"Big Tobacco Can't Cut Teen Smoking" By Alan Brody author of "Cigarette Seduction."
Big Tobacco Can't Cut Teen Smoking
By Alan Brody.NY Newsday
May 1, 1998
Alan Brody, a marketing journalist, is the author of "Cigarette Seduction."
THE TOBACCO industry may be guilty of many big lies, but Congress and the public health community may be developing a big lie of their own: that the cigarette companies can undo the phenomenon of teenaged smoking.
As Stanton Glantz, author of "Cigarette Papers," wrote: "The tobacco companies know how to get kids smoking and, given proper economic motivation, they will know how to stop kids from smoking."
But the issue is bigger than tobacco companies. Because the settlement talks with the government are based on the tobacco companies' supposed omnipotence, the likely failure will create a whole new layer of corruption - all the way from illegal sales to fly-by-night tobacco companies to the potential for more damaging products to enter the gap.
Adults tend to have a poor memory of their own youth and why they themselves became smokers. It wasn't because the tobacco companies marketed to them. It was because they marketed to adults and, as teenagers, they desperately wanted to be adults.
A lively grandmother in her 80s confided to me that she started smoking at 10 and quit at 40. That means she began smoking in the 1930s when cigarette ads were still focusing on tobacco leaf quality and Turkish flavor. There were no ads for teenagers and certainly none for pre-teens. In fact, the country barely paid any attention to teens.
Conventional wisdom has it that advertising and marketing are responsible for selling tobacco. It helps. But does it cause smoking? The absence of advertising in Finland and, for a while, in Italy showed that cigarettes sell just fine without ads.
The etiology of smoking runs deeper into the realm of mystery than legislators and public health officials may care to venture. But that is truly where the allure has its origins. Teenagers aren't responding to ads nearly so much as they are responding to their own demands of adjusting to the tribulations of growing up.
Since we as a society have taken no steps to fill a gap in coming-of-age rituals common in other cultures, guess what industry has come to occupy this role? Kids seek a magic path to the "real heart" of adulthood. They will accept danger but they want belonging and a kind of personal guide, the mystical amulet popular in myth. Cigarettes offer this. That they are about life and death only adds to their "spirit power."
When teenagers were invited to tell Congress why they smoke, one girl said she was a nonsmoker until she watched a talk show where experts cited depression as a reasons teenagers smoked. "So that's what you do!" said the girl, who apparently had been feeling depressed, and she began smoking.
I have no objection to taxing the tobacco companies or throwing a few perjurers in the hoosegow. But the demand for smoking is a phenomenon that is not covered by the proposed legislation and both the tobacco companies and the public health groups are going to be left with an embarrassing and costly predicament. As the European experience has shown, raising prices works - for a while - and then kids have a way of readjusting. A greater fear, as one teenager put it in an interview with an American Cancer Society worker I spoke with: "if you make them so expensive, we'll just go on to other drugs."
In this politicized environment, it is easy to believe that legislation can make magic. Or that the tobacco companies are solely responsible for the rise in smoking. When the Centers for Disease Control announced that smoking had increased 30 percent in six years, they were quite pleased because the implication is that the tobacco companies are to blame. But this was also during the most hostile media period tobacco has ever faced. Newspapers, TV networks and even magazines that once quivered at the thought of losing cigarette ad dollars now thumb their noses, knowing drug companies with antismoking products are lining up to take their places. Tobacco has moved from ad reliance to a potent combination of billboards, merchandising and point-of-purchase awareness.
Teenagers are even fighting back with their own ad parodies and the like. And the public health officials are being heard in the media as never before. Yet, teen smoking has gone up. Could it be that the very self-righteousness of the tobacco critics has backfired on them? And how willing are they to get into the real nitty gritty of teen smoking? Something other than "just say no" or "punish the tobacco companies." A recent poster campaign funded by the CDC used a typeface composed of broken cigarettes to spell out "Boyz II Men" and "Tobacco-Free Kids."
As the legislative process runs its course and the guilty are punished and the righteous are praised, we are going to have to deal with the real issues of growing up and the temptations and rituals that accompany it. If we assume that kids will be weaned from temptation once the nasty tobacco people go away, we are in for a nasty surprise. At the beginning, public health officials praised cigarettes for replacing chewing tobacco and TB-spreading spittoons that once adorned public places. Ironically, TB is curable today while cancer isn't.
Teenaged smoking is a much bigger societal issue than legislators realize, and the proposed tobacco legislation does nothing to countenance it. The magic of cigarettes is not in the ads, but in the fact that they sell a mild legal drug that has become imbued with the "spirit power" of possible self-destruction and great societal controversy. Our real job is not to eradicate smoking but, to reduce the environmental conditions that help it grow - essentially, reducing the deep attraction of the forbidden and the implied psychological palliatives that give smoking its siren appeal to teens.
The best we can hope for is to create more intelligent and meaningful channels of teenaged growth, limit access, counter the point-of-purchase signage and offer a non-addicting substitute to those who just can't resist. If we don't, we will find ourselves living off the proceeds of the tobacco business without ever resolving the problem of teenaged smoking.
If the selling of tobacco created a corrupt, lying enterprise of vast proportions, imagine what it will do to a society that pretends to solve a problem in a way that it cannot. And then finds, thanks to the never-ending tax bonanza, that it has no incentive to do so anyway. If we don't solve this problem, we have solved nothing.
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Copyright 1998, Newsday Inc.
Big Tobacco Can't Cut Teen Smoking., 05-01-1998, pp A57.
Posted with author's permission
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