Tobacco Free Activists Recognized by National Group

Handsel Art

19 November 2013

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

contact J.R. Few

handselart@gmail.com

or 870-427-1365

Tobacco industry marketing tactics, like product placement, make nicotine addiction seem normal 

and harmless and are often subtle and deceptive. 

Two Arkansas photographers have been recognized in a national tobacco prevention photography contest hosted by Countertobacco.org.  Ashley Richter, a tobacco free advocate attending North Arkansas College, was a winner in the Youth Appeal category with a photo of  an electronic cigarette advertisement adjacent to candies at a convenience store counter.  An Honorable Mention in the same category was awarded to J.R. Few of rural Marion County for a photo showing product placement of flavored cigars next to bubble gum and hard candies. Photos like these, showing nicotine products and ads in proximities to candies or foodstuffs, display the unfortunate and false subliminal message that they are harmless and normal.

Countertobacco.org is the first comprehensive resource for groups working to challenge tobacco at point of sale. The tobacco industry has a history of sophisticated and successful marketing that, in addition to a federal conviction for fraud in 2006, addicts and kills over 400,000 Americans annually. Currently, the major focus of tobacco industry marketing is the retail environment where tobacco is sold. Not coincidentally, research shows that convenience stores selling tobacco are where youth most frequent.

Few, a volunteer with the Arkansas Cancer Coalition and the Coalition for a Tobacco Free Arkansas notes, “Ms. Richter’s photo is topical and important because the industry is taking advantage of a loophole in federal and state regulations for tobacco products to market the electronic cigarette. These devices are not a tool to help people overcome their nicotine addiction. They are a marketing strategy to prevent just that.”  Public health research has shown that rather than helping people quit smoking, electronic cigarettes prompt a dual use of nicotine delivery with no real net health benefit.  

The American Cancer Society holds the annual Great American SmokeOut on the third Thursday of November. The ‘SmokeOut’ is designated as a day nicotine addicts can take a day off and perhaps extend a tobacco free life.  If we pay attention to groups like Countertobacco.org it may also be an opportunity to understand how the tobacco industry continues to market a deadly addictive drug. 

The Arkansas Department of Health offers free counseling for nicotine addiction at 1-800-QUIT NOW.

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A current thought on harm reduction

 Harm reduction was a term coined in response to diseases and maladies encountered by homosexual men and by intravenous drug users in the face of the tremendous onset of the AIDS epidemic in the late 80s.  Clean needles and condoms were seen as a way to offset the worst effects of a public health crisis until an actual cure or remedy for the diseases that were killing people was found. 

Since then the term ‘harm reduction’ has been bastardized by the tobacco industry as not a way to reduce harm until a remedy for tobacco related disease is found but a way to perpetuate tobacco industry profit under the guise of public health.  This is so very evident after we see that the same arguments for the ‘harm reduction’ of spit tobacco are the same used for the novelty of electronic nicotine delivery.  There is disease related to intravenous drug use and some sexual behaviors.  There is disease related to tobacco use.  One use of the term ‘harm reduction’ wants to find a remedy for disease.  The latter uses the term as a means of continuing tobacco industry profit.  The crux is that there may be a human inclination toward intoxication and certain sexual behaviors but that does not necessarily include nicotine.

Focusing public health efforts on safe sex and clean needles responds to modified and alternative behaviors as remedial. Focusing efforts on changing nicotine delivery responds to alternative nicotine delivery as the remedy.  The first is a public health strategy. The latter is a marketing strategy.  As the multinational tobacco corporations ease their way into electronic cigarettes we see more and more of the same arguments for ignoring actual data concerning dual use and disease.  Electronic nicotine provides no significant pubic health benefit.

One must look closely to see the tobacco industry’s subtle diversion of blame and rights with harm reduction. The original use of the term regarding drug use and sexual behavior wants to see individuals change their behavior.  The tobacco industry wants to see harm reduction confuse behavior with a choice of nicotine delivery. 

The tobacco industry is not concerned with rights, but profit.

Using grammar to challenge electronic cigarette marketing

Early electronic cigarette marketing.

Seeing the growth of the popularity of electronic cigarettes I wanted to note the importance of tobacco free advocates making a collective effort at getting our language together. ANR has a presentation ice breaker where the audience is asked to say, “smoking ban.”  The presenter then congratulates them for getting that out of the way so that they never have to utter that phrase again.  We work for tobacco free spaces, clean indoor air, and safe smoke free workplaces and public space. We try to avoid saying anything about “anti tobacco” and recognize that “environmental tobacco smoke” is a polite industry way of talking about secondhand smoke. We need to make sure that we do not address the industry challenges from electronic cigarettes with their language. 

It is with this spirit that I suggest that advocates drop, as is conversationally convenient, the use of terms like “vaping” and “E vapor.”  Even the term “E cig” has the short harmless aspect of a nickname.  We might do well to consider the discipline of always using a full description of “electronic cigarettes” as another “nicotine delivery device.”  We can refer to the effluent as just that, “effluent.”  And make note to point out the “fine particulate” included in the “aerosol contamination.” 

The stakes are too high to allow the tobacco industry to define our terms.

CTFA Holds Annual Conference

The Coalition for a Tobacco Free Arkansas (CTFA) held its 11th annual Striking Out Tobacco in Arkansas Conference at the Riverfront Wyndham in North Little Rock September 12th.  Attended by advocates from around the state, the conference featured such prominent speakers as Dr. Valerie Yerger from the University of California, San Francisco(UCSF) and the noted tobacco industry whistle blower, Dr Victor DeNoble.

