Tobacco loves kids
Easily tempted, easily addicted, youths still need to be protected
Updated: 07/28/08 6:44 AM
Two recent news stories — troubling on their own, damning together — blew away the cigarette industry’s smoke about young users and demonstrated once again why Big Tobacco can’t be trusted to keep its hands off anyone’s kids.
The stories, coincidentally, were published on the same day last week. One reported on a research paper by the Harvard School of Public Health that documented how tobacco companies manipulated the chemistry of their cigarettes to appeal to younger smokers and hook them as they got older.
The other looked at a study by the University of Montreal showing that teenagers become addicted to tobacco much more quickly than previously understood. Their developing physiology and behavioral immaturity conspire to quickly ensnare them in a dependency that, according to some studies, is as fierce as heroin addiction.
Hence Joe Camel, the now abandoned cartoon representation of Camel cigarettes. Hence, also, the Harvard report that showed how tobacco companies varied the amount of menthol in cigarettes, depending on the age group it was tar-getting.
For example, the report cited a document from R. J. Reynolds that noted all three major menthol brands “built their franchise with YAS (younger adult smokers) . . . using a low-menthol product strategy. However, as smokers acclimate to menthol, their demand for menthol increases over time.”
In 1987, the company’s effort to recruit young smokers produced this observation: “First-time smoker reaction is generally negative. . . . Initial negatives can be alleviated with a low level of menthol.”
And why not? As the University of Montreal study shows, children are easy to seduce, and once you have them, you have them for years — even decades. Maybe even life, however foreshortened.
This is the best counter-argument against critics who say that everyone knows smoking is bad, so there’s no reason to listen to whiners who sue over their addiction. The argument falls apart when you consider that the industry seeks out children who are too immature to resist and quickly become too addicted to quit.
All of which is to say that no one should trust the tobacco industry’s post-lawsuit pledges to forgo the kiddie market. A number of observers have identified tactics they believe to be subtle come-ons to children (see www.tobaccofreekids.org on the Web). And studies have shown that people who don’t start smoking young probably won’t ever take up the habit. The cigarette companies can’t survive without kids. The kids may not survive the tobacco companies, it’s true, but since the tobacco companies don’t much care about them, the rest of us must.
