Big Tobacco’s sales pitch

Not content with causing untold harm to human health, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. now intends to kill the advertising industry. This most intransigent member of the Big Tobacco family says it has proof ads do not sell products.

This startling revelation comes just after Philip Morris says they do. The nation’s largest cigarette maker announced last week it would stop advertising in some 40 magazines in response to criticism it was pitching cigarettes in publications with large teen-age readerships.

The company also said it will no longer place it ads on the highly visible back covers of any publication. It was a Philip Morris ad on the back cover of a recent issue of Rolling Stone with pop singer Britney Spears on the front that sparked the strongest criticism, with back-cover ads in Sports Illustrated a close second.

Asked if it would emulate Philip Morris’ gesture, RJR said no. The nation’s second-largest cigarette maker says numerous studies show that cigarette ads do not influence teens’ decisions on whether or not to smoke. All those expensive glossy ads showing attractive young models having glorious fun while smoking don’t work, they apparently are just an act of charity by RJR toward otherwise unemployable attractive young models.

It has been three months since the Supreme Court ruled that the Food and Drug Administration does have explicit legal authority to regulate tobacco, three months in which tobacco advertising has exploded, more than four-fold by some estimates. Philip Morris’s new policy brings it into voluntary compliance with the defunct FDA regulations, which use actual readership as the basis for determining the extent to which a publication is youth-oriented.

Meanwhile, RJR is skating ever closer to the edge of the guidelines it agreed to in the 1998 Master Settlement with the states, in which youth orientation is defined by subscriptions. Anti-smoking advocates cite this as a major loophole in the agreement, since the tobacco industry knew full well that teens may read a lot of magazine but few take out subscriptions. Since the Master Settlement, which was supposed to reduce teen-targeted ads, RJR has increased its teen targeted ads. Ads which RJR says don’t work.

RJR, and its other Big Tobacco siblings, also have greatly increased contributions to the political parties, just as Congress is about to take up the matter of giving the FDA the authority to regulate tobacco. Sens. John McCain and Bill Frist, who spearheaded a futile effort for a comprehensive tobacco control bill two years ago, have introduced a more modest proposal that focusses only upon the FDA’s ability to require cigarette manufacturers to list ingredients. It allows the FDA to develop standards to reduce the risk created by those ingredients, but it expressly forbids the agency fron banning tobacco or nicotine. The FDA would have the authority to regulate the marketing and promotion of tobacco to children, but the far broader restrictions on advertising in the 1998 bill are gone.

Public health groups have roundly criticized the new McCain-Frist bill as being riddled with loopholes and they urge passage of a competing measure by Sen. Edward Kennedy that is a virtual copy of the failed McCain-Frist bill of 1998. Their point that the tobacco industry knews what to do with a loophole is a good one. The point made by Sen. Frist, a heart and lung surgeon before he came to the Senate, that something is better than nothing, is better.

And in the current political climate, certainly more realistic. Asked about the new McCain-Frist bill, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott made a crack about needing a prescription to buy chewing tobacco but otherwise claimed no knowledge of it.

That this bill has escaped Sen. Lott’s attention is understandable. It is, after all, an election year. There are a lot of candidates to elect, a lot of ads to buy. At least somebody still thinks they work.