Dr. Yerger, an Associate Professor of Health Policy at UCSF, is probably best known for her involvement w the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library. But for this presentation she donned her credentials as a licensed naturopathic doctor to talk about menthol in tobacco. The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, that gave the FDA limited authority over tobacco, banned fruit and candy flavors in cigarettes but neglected menthol.  Yerger noted that menthol’s medicinal application was not merely a benign flavoring.  As a natural anesthetic it not only masks the harshness of tobacco smoke but also enhances drug delivery. This encourages addiction and makes cessation more difficult.  She pointed out the importance of seeing that 80% of African Americans, who smoke, smoke menthol. Challenging tobacco, challenging menthol in tobacco, is a matter of social justice.

  

Ritney Castine, representing the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, gave a lively overview of modern tobacco control and the value of youth involvement in policy change.  Noting that many only wanted young people to be cute, he emphasized,  “Cute isn’t effective.” Castine added that young people are essential to any great change but could only be that as fully vetted participants.

A knowledgable review and refutations of the myths surrounding of the Affordable Care Act was provided by consumer assistance specialist from the Arkansas Insurance Department, Sandra Cook.

Karin Rudolph, with the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, presented a well scripted party line account of the FDA’s  limited authority over cigarettes under the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. This law, passed in 2009, was supported by many major public health groups, and tobacco giant Phillip Morris.

The day culminated with former Phillip Morris scientist, Dr. Victor DeNoble.  Dr. DeNoble recounted animal research proving that, contrary to industry claims, nicotine was a very addictive substance. He was kept silent for a decade by a confidentiality agreement with Phillip Morris. It was only his 1994 testimony before Congress that allowed him to speak out.  Echoing previous remarks and questions about the burgeoning E-cigarette market he noted that the device was not  a safe alternative to smoking but designed to enable continued addiction.

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Addiction Incorporated

On August 7 at the North Little Rock Riverfront Wyndham, the Arkansas Department of Health Tobacco Prevention and Cessation Program, in partnership with the Coalition for a Tobacco Free Arkansas, presented a viewing of the documentary Addiction Incorporated. Using an overview biography of industry whistle blower and tobacco free advocate, Victor DeNoble, the film outlined the challenges and industry subterfuge around the scientific discoveries demonstrating the addictive nature of nicotine.

The film begins with a background of DeNoble as a naive working class lad finding himself as  a post doc fellow with a job offer from Phillip Morris. His work for PM involved research on alternatives to nicotine that might reduce cardiovascular risks.  Studies on lab rats led to the conclusion that nicotine was in fact a very addictive substance. Phillip Morris shut down the research and fired DeNoble. Bound by a nondisclosure clause, it was only a decade later that this research was revealed in testimony before a congressional panel investigating the tobacco industry. Using interviews with lawyers, industry executives, and public health advocates the film follows litigation, the first efforts at FDA regulation, the MSA, the Family Smoking and Tobacco Prevention Act, and the RICO conviction of the tobacco industry in U.S. v Phillip Morris et al.  At a certain point in this journey DeNoble decides to dedicate his advocacy to educating children about addiction and tobacco.

Previous to the viewing a couple sitting behind me identified themselves as novices to tobacco prevention asking what they could expect.  I told them I hoped that the film would help direct advocates to recognizing the necessity of challenging the tobacco industry.  Without understanding the vector of the industry tobacco control at best is masturbation. 

The film did a fine job of documenting the last 30 years of public health’s dealings with the tobacco industry.  Where it failed was in noting that what passed for public health victories were actually successful long term industry strategies.  The adult smoking rate may have fallen from around 60% in the late 50s to 20% today but morbidity from tobacco related disease still tops 400,000 Americans annually.  The litigation of the late 90’s spawned the Master Settlement Agreement with the states. But of those settled funds only about 2% are spent on tobacco prevention today.  The first efforts in the 90s at allowing the FDA regulatory control over tobacco were thwarted by the Supreme Court’s ruling that for the  FDA to retain it’s guarantee for health and safety it would have no choice but to ban tobacco.  Congress had not given the FDA that authority.  The 2009 Family Smoking and Tobacco Prevention Act was a law written by Phillip Morris allowing FDA limited regulation and compromising that guarantee and the integrity of the FDA.  And even the significant RICO conviction carried no meaningful punitive measures. To many of us the film was ancient history just scratching the surface of tobacco industry subterfuge and deceit.  But judging from the crowd reaction it was news to quite a few.

The documentary left the impression that the tobacco pandemic could be resolved if we could just keep young people from ever starting.  That, in itself, is  part of industry strategies to blame the victims for tobacco related disease while omitting their own culpability.  Nowhere was it mentioned the numerous youth tobacco prevention programs the industry funds that have been shown to be ineffective and can actually increase youth initiation by depicting smoking as a choice only an adult should make.  The film neglects the complicity that industry funding makes of otherwise well intentioned groups like the Boys and Girls Clubs and 4H Clubs.  We don’t see how Keep America Beautiful is hijacked into providing public ashtrays that not only distract the blame for litter from tobacco companies but actually encourage public smoking. We don’t learn in the film that the growth market for tobacco is in the lowest socio economic class in this country and in underdeveloped nations. Unmentioned are the millions the tobacco industry spends in a token effort to make themselves appear to be good corporate citizens while profiting from a product that is by far the leading cause of death and disease on the planet.  We don’t hear of the political funding opposing tobacco taxes and tobacco free spaces. Or of the friendly politicians bought by the pallet load. 

Addiction Incorporated is a film we all should see.  But it should be viewed with the awareness that the tobacco industry is actually much much more amoral. The documentary is good as long as we realize it is but a starting place in challenging tobacco.