Authors: Richard Kluger
Rather than producing a diluted dosage of smoke and thus having a minimal pathological effect, ETS was now being charged by some investigators with
having a much greater systemic impact on nonsmokers than was implied by extrapolations in the form of equivalent doses from smoked cigarettes—usually put at one or two ultra-lights a day for the average nonsmoker. As Stanton Glantz stressed in testimony before OSHA officials in August 1994, whereas smokers’ bodies adapted to the toxic and abrasive effects and reduced oxygen supply due to their chronic inhalation, nonsmokers’ systems were more sensitive when exposed to ETS, even though absorbing much smaller doses. As an example, he noted that the tendency to greater stickiness and clot-formation in nonsmokers’ blood often proved irreversible after even comparatively brief exposures, because, as he put it, “The process saturates at low doses.” As a result, the tobacco industry’s fondness for minimizing the ETS peril by measuring it as a fraction of the doses from directly smoked cigarettes “will lead to gross underestimates of the risks of passive smoking to the cardiovascular system.”
IV
ALTHOUGH
hard-core smokers remained the prime target of the tobacco control movement, serious attention now began to be paid to how to halt adolescents from taking up the practice in the first place or, at the least, to make it harder for them to do so. Surveys confirmed the public-health community’s worry that youngsters did not grasp the hazards involved. More than a third of them did not know that pack-a-day users ran a resulting high risk of serious illness, and 95 percent of teen smokers said they intended to quit in the foreseeable future when in fact only one-quarter of them would do so within eight years of first lighting up.
Forty-four states had laws on the books, many of them long-standing, against the sale of tobacco products to underage customers, with eighteen being the most common cutoff age. But unlike the far more vigilantly exercised laws governing the sale of alcoholic beverages to minors, the curb on tobacco sales was laxly regarded, if at all. Signs declaring such sales illegal, required by eleven states, were rarely posted. Store clerks, often youngsters themselves, almost never bothered asking for identification cards. Witnesses to underage sales almost never reported such violations to the police, and in the thoroughly unlikely event that a purveyor was found in violation of the law, fines were minimal. What message was adult society sending to youngsters, furthermore, when it granted them easy access to cigarettes via freestanding, unattended vending machines but forbade the sale of beer and liquor in that fashion? Smoking, in short, was regarded as far less hazardous to the community than drinking was.
To rectify this impression, public-health authorities in Massachusetts undertook
a “sting” experiment, sending an eleven-year-old to try to purchase cigarettes at one hundred locales around the state; the youngster succeeded at fifty-nine out of ninety-three stores and six out of seven vending-machine sites. And only four of the locations had signs posted saying such sales were prohibited, as the law required. Edward Sweda of the Massachusetts GASP took this instructive effort one step further by sending two obviously underage children to buy cigarettes from a Store 24 chain outlet and, after they succeeded, brought suit on their behalf. The vendor settled out of court in 1990—the first such acknowledgment in the nation that tobacco sales to underage youngsters were no laughing matter—and led other such chains, like Southland Corporation’s big 7-Eleven convenience stores, to announce new monitoring procedures. The Massachusetts legislature put through a far tougher version of the rules, requiring the licensing of tobacco vendors, steeper fines for underage sales, and license suspension for repeated offenders. President Bush’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Louis Sullivan, called on the states to emulate the Massachusetts model and urged public-health officials rather than police authorities to enforce bans on cigarette sales to minors, but no federal initiative, such as a national age limit on cigarette sales, was contemplated.
Sampling, too, was now subjected to consciousness-raising. Giveaways had become increasingly favored in the cigarette companies’ promotional budgets as advertising allocations continued their relative decline. Most state laws applied only to sales, not gifts, of cigarettes to youngsters, so the manufacturers handed them out with impunity, often in settings such as outside rock concerts and not far from schools, where the samplers, usually under contract to the tobacco companies (and thus not in their direct employ), were sure to encounter the next generation of smokers and speed them on their way. Joe Tye’s organization, Stop Teenage Addiction to Tobacco (STAT), caught Lorillard in the act of sampling youngsters with Newports from a van painted green and orange and bearing the brand’s slogan, “Alive with Pleasure,” in large, equally attention-getting letters on the streets of the nation’s capital. When Tye reported his carefully documented sightings to the cigarette company, it declined to respond at first, but when Tye persisted, Lorillard stated, “We do not give cigarettes to children,” and blamed the incident on the carelessness of its hired dispensers. Slowly recognizing the indefensibility of the practice and the impossibility of screening out underage recipients, the companies began to drop the marketing scheme in the early 1990s, just as governmental bodies were starting to bar it.
