Philippe Boucher's Rendez Vous with . . . Anne Landman
Author: Philippe BoucherRendez-vous with Anne Landman
West Region Program Coordinator for the American Lung Association of Colorado Grand Junction, Colorado
afoxland@gj.net
By Philippe Boucher
RENDEZ-VOUS 69 Thursday, June 15 2000
PB : Thank you Anne for accepting our rendez-vous. May I ask you to introduce yourself?
Anne Landman : My name is Anne Landman, and I am the West Region Program Coordinator for the American Lung Association of Colorado, in Grand Junction. I was a respiratory therapist for about 15 years and through that experience became acquainted first hand with the toll tobacco takes on people. My main objectives are to expose the tobacco industry's internal documents to the general public in a meaningful way that exposes the way the tobacco industry has overtaken our government and our society in ways people do not yet understand. I also want to expose the way industry has been promoting addiction among young people through hidden merchandising tactics about which most of the country is unaware.
Q1. First question : I was impressed by your study last year about how retailers allow kids to steal cigarettes and are compensated by the tobacco industry for this (short term) loss. Can you give us some background about your investigation and has anything changed since?
AL: Since I exposed this merchandising arrangement and how it facilitates shoplifting (and hence nicotine addiction) among kids, the Food Marketing Institute in Washington, D.C. has added two new categories of often-stolen merchandise to the pie chart of most-commonly-stolen types of merchandise. I suspect that they did this at the behest of Philip Morris, with whom they work closely. The reason is that adding the two new categories (which were baby food and analgesics) had the effect of making the cigarette category appear smaller (on a percentage basis). Also, Philip Morris is now pointing to this "new" chart showing "reduced" cigarette shoplifting rates as "proof" that their youth access programs are working. However, no hard data on the actual quantity of cigarettes stolen has been supplied to back up Philip Morris' claims that the percentage of shoplifted cigarettes has been reduced. Even if the hard data showed that it has been reduced, that fact could easily be attributed to the great number of bans on self-service displays that have been enacted in local jurisdictions the last several years as a result of heightening public awareness of the tobacco displays/placement fees arrangement.
Q2. You are now "mining" the industry documents and selecting everyday one item that you share via listserve. Can you tell us how you work, how you choose what to share, what you have found the most interesting so far?
AL: I cruise the documents more or less as a hobby, and do it in my free time. The trick is reading a lot of documents. When you read them, even the dull ones, you start to understand more of the tobacco industry's "lingo," you start to understand how they think, who did what, etc. Through this information, you discover project names, acronyms, and unique terms that only they use to describe things. These are terms that provide in more fruitful search. As you can imagine, I read hundreds of documents. I share only the best. Sometimes it requires pulling together three or four documents on a subject to be able to draw a complete picture of the industry's behaviors in a particular circumstance.
Q3. One year and a half after the AG settlement, how do you assess the situation for tobacco control in Colorado? Do you have more resources to use? Do you see the consumption go down?
AL: Tobacco control has changed little in Colorado as a result of the settlement at this point. The billboards are gone; that's about it. It took our legislature a year to determine how to divvy up the settlement dollars, and it will be awhile before the infrastructure is fully in place to start awarding grants. Only 15% of Colorado's settlement funds will be put towards tobacco control. The tobacco industry is still a powerful lobby in our state, and Philip Morris is still using front groups like the National Smokers Alliance to oppose smoking bans proposed in small towns. As for other resources, I consider the documents a wonderful resource because they vindicate tobacco control advocates completely and justify our work. We are still referred to by our local paper as "neo-prohibitionist health nannies" --but the name calling gets harder to justify when you can prove wrongdoing by the industry behavior by showing their own documents.
Q4. Philip Morris recently trumpeted their abandoning advertising in a few magazines. How about promotions? My experience has been that promotions are much more important for the industry than the traditional ads. Are you keeping an eye on promotions and do you see any evolution there?
AL: As the industry's ability to overtly advertise gets more and more restricted, they move more and more of their money into promotions. Trends over the last 20 years or so show huge increases in TI spending in the promotions category as ad spending has shrunk. This is the category that includes payment of rack fees, or "placement fees." Product placement has become very competitive as a result of advertising restrictions, both as voluntary and as a result of the settlement.
Q5. Are you going to attend the world conference in Chicago in August? This gathering will allow more international cooperation. What about interstate cooperation within the US? Do you have regular contacts and exchanges with other states?
I'll be in Chicago.
I talk with advocates in other states via talk lists on the Internet. I don't see much in the way of interstate cooperation--at least not on the governmental level. Advocates are very helpful and cooperative from state to state.
Q6. Is there anything else you would like to add?
AL: Yes...that I'll be very happy when the day arrives that we see a lot more information in the mainstream media describing Big Tobacco's dirty tricks, as revealed both through their documents, and through their every day merchandising practices.
Thank you Anne for taking the time to be with us today.
See Anne Landman's Document Discoveries page
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