The War On Smoking Essay, Research Paper
The war on smoking has existed for decades. With the
advent of more tenacious laws prohibiting smoking in public
locations, and most recently Minnesota s historic tobacco
settlement, many actions against Big Tobacco have become more
successful. Anti-smoking campaigns have become more
confrontational, directly targeting tobacco companies in an
effort to expose its manipulative and illegal marketing tactics.
On the surface, last November’s $206 billion settlement
agreement between the tobacco companies and 46 states looks like
a serious blow for Big Tobacco. In addition to the money, it
contains some important concessions: a ban on outdoor
advertising, limits on sports sponsorships and merchandising, no
more “product placement” in movies, and they have to close the
Tobacco Institute and other instruments. And Joe Camel – along
with all other cartoon characters – is gone for good.
Yet this did not hurt the tobacco industry’s ability to
sell cigarettes. On Nov. 20, the day the attorneys general
announced the settlement, the stock of the leading tobacco
companies soared. After all, the Big Four tobacco makers will
pay only 1 percent of the damages (at most) directly; the rest
will be passed on to smokers through higher prices. Since many
states are already figuring the settlement money into their
budgets, this puts them in the odd position of depending on the
continued health of the tobacco industry for their roads,
schools, and hospitals.
Punishing the industry, in other words, doesn’t
necessarily address the root of the problem – reducing demand
for cigarettes. And that won’t go down until we all face the
fact that smoking is once again cool. In the 1980s, scarcely any
teenagers smoked. However, according to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, teen smoking rose 73 percent from 1988
to 1996.
As long as movie stars like John Travolta and Uma Thurman
flirt gorgeously through a haze of cigarette smoke, as long as
it drifts through all the right nightclubs and bars and
hang-outs – not to mention the magazines and posters and
billboards – teenagers will find ways to smoke, no matter how
many public service announcements or laws are written to stop
them. Most of these kids know that smoking fills their lungs
with toxins like arsenic, cyanide, and formaldehyde. They’ll
even recite the statistics to you: Smoking kills over 1,000
people a day in this country alone, and is far deadlier, in
terms of mortality rates, than any hard drug. And then they’ll
blow their smoke into your face.
The only way to get any leverage with teenagers is to
return fire with fire, taking on the various influences that
make smoking seem attractive. We need, in other words, to find
new ways to make smoking look ridiculous.
John F. Banzhaf III had no particular animosity toward the
cigarette companies when he sat down in his Bronx home on
Thanksgiving Day 1966 to watch a football game with his father.
He was struck by a cigarette commercial that seemed to glamorize
a habit that both his parents practiced. While at Columbia
University School of Law, Banzhaf had studied the ”fairness
doctrine,” a Federal Communications Commission policy that
required broadcasters to offer free air time to opposing views
on controversial public matters. He wondered whether the
doctrine could be applied to cigarette advertising. It had never
been applied to commercials before, but the FCC ruled in
Banzhaf’s favor. By 1967 broadcasters were airing one
anti-smoking ad for every four cigarette ads, on prime-time
television.
Bleary-eyed football fans who managed to hang on beyond
the last bowl games witnessed history 90 seconds before midnight
on New Year’s Day 1971 when four Marlboro cowboys galloped into
the TV sunset. From then on, cigarette companies would never
again be allowed to advertise their wares on television or
radio.
Between the years of 1967, when the anti-smoking ads first
aired on television, and ending in 1970, when they went off, per
capita cigarette consumption dropped four years in a row -
something that had not happened since the turn of the century.
Naturally, there were other reasons for this decline, but
researchers tend to agree that the ads were a powerful factor.
They also permeated the culture in ways that can’t be
quantified, making people less likely to associate cigarettes
with glamour. In Hollywood movies, where smoking had been
seemingly mandatory for decades, cigarettes disappeared like the
hats from mens’ heads. Only 29 percent of movie characters
smoked in the 1970s- less than half as many as before or since.
Most of the ads were produced by the American Cancer
Society and the American Lung Association, and they were so good
that the tobacco industry began to panic.
They were clever too, however cigarettes didn’t really
disappear from television. With all the money they saved on ads
(close to $ 800 million a year in current dollars), the tobacco
companies managed to make sure that major sports events would
occur against the backdrop of a massive cigarette ad. They
sponsored tennis tournaments and drag races; they poured ads
into newspapers and magazines; they papered highways and inner
cities with acres of billboards. They crafted new brands to
specific demographics – Eve, Misty, and Capri for women,
following the launch of Virginia Slims; Uptown and Kool for
African Americans; American Spirit for Native Americans.
Movie industry spokesmen claim that product placement
hasn’t happened since 1990, and last November’s settlement now
forbids it. And it should be said that Hollywood directors are
far more likely to be slaves to fashion than to the tobacco
industry. But whatever the reason, by the mid-1990s, Hollywood
movies were once again filled with smoke. According to the
American Lung Association, in 133 top movies produced in 1994
and 1995, 82 percent of the lead or supporting characters smoke.
In fairness to Hollywood, the anti-smoking movement itself
may deserve some of the blame for recent increases in teen
smoking. Like so many social crusaders before them, they’ve
occasionally lapsed into self-righteousness – thereby inviting
teens to take up cigarettes as the torch of fashionable
rebellion. They have supported laws that allow police to arrest
and fine teenagers caught with cigarettes – a strategy that
blames the young smoker instead of the marketers.
The tobacco companies have worked hard in recent years to
dress their product as forbidden fruit . They’ve supported laws
that allow police to arrest and fine teenagers caught with
cigarettes, and promised not to oppose them as part of last
November’s settlement. And they’ve launched massive campaigns
that are designed, supposedly, to combat teen smoking.
The best approach seems to be the one that worked back in
the late ’60s: satire. California, which funds anti-smoking
commercials with the proceeds of a 25-cent cigarette surtax
passed in 1988, has led the way in this area. One of their
recent ads features a group of distinguished young men in
tuxedos who light their cigarettes as a gorgeous young woman
walks in. As the announcer tells us about the link between
smoking and impotence, their cigarettes suddenly go limp – and
the woman looks mockingly at them and walks away. Cigarettes,
the announcer says. Still think they re sexy?
These campaigns represent a promising start. But as the
California example suggests, they’re vulnerable to political
meddling. At the national level too, the tobacco industry, with
typical agility, has found a way to undermine them. Buried deep
in last November’s settlement agreement is a clause stating that
the money spent on anti-smoking ads through a national
foundation created by the settlement for that purpose shall be
used “only for public education and advertising regarding the
addictiveness, health effects, and social costs related to the
use of tobacco products and shall not be used for any personal
attack on, or vilification of, any person (whether by name or
business affiliation), company, or governmental agency, whether
individually or collectively.”
In other words, the settlement bars the kinds of ads that
have been so successful in California and Massachusetts. The
restriction isn’t watertight – it only applies to the foundation
created by the settlement, and states could use other funds to
pay for anti-smoking campaigns. But that’s not likely, given
that the foundation is slated to get $ 25 million a year for
education and media purposes. And many states have already made
it clear that they intend to use the rest of the money to fill
gaps in their budgets. New York City plans to use its share to
clean up public schools, Los Angeles wants to repair its
sidewalks, Louisiana will reduce the state debt, and Kentucky
may use some of its money to help ailing tobacco farmers. Many
of these states may find themselves running toothless
anti-smoking campaigns – which is precisely what the tobacco
industry wants.
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