The Right Message

Here is the link to the previously mentioned presentation: The Right Message. Why not, Why, and How.  I was encouraged reading in the new 2014 Best Practices for Tobacco Control the emphasis on Mass Reach health Communication.  The tobacco industry is pretty clear in their goal of selling a profitable product.  Public health on the other hand has been divided in its efforts and less than honest about actually saying what it should be doing is making that product unprofitable.  This is one reason I tend to try and recognize tobacco free space as not merely the clean indoor air but also the parking lot free of signage or the counter top free of product.  It is not merely that tobacco is a health risk.  The tobacco industry is a health risk.

Anyway, here is the link to the video again.

TPCP, Using Media, and Lobbying

I’m bad about keeping a blog. Since no one reads it anyway it becomes little more than a journal.  But I need to follow up on an opportunity I was given presenting a short bit to the current Arkansas Department of Health Tobacco Prevention and Cessation Program (TPCP) Grantees at their Quarterly meeting at Pulaski Tech recently. The bulk of the day was an Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights training by their Southern States Regional Consultant, Onjewel Smith.  

My presentation was little more than a combination of a perspective of how public health has always been short sighted, when it came to dealing with the tobacco industry from as far back as the Frank Statement, and a synopsis of a paper I delivered at the 2009 ASH Wales Conference in Cardiff, Wales.  The Cardiff presentation was an overview of successes Tobacco Free Marion County had in reducing BRFSS adult smoking rate numbers making use of a coordinated and comprehensive public relations campaign.  CTFA’s Katherine Donald suggested that since my gig came while everyone was eating their boxed lunches I was the Keynote Speaker.  I told her that if I ever got around to writing a C.V. it would be.

Dr. Gary Wheeler, acting medical head of TPCP and an inaugural graduate of the Clinton School of Public Service, I cannot brag on Gary enough, helped clarify my language about a Fayetteville bar owner’s complaint to the state Ethics Board.  Gary shared that calling attention to using public funds to lobby was a tobacco industry ploy  used against federal tobacco free efforts in the 90s.  Regardless, it was Huckabee in 2003 who said he wanted tobacco grantees to comply with the “letter as well as the spirit of the law” regarding tobacco prevention.  I quote this because he used the same language not 3 weeks later complaining about the legislature recessing rather than adjourning. Huckabee’s actions easily checked progress in tobacco prevention in Arkansas to this day, not excluding his 2006 exemption riddled Arkansas Clean Indoor Air Law. It really is an embarrassment that Huckabee has any kind of national stage in the media today much less a political voice.

But it does explain the murmured response among grant administrators and grantees when I assured them that they could lobby within semantics.  Hell, I encouraged them to lobby.  CDC Best Practices are all about policy change.  And my emphasis on semantics was exactly the same advice Lynda Lehing gave grantees in 2003.  There has to be some government employee/ bureaucrat mantra about safety in ignorance. At any rate it was Huckabee’s 2003 call to inaction that was the major prompt for me to speak out and use what I knew about public relations and the media as a voice once removed from Tobacco Free Marion County.  And like Ms. Smith inferred, tobacco prevention advocates often find themselves alone in the wilderness.  TFMC was no exception.  Using the media was a way of making the coalition seem much larger than it actually was.  And it can be for any tobacco prevention advocacy today as well. 

At some point in the near future I’ll put audio to my presentation and put it on line.

A National Disgrace

I was coincidentally looking through the TTAC newsletter when Katherine Donald shared the link w her Coalition for a Tobacco Free Arkansas mailing list.  What I happened to fall upon in the table of contents was the link to the FDA Tobacco Products page and 8 Tips for talking to youth about tobacco. I get the FDA updates but don’t always follow up.  This is one reason why.

The CDC 2007 Best Practices for  Comprehensive Tobacco Control Health Communications Interventions makes the statement:

“Adolescents and young adults are very sensitive to perceived social norms and media presentations of smoking behavior. Nonsmoking adolescents exposed to tobacco advertising and promotional campaigns are significantly more likely to become young adult smokers. Because adolescents and young adults have been and continue to be so heavily exposed to images of smoking in the media, tobacco advertising, and promotional campaigns, public health counter-marketing campaigns are needed to focus on preventing initiation and promoting cessation.”

Nowhere in the FDA ‘tips’ for talking to youth is there any mention of tobacco advertising, tobacco promotion, marketing, or even the words “tobacco industry.” Instead, it focuses on how the young individual must decide, regardless if they are 11 years old or not, if they will become a nicotine addict.  This is just another example of how and why the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act is a national disgrace.

How is it that the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, and a wealth of popular public health groups, not including the National African American Tobacco Control Network and Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights, could support such a terribly flawed bill?

That is a huge question. How, or will, these groups rectify and apologize for their misspent support?  The greater issue is: how will the rest of us redeem a federal law that institutionalizes tobacco unlike never before?

