New study aims to use tobacco industry data to reach ‘social smokers’
Jump to full article: MSNBC, 2009-06-16
Author: Linda Carroll msnbc.com contributor
Intro: the number of “social smokers” like Hynes is on the rise, according to a new study. Between 1996 and 2001, the rate of nondaily smoking jumped from 16 percent to 24 percent of smokers. And it has continued to climb since then. In California, for example, the percentage of smokers who light up only occasionally went from 26 percent in 1992 to 30 percent in 2005, state health figures show.
And that’s exactly the way cigarette companies planned it, says Dr. Rebecca Shane, a researcher at the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California at San Francisco. She's a lead author on a new study published in the August issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The study aims to turn tobacco company research on its head, using industry data to help find ways to help social smokers quit.
In the 1970s and 80s — as the health risks of smoking became increasingly apparent — the tobacco industry spent millions studying social smokers to figure out what made them tick, Shane says. . . .
Tobacco firms targeted social smokers The tobacco makers hired anthropologists and psychologists to help design advertising campaigns that would make cigarettes more alluring to people who weren’t wired to become addicted to nicotine. The idea was to show that cigarettes could be a social lubricant, a necessary addition to any social gathering.
Shane and her co-author turned up the new information while searching through reams of tobacco industry documents that were released as part of a settlement in one of the landmark state suits against big tobacco.
Tobacco companies worked hard to develop an image of smokers as “cool,” Shane says. . . .
The challenge, Shane says, is to counter that alluring image and to find a way to get occasional puffers to acknowledge that they truly are smokers, too. Until experts figure out a way to do that, there won’t be much progress in getting social smokers to quit, says Dr. Antoine Douaihy, an associate professor of psychiatry and medical director of Addiction Medicine Services at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
“Conventional anti-smoking campaigns will fail to reach them,” Douaihy says.
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