Although the tobacco companies devoted a growing portion of their marketing expenditures to display allowances for retailers, incentive payments to wholesalers for monitoring out-of-stock shortages, and price-cutting rebates to buyers, cigarette advertising still served as a primal lure to young customers who would replace those who died or quit. The ad message, whatever its variations,
was always the same: smoking makes you beautiful, adventurous, and sexy, provides pleasure without penalty or pain, and turns kids into grown-ups. And as psychologists William McCarthy and Ellen Gritz noted in a joint 1988 paper, “[t]he sheer ubiquitousness” of tobacco ads—in the press, on billboards, and at sports arenas—“encourages the teenager to think that smoking is a nearly universal phenomenon.”
By far the most popular brand in the twenty-four-and-under sector of the cigarette market, winning about seven out of every ten sales, Marlboro had built its appeal to youth by tirelessly projecting its cowboy imagery, a manifestation of independence from the programmed adult world. To challenge Marlboro’s youth appeal, the key to the brand’s command of one-quarter of the entire U.S. cigarette market, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco decided in 1988 to rejuvenate its moribund pioneer brand, Camel, then celebrating its seventy-fifth birthday. With little more than 3 percent of the market, Camel was favored mostly by older, blue-collar, and rural smokers. The company offered milder line extensions and flip-top box versions of the brand and then hit upon the most arresting advertising campaign since Philip Morris discovered “Marlboro Country”.
To get around a French government ban on the use of human figures in cigarette ads in the early ’Seventies, RJR used a cartoon version of the listless camel on the front of the brand pack—known as Old Joe in company lore (see chapter 3, section
i
)—and gave him a friskier persona. While Old Joe, as a dashing dromedary in French Foreign Legion garb, had not done wonders for Camel in the French market, RJR now trotted out the cartoon camel to appeal to younger U.S. smokers by turning him into a “smooth character,” as the ad copy called him—the quintessential party animal, done up in a tuxedo and sunglasses, with a cigarette adangle from his pendulous lips and a bevy of adoring (human) beauties nearby.
The sexual overtones of the campaign were underscored by the none too subtle resemblance of smooth Joe’s face to the male genitalia. It was all as “plain as the nose on your face,” wrote a Harvard professor, expert in Freudian iconography, on
The New York Times
op-ed page. Reynolds officials professed bewilderment that the creature was being taken for anything other than a heroically posed gadabout, a lover of sun ‘n’ surf, a flashy racing-car driver, or the leader of a five-camel blues band known—suggestively, according to Joe’s critics—as the Hard Pack. “I was not amused by it,” James Johnston, fired a decade earlier but recalled in 1989 by the takeover Kravis management to run the RJR domestic tobacco operation, said of the uproar the ad campaign was causing. Johnston ordered Old Joe’s looks to be made less testicular, but when the ad agency artists presented him drawings of a fifteen-stage evolution of the animal, his phallic appearance had not notably changed. “That’s what camels really look like,” Johnston was told, and he decided Old Joe was not about to
be tampered with to placate puritanical fantasies. Besides, Madison Avenue loved the lively roué. The new Old Joe was odd-looking and amusing enough to win high marks from the creative end of the business for breaking out of the sameness that had long dulled cigarette advertising.
Reynolds budgeted $75 million a year to advertise and promote Joe Camel. A huge, illuminated “smooth character” billboard went up in Times Square, a block from where the famous Camel sign with its wafting smoke rings had gone up early in World War II and had remained for a generation. And the company aggressively promoted Joe’s likeness in a whole line of such youth-oriented merchandise as T-shirts and sweatshirts, posters, mugs, and beach sandals, purchasable with “C-Notes,” bills featuring Joe in a George Washington wig and available in exchange for empty packs of Camel.
