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.

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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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.

Local Control Given Setback

First the requirements of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act that cigarette advertising be limited to black and white advertising where minors might view it were struck down. Now the ostensible overturning of Federal preemption for state and local authority to regulate point of purchase advertising was delivered a blow by a federal Judge in New York Wednesday, December 29.

The New york City Board of Health in 2009 voted to require tobacco retailers display graphic warnings of the dangers of tobacco use that included a number for free cessation services. However the decision delivered by U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff considered that an infringement on the tobacco companies rights. “Even merchants of morbidity are entitled to the full protection of the law, for our sake as well as theirs," he said.

Tobacco free advocates were depending on Sec. 203 of the new law to allow local control preempted by the 1965 Federal Cigarette Advertising and Labeling Act. The law reads:

"Section 5 of the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act (15 U.S.C. 1334) is amended by adding at the end the following: ‘‘(c) EXCEPTION.—Notwithstanding subsection (b), a State or locality may enact statutes and promulgate regulations, based on smoking and health, that take effect after the effective date of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, imposing specific bans or restrictions on the time, place, and manner, but not content, of the advertising or promotion of any cigarettes.’’"

Apparently the graphic content denied those that profit from the leading cause of death and disease from the full protection of the law. Thus continues the odd saga in the United States of what is known only here as commercial speech. When applied to tobacco not only does it protect corporations’ speech it protects them from liability after 1969.

Supported by the major public health groups, and tobacco giant Phillip Morris, the new federal law giving limited authority over tobacco to the FDA is turning out to be yet another significant victory for tobacco companies.

Dismantling FDA Authority for Tobacco Begins

A Federal court in Kentucky overturned the first advertising regulations of the Philip Morris FDA bill this week. While leaving in aspects for larger health warnings and prohibiting event sponsorships, two key parts of the marketing restrictions were tossed. The bill had stipulated that only black and white advertising in mediums where children were likely to view would be allowed. This was thrown out as overly broad. You think?

Tobacco companies can continue to use their color graphics and imagery in advertising which are integral to branding and normalization of tobacco promotion.

Additionally, restricting tobacco company language claiming that FDA regulation made their product safer was tossed. This was one of the more telling and foolish parts of the bill. Detractors began much of their criticism of this legislation saying that industry marketing would take advantage of giving regulatory authority to the agency that supposedly guaranteed the health and safety of our food and drugs. In response, this ridiculous and obviously unconstitutional restriction was tacked onto the bill. “No you can’t claim that an FDA regulated cigarette is safer!” Apparently, yes you can. So why have we ruined the tenable integrity of the FDA anyway?

Philip Morris wrote this legislation. Other tobacco company lawyers cued up almost immediately to help dismantle the most potentially effective regulatory authority and thus far are successful. One can only imagine what the current Supreme Court will do for them as the suits creep upstream. What is not left to the imagination is that when all is said and done Philip Morris will have gotten almost everything it wanted without ever filing a brief.