Tobacco.org

• Tobacco industry efforts to derail effective anti-smoking campaigns 

Anti-smoking ads that reveal the tobacco industry's deceptive practices have been aggressively quashed through various methods found Temple University Assistant Professor Jennifer K. Ibrahim, co-author of an analysis in the August issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

In the article, Ibrahim tracks the rise and fall of state and national efforts to curb smoking for the past 40 years. She chronicles industry strategies to prevent a campaign's creation, steer messages to smaller audiences, limit the content of the message, limit or eliminate the campaign's funding, and pursue litigation against the campaign. Ibrahim looks at campaigns in Minnesota, California, Arizona, Oregon, Florida, and a national campaign from the American Legacy Foundation.

"It tells the story behind the smoke. People often judge these ads and now you know what the tobacco industry was doing trying to undermine them," Ibrahim said. . . .

State health departments face an uphill battle when dealing with the political clout of the industry with its lobbying, campaign contributions and specials events, Ibrahim said.

One tactic also involves the industry producing its own ineffective campaigns in order to portray state programs as duplicative and a waste of public dollars. Campaigns designed by the tobacco companies patronize youth in their early teen years, with messages like "Think, Don't smoke", Ibrahim said.

In contrast, Florida's "truth" anti-smoking campaign empowered them by giving them information about how the tobacco industry tried to manipulate by marketing.

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