Tobacco control advocates pounced on the Joe Camel campaign as evidence of the industry’s contempt for public concern about the health issue and a transparent pitch to young people—surely the cartoon character and his likeness adorning low-priced recreational gear were not targeted at adult buyers, they argued. The Coalition on Smoking or Health petitioned the FTC to halt the Joe Camel ads as unfair advertising, luring the underaged to purchase a hazardous product. And Surgeon General Koop’s successor, Antonia Novello, urged Reynolds to rein in Old Joe as a public-health menace and called upon the nation’s newspaper and magazine publishers to turn down Camel ads and upon retailers not to display point-of-sales materials featuring the lusty pitchman. But RJR steadfastly denied that the campaign was aimed at underage buyers—to concede as much would have been to plead guilty to fostering illegal sales—and granted only that the marketing program was directed toward young adults whom it was trying to switch from rival brands. Nobody could prove otherwise.
Protestations of intent aside, Reynolds was succeeding fabulously in winning recognition for its cheeky cartoon Camel mascot among youngsters well under the legal smoking age. Several studies reaching that conclusion in the December 11, 1991, issue of
JAMA
showed, among other findings, that 30 percent of three-year-olds and 90 percent of six-year-olds questioned knew that the Joe Camel image was connected with cigarettes, and that 98 percent of high schoolers grasped Joe’s link to the Camel brand (compared with 67 percent of adults who made the linkage). Still, RJR’s Johnston insisted, “Advertising is irrelevant to a young person’s decision to begin smoking,” and his ad agency executives argued that cartoon characters like the “Jolly Green Giant” and Owens Coming’s “Pink Panther” were used to push products without generating a passion for string beans or insulating material among children. Still, for whatever reason, beginning smokers were found by surveys to favor overwhelmingly the most heavily advertised brands.
If the effectiveness of the Joe Camel campaign was measured not by the notoriety
it aroused but by its effect on sales, then the effort was proving hardly worth the antagonism it engendered and the fuel it provided for those calling on Congress to ban cigarette advertising altogether. Camel’s market share in the twenty-four-and-under sector climbed from 4.4 percent to 7.9 percent at its height, but in 1993, five years into the cartoon campaign, the brand’s overall share had risen only about 1 percentage point to just over 4. By the following year, when the FTC finally decided not to act against Reynolds’s use of Joe Camel, priapic or not, the brand’s share was back under 4 percent.
V
T
o counter the cigarette companies’ efforts to shore up their eroding consumer base—between 400,000 and 500,000 were said to be dying from smoking or ETS every year, more than a million quit annually, and 15 million tried to—by enlisting young smokers, preventive medicine authorities urged a more aggressive intervention and educational campaign. By far the most successful effort along these lines was undertaken in California, where tobacco control advocates had long been stymied by state lawmakers indifferent to the problem, or worse. “When the tobacco industry says ‘Jump,’” remarked Mark Pertschuk of the Berkeley-based Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights (ANR), “the California Legislature says, ‘How high?’” Its most powerful figure, Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, accepted some $200,000 from tobacco-funded political action committees over a five-year period in the late ’Eighties and early ’Nineties and was known to have worked closely with industry officials to help foil antismoking legislation. Thus, while California led the nation in the number of local smoking restrictions, there was no substantive statewide program in place.
To end this bottleneck, nonsmokers’ rights groups framed Proposition 99, to be passed on directly by California voters in 1988. “Prop 99” called for raising California’s low ten-cent-a-pack cigarette tax by twenty-five cents, the largest tobacco excise increase ever contemplated by any U.S. governmental jurisdiction. The revenues from it were to be devoted to an antismoking educational campaign, cancer research, medical services for indigents, and reforestation of areas ravaged by cigarette-ignited fires.
The cigarette manufacturers, with 10 percent of their domestic market imperiled by the threatened huge tax rise, responded with a war chest estimated at $15 million and a no-holds-barred advertising campaign. In a typical industry-paid ad, an alleged undercover police officer stated that the big cigarette tax jump “will create major crime” by increasing tobacco smuggling from out of state through gangs who could clear $13,000 per vanload of contraband smokes, enough to buy “thirty-two pounds of marijuana, enough crack for
1,280 kids, or 185 handguns.” But the invention of such bogeymen boomeranged. California law enforcement officers who had initially opposed the cigarette tax hike objected to the tobacco industry’s fabricated argument and withdrew their opposition. More to the point, the nonsmoking public, heavily in the majority, liked the tax increase because its burden fell entirely on smokers and its yield would be a windfall for the state’s public-health and environmental protection needs. Prop 99 sailed to victory with 58 percent of the voters in favor.