-faced spokesmen on "Face the Nation" not long ago, their noncompliance will contribute to a general "disrespect for the law...
...He just happens to be in a locker room...
...The sad fact," says Dr...
...The Tobacco Institute publishes a bimonthly screed called The Tobacco Observor (typical headline: "Heavy Smokers—Less Lung Cancer") and finances the Council for Tobacco Research, a pseudo-scientific body that devotes much of its energy to finding kinds of cancer that aren't caused by smoking...
...The Institute and R. J. Reynolds are both conducting major advertising blitzes aimed at confusing the public...
...No one depicted in cigarette advertising shall be or appear to be under 25 years of age....Cigarette advertising shall not suggest that smoking is essential to social prominence, distinction, success or sexual attraction....Cigarette advertising shall not...
...The companies have been aided substantially by the federal government, which helped export the smoking habit by including surplus tobacco in Food for Peace shipments...
...His book, None of the Above: Behind the Myth of Scholastic Aptitude, will be published by Houghton Mifflin in May...
...Death in the West" is now widely available and has been shown many times on television and in schools...
...cigarette companies can cite no authority higher than their own propagandists and a shrinking handful of medical flat-earth men...
...The capitulation of publications as big as Time and as small as The New Republic guarantees we'll have much to learn from even an inadequate book about smoking...
...Applesauce is harmful if you get too much of it...
...Admirers of Taylor's film are bound to find his book disappointing...
...The reason for the increase is smoking...
...The industry stays in business by entrapping its customers when they're too young to know any better and then keeping them confused until they're too old to do anything about it...
...See sidebar below...
...New markets In most other countries, American tobacco companies don't pretend to adhere to "principles...
...This "controversy" about police enforcement is absurd since public-smoking laws are selfenforcing: nonsmokers are increasingly vocal and smokers are increasingly polite...
...Peretz told me that be thought smoking was not as dangerous as doctors made it out to be and that, therefore, 'this is a costly crusade that I am willing to forgo.' But the industry's specious "cost-benefit analysis" looks at only part of the equation...
...but I also recognize that they bring economic benefits which, in purely financial terms, outweigh the cost of human suffering...
...Health aside, he claims smoking is healthy for the economy...
...David Owen is a New York writer...
...and of course smokers themselves keep the whole enterprise going by continuing to squander their money and their health...
...Brown assured me that Time's policy of editing copy to suit the tobacco industry applied only to advertisements...
...All were deleted by Time...
...Such victories loosen the industry's grip on legislators by reminding them that the nation's nonsmoking majority (75 percent) is willing to take its preference to the polls...
...40 percent don't know that it causes most lung cancer...
...Voting...
...Magazine publishers know that cigarette companies don't pay attention to their "principles" Publications that depend on cigarette advertising bend over backward to be accommodating...
...The industry also exports more tobacco and tobacco products than it imports, giving it an annual trade surplus of $1.7 billion...
...This is baloney...
...Peretz told me that he thought smoking was not as dangerous as doctors made it out to be and that, therefore, "this is a costly crusade that I am willing to forgo!' Although he wouldn't admit it to me, Peretz spiked the article after showing it to his publisher, Jeffrey L. Dearth, and his former publisher, James K. Glassman, now executive vice president of US...
...Thames Television capitulated and, in a bizarre out-of-court settlement, promised never to broadcast the film again, to turn over all but one file copy to Philip Morris, and not to reveal the terms of the settlement...
...Similar measures have been adopted in other cities...
...Cigarettes didn't begin to catch on in a big way until after World War I, and lung cancer has an incubation period of 20 to 30 years...
...It shows a confident, mature adult choosing to smoke Kent...
...This article was originally commissioned by The New Republic, but Martin Peretz, the magazine's owner and editor-in-chief, killed it after it had been set in type...
...The program costs further millions each year to administer...
...Interviewer: "I don't think many people are dying from applesauce!' Wakeham: "They're not eating that much!' After "Death in the West" was broadcast in England in 1976, Philip Morris went to court to keep it from being shown in the United States...
...Helms smokes an occasional Lucky Strike to keep up appearances, but he doesn't inhale...
...Maintaining this ignorance has cost the tobacco industry hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of advertisements and public relations...
...The Department of Agriculture spends even more millions on research aimed at finding cheaper ways to grow tobacco, providing a free boost to the cigarette industry and effectively nullifying the surgeon general's efforts to discourage smoking...
...The section's introduction noted "a rise in the incidence of cancer" but attributed this increase to "the chemicals we are exposed to in our foods, water, and the air we breathe" rather than to its principal cause, cigarettes...
...Wakeham is asked whether cigarettes are harmful...
...Pantheon, $18.95...
...When I asked Lorillard's vice president for public relations whether this ad violated the industry's principles, she told me, "In our opinion it does not...
...The reason the cigarette companies have such a grip on us is because of the relative size of the account...
...Tobacco consumption in developing countries is growing four times faster than it is in industrialized ones...
