tobacco

Imperial Tobacco has been paying out cash incentives and lavishing corporate entertainment on owners of trendy clothing stores and hair boutiques in Adelaide, South Australia, to get them to sell Peter Stuyvesant brand cigarettes in special displays amid their hip merchandise. In the campaign, which started over a year ago, Imperial offers retailers up to $2,000 per store per year to display the cigarettes. The company also treats store owners to free lunches and a party cruise with food, cocktails and all the free cigarettes they want. Marketing kits promote the brand using the slogan, "It used to be extremely dangerous. Now the only danger is you're not the coolest cat on the block." After the Sunday Mail revealed the campaign and kickback scheme, Imperial Tobacco announced it would pull cigarettes out of the boutiques by January 31.

1976 True cigarette adThe U.S. Supreme Court has given a green light to smokers to sue tobacco companies over the fraudulent marketing of "light," "ultralight" and "low tar" cigarettes. Cigarette companies are currently facing around 40 such lawsuits. For decades, advertising lulled smokers into believing that so-called "light" and "low tar" cigarettes were better for their health. Smokers in Maine, however, sued Philip Morris, charging that the company was aware for decades that smokers compensate for lower levels of tar and nicotine by taking longer and deeper puffs. Philip Morris argued that the Federal Trade Commission's endorsement of machine testing for tar and nicotine levels in cigarettes, started in the 1960s, should relieve them of fraud charges. The FTC recently abandoned its testing method, though, after concluding that it's flawed because machines don't take into account how smokers adjust their smoking behavior when using cigarettes with lower levels of nicotine.

The Philippines has enacted a law that treats the exposure of women to secondhand smoke in the home as a form of domestic violence punishable by law. Under the law, a woman can seek a protection order requiring her partner to stop smoking around her. Between 1981 and 1989 Philip Morris (PM) performed at least 115 studies at their secret overseas biological labs on the toxicity of secondhand tobacco smoke and found that secondhand smoke is four times more toxic by inhalation and 2-6 times more tumorigenic on skin than mainstream smoke (the smoke the smoker himself inhales). PM never published their studies or shared the information with governments or the public. PM also carried out elaborate media strategies in the U.S. and other countries aimed at confusing the public about the health dangers of secondhand smoke. Deborah Sy, a legal consultant with the Health Justice Foundation in the Philippines, explained the law by saying "Exposing another to second hand smoke has the same effect as exposing someone to poisons and dangerous toxins. It is an act that has immediate effects such as nausea, dizziness, headache or irritation of respiratory system. Normally, the exposure to smoking suffered by women is prolonged. Hence, the damage to the body is more significant."

Arguing an appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Jesse Williams, a African American man who died of lung cancer after smoking Marlboros for 42 years, Philip Morris (PM) lawyers likened the company to a civil rights victim. PM also compared itself to a death row inmate illegally denied due process, an indigent criminal denied adequate legal representation, and even the civil rights group NAACP. Mayola Williams, Jesse's wife, pursued the personal injury case on behalf of her husband after his death, arguing that PM is liable because of its longstanding misinformation campaigns designed to allay fears about smoking. In 1999, a Portland, Oregon jury ruled against PM and awarded $81 million to Williams' estate. After the original verdict, PM finally admitted publicly that smoking causes cancer, but the company continues to appeal the case. PM's now seeking a new trial and relief from the punitive damages award, whose value with interest has now climbed to over $140 million.

An earlier PRWatch blog exposed an unseemly partnership between the American Heart Association and Rite Aid Drug Stores after AHA teamed with Rite Aid to promote the "Go Red for Women" campaign to increase awareness of heart disease in women. AHA selected Rite Aid as its partner for "Go Red" even though Rite Aid sells cigarettes, a leading cause of heart disease. This bizarre alliance gave Rite Aid the ability to brag publicly that it was "taking a stand against heart disease in women" while simultaneously displaying "healthy heart" posters alongside cigarette displays in its stores across the country. In another unseemly alliance, it was revealed that Eugene Trani, the President of Virginia Commonwealth University, which operates a medical center, school of public health and medical school, was found to be accepting a $40,000 annual retainer, plus fees totaling $3,500 and stock options, for serving on the board of the Universal Corporation, a leading global supplier of tobacco leaf.

