Anti-Smoking Youth Ads Designed to Promote Cigarettes

by Wallace Ravven

One piece of evidence that the youth programs were designed to serve the industry's political aims comes from a 1991 Philip Morris document stating that the success of the "youth initiatives" would be determined by whether they led to a "reduction in legislation introduced and passed restricting or banning our sales and marketing activities" as well as "passage of legislation favorable to the industry."

Although the goal of the youth smoking prevention programs was supposedly to discourage youth from starting a smoking habit, the researchers could find no evidence in any documents of industry studies to evaluate the program's success in achieving this goal.

Instead, the industry assessed in great detail the public relations and legislative outcomes associated with its youth smoking prevention programs. In the mid 1980s, for example, the Tobacco Institute asked its lobbyists