...Massive losses of advertising revenue,' said Leon Wieseltier, the editor who bad assigned it...
...tobacco companies...
...The Academy sent a letter to the editor protesting the cuts, which it says were made without its approval, but the letter was never published...
...Still, given the nearly universal reluctance of newspaper and magazine publishers to offend the advertisers who are killing their subscribers, one takes one's tobacco reading where one finds it...
...In Ms., a publication otherwise attentive to women's health, the Council found "a complete absence of articles on the hazards of smoking," even on the danger of smoking during pregnancy or while taking birth control pills...
...Indeed, 75 percent of all smokers are hooked before the age of 21...
...According to the Institute, tobacco is responsible for about $4.4 billion in federal taxes and $4.3 billion in state taxes each year (including, ludicrously, Social Security and personal income taxes paid by industry employees...
...But America's cigarette addiction was stronger than the companies had dared to hope (48 percent of lung cancer victims who survive surgery begin smoking again, most within a year), and they were able to change their strategy...
...Rothmans never comments on opinions expressed by members of the medical profession...
...Peter Taylor calls this vast and convoluted network the Smoke Ring...
...Social prominence, distinction, success, and sexual attraction," far from being proscribed, are virtually the only themes of tobacco advertising...
...But when the new nonsmokers' rights movement appealed directly to the people over the heads of their politicians, the industry knew it was in trouble...
...The Smoke Ring: Tobacco, Money, and Multinational Politics...
...Rolling Stone and National Lampoon, two publications aimed directly at young people, have a much higher density of cigarette ads than most magazines aimed at adults...
...American tobacco companies sold 593.6 billion cigarettes in 1983, down slightly from the year before but up 20 percent from 1964, the year of the surgeon general's original report...
...Present the cigarette as one of a few initiations into the adult world," the study suggested...
...Perhaps not...
...In 1981 R. J. Reynolds (Winston, Camel) bought $215 million worth of new cigarette-packing equipment and began a ten-year, $1 billion construction project at its main cigarette plant in North Carolina...
...For more than 20 years, in the face of overwhelming proof to the contrary, cigarette manufacturers have maintained that the link between smoking and "various health conditions and outcomes" (as an industry spokesman I interviewed recently referred to cancer and death) is entirely conjectural...
...All of us need a time of 'growing up' to develop the mature judgment to do so many things," the text continues...
...Voting...
...Which is not to say the industry has lost its taste for massive disinformation campaigns...
...According to a pamphlet published by the Tobacco Institute, the industry's lobbying juggernaut, tobacco employs 393,000 Americans directly and 1.6 million indirectly ("such as matchbook makers and packaging suppliers, even flavoring formulators and public opinion surveyors"), for a total contribution to the work force of two million jobs...
...The tobacco companies show even less restraint in the Third World, the biggest growth market for American cigarette sales...
...People who pick up this habit in their early twenties do not become confirmed smokers...
...In return for taking up cigarettes, the club's members received discounts on records and stereos, tickets to discos and sporting events, and lessons in scuba diving, wind-surfing, sailing, and hang-gliding...
...Raising a family...
...Governments support cigarettes (and even subsidize their production) in order to reap the tax and export revenues they generate...
...As it turned out, this cost estimate had three zeroes too many...
...Taylor has experienced these processes first-hand...
...Representatives from R. J. Reynolds encourage Third World farmers to switch from foodstuffs to tobacco by offering them free equipment, cheap loans, and a guaranteed market (despite their professed concern for American jobs, the tobacco companies imported 239,178 metric tons of inexpensive foreign leaf in 1983...
...In most poor countries, smokers who can't afford to buy packs are sold cigarettes one at a time...
...If mature, confident Americans freely choose to shorten their lives by smoking Kents in locker rooms or anywhere else, is it any of the government's business...
...would they stop paying taxes if they worked for someone else...
...The answer, according to the ad, is "No...
...When I laughed at this, he said, "Okay, `countless' is an exaggeration" In fact, Time almost never runs stories about the dangers of cigarettes...
...Ninety percent of the nation's adult smokers tried to quit last year...
...Anything can be considered harmful," he replies...
...If you're selling a product that requires frequent, continuous, and heavy usage, as a cigarette does, then you obviously have to keep in mind.that unless you get the teenager to smoke, you really don't have a consumer out there...
...What was the basis for this decision...
...In recent months, Reynolds has divested itself of three major non-tobacco subsidiaries...
...More kids are also now using chewing tobacco...
...This is not our finest hour," Wieseltier said later...
...Massive losses of advertising revenue," said Leon Wieseltier, the editor who had assigned it...
...Not so, claims the tobacco industry...
...If nicotine addiction were entirely psychological, the tobacco industry would go broke...
...These shipments "have developed new markets for American tobacco," according to Jesse Helms, the industry's most fervid supporter in Washington...
...The industry's deceptions don't end with arithmetic...
...The last thing it wants is a public (particularly a young public) that knows "both sides...
Vol. 17 • March 1985 • No. 2