The public is often unaware of such unethical relationships among high-profile public health groups and figures, which only helps perpetuate them.

Now another prominent public health figure has been found to be profiting personally by both causing and treating tobacco-related diseases. Michael A. Friedman, M.D., the Chief Executive Officer of the prestigious City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, California serves on the Board of Directors of the Rite Aid Corporation, the same cigarette purveyor that allied with the American Heart Association to "fight heart disease in women."

November 23, 2008 marks ten years since 46 state Attorneys General and the major American tobacco companies signed the big tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA). Besides being the largest legal settlement in history and resolving an unprecedented onslaught of litigation against the industry, the MSA required tobacco companies to pay approximately $200 billion to the states over 25 years (subject to tweaks for inflation and market share).

The devil, however, was in the details. Heralded at the time as a defeat for the tobacco industry and a victory for public health, the MSA has actually done little to change the status quo. It ended some forms of tobacco advertising, for example, but the restrictions adopted were in reality less important to the industry than to public health authorities. The industry abandoned billboards and transit ads, ads in magazines with a high youth readership, and ads within a certain distance of schools. However, it continued marketing through high levels of advertising, bar nights, event sponsorships, direct mail, and retail placements.

Statins Cholesterol-reducing drugs called statins have been in the news lately following the release of a major medical study that found that statins can prevent heart disease and stroke in people with no previous history of heart disease.

Statins are among the biggest-selling family of drugs of all time. Many articles about the study mentioned above, including one on the credible web site WebMD, also mention the specific drug used in the study: Crestor.

The study has generated hundreds of articles, most of which repeat the same basic framing of the issue: if heart disease is the problem, a drug is the answer.

Virginia Slims new, pink "purse pack"Philip Morris (PM) hopes to make cigarettes even more appealing to women by introducing a new, pink "purse pack" of its Virginia Slims brand in the first quarter of 2009. The sleek, rectangular packs will have square ends and be designed to hold the smaller-diameter, "light" and "ultra light" cigarettes the company traditionally targets toward female smokers. PM announced the introduction of its pink Virginia Slims during October, which, ironically, is also National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The American Cancer Society, Cancer Action Network, American Heart Association, American Lung Association, American Medical Association and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids are all protesting the pink pack, saying its rollout demonstrates that PM "is not the changed, responsible company it claims to be," and that it "shows contempt for women and their health by putting a pink gloss on a product that causes lung cancer and heart disease, two of the leading killers of women."

A three-year, $7 million neuromarketing study done in Oxford, England has found that cigarette health warning labels actually make smokers want to smoke more, not less. Neuromarketing research studies how the brain reacts to various types of marketing stimuli. Researchers studied 2,000 people from five different countries using sophisticated brain-testing technology, like electroencephalography and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to gain a better understanding of consumer behavior. A surprising finding involved the health warning labels placed on cigarette packs. Researchers asked subjects if the warning labels worked to help them reduce smoking, and most said "yes." But when they repeated the same question while flashing images of the labels to the subjects while they underwent an MRI, they found that the images activated "craving spots" in the brain, indicating that the health warnings actually encourage smokers to smoke more.

An analysis of tobacco industry documents published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) tells how the German cigarette industry worked to stop Lufthansa, the flagship airline of Germany, from banning smoking on its domestic flights in the early 1990s. Documents also reveal that German tobacco companies worked to keep cigarette vending machines accessible to children, stop higher taxes on cigarettes, block a ban on tobacco advertising and recruit doctors and scientists to serve as "expert witnesses" to testify against the health dangers of tobacco. One of the paper's authors, Martina Pötschke-Langer, who heads the World Health Organization's Collaboration Centre for Tobacco Control at the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg, said "The campaign against Lufthansa's non-smoking flights appears to be especially vicious, since pressure was applied to the government as well as to public opinion via the mass media." Lufthansa started working to ban smoking on German domestic flights in 1989, but wasn't successful until 1996.