CTFA Holds Successful 10th Anniversary Conference

Handsel Art

16 September 2012

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

contact J.R. Few

handselart@gmail.com

or 870-427-1365

CTFA Holds Successful 10th Anniversary Conference

Dr. Stanton Glantz

Over 160 advocates from around the state celebrating public health successes from the past decade gathered for the Coalition for a Tobacco Free Arkansas’ 10th annual Striking Out Tobacco in Arkansas conference in North Little Rock September 13th, 2012.  Attendees were treated with presentations from some of the most distinguished tobacco control authorities in the nation.

Dr. Greg Connelly, from the Harvard School of Public Health, was influential in getting the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act passed in 2009. This law gave limited authority over cigarettes to the Food and Drug Administration. An original member of the FDA’s Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee, Connolly has since resigned and had little to recommend about the law today. He encouraged the audience to put pressure on the FDA to act more quickly regarding a decision about menthol.  The original bill banned characterizing fruit and candy flavors in cigarettes but neglected to include menthol in these restrictions.  The Committee concluded that menthol in cigarettes made initiation of nicotine addiction easier and quitting more difficult. Their March 23rd 2011 report stated, “removal of menthol cigarettes from the marketplace would benefit public health in the United States”.  The FDA’s final decision was due 90 days after the submission of the report but has not acted.  80% of African American smokers consume menthol cigarettes.

Keynote speaker, Dr. Stanton Glantz, a founding member of the group Americans for Non Smokers’ Rights and Director of the Center for Tobacco Control and Research at the University of California at San Francisco, recounted how the tobacco free movement had evolved in California.  He called attention to the statewide media campaign emphasizing that nicotine was addictive, secondhand smoke will kill you, and the tobacco industry lies. He noted that focusing on a corrupt industry creates a ‘social un-acceptability‘ quotient  that could be as effective as tobacco taxes in decreasing use.

Glantz pointed out that he and Dr. Connolly had been on opposite sides of the law giving the FDA authority over cigarettes. Noting that the industry was now offering soluble nicotine products to sidestep smoke free laws and keep people addicted he added, “One thing I think we should be pressing for at the FDA,  if they should ever grow a back bone, which is unlikely, but if they should they should prohibit co-branding of these non cigarette products, so they can’t say Use Marlboro snus on the plane and smoke Marlboro cigarettes when you can.” 

He concluded that tobacco control efforts really do work.  Over 15 years the California  tobacco control program cost $1.4 billion.  But health care costs from an almost immediate reduction of heart disease deaths and asthma attacks, and 14% decreased incidence of lung cancers over a decade, saved the state $86 billion.  “So when politicians say we don’t have enough money for tobacco control, everything they cut from that, they are paying over and above that in health care costs and it’s not 20 years from now.”

Recognizing  Arkansas’ deeply flawed clean indoor air law, Glantz suggested that activists work locally to rectify exemptions.  He complimented advocates for a 30% drop over the last 3 years in cigarette sales in Arkansas.  “You’ve got to realize that every little success you have is dollars out of a multi national corporation’s pocket, and they don’t like that,  and are going to do everything in their power to stop that.”

Additional speakers included representatives from the National Latino Tobacco Control Network, the American Lung Association, and the University of Wisconsin. “CTFA always does a great job addressing disparities,” says Julie Andersen from Marion County.   “This year was no different with speakers focusing on Latinos, the LGBT community, and nicotine dependence among those living with a mental illness. Excellent conference!”

The Coalition for a Tobacco Free Arkansas is a statewide network of organizations with a shared mission to challenge the tobacco industry.  More information can be found at www.arfreshair.com 

An open letter to the new Miss Arkansas, Sarah Slocum

Congratulations, Ms. Slocum! 

Soon you will be approached by all manner of sponsors wanting to get a piece of the crown and publicity.  One of these sponsors will be RJ Reynolds maker of Camel #9s, in the sleek pink and black packaging and promotion targeting young women.  

RJR will offer you large dollars to promote in schools a program they fund that is ostensibly a tobacco prevention program directed toward youth.  If you find it odd that a tobacco company would support effective tobacco prevention you would be right.  The Centers for Disease Control cites research showing that tobacco company funded programs to reduce youth use not only are ineffective but may increase youth initiation to tobacco.  

This particular program, 'Right Decisions, Right Now', by focusing on telling young people to resist peer pressure, infers that tobacco use is somehow more popular than they realized. Research has shown young people are twice as likely to smoke because of tobacco advertising than peer pressure.   Additionally,  this program portrays smoking as an activity only adults should choose.  Can you think of a better way to get kids to want to smoke? 

Miss Slocum, Miss Arkansas, I encourage you to take the high road and refuse to be the pawn of an industry that calls kids, “replacement smokers.”  Your status and role model are so important to so many people.  Please use it intelligently.

Thank you and good luck.  

p.s. you can learn more about tobacco industry tactics here:  http://no-smoke.org/document.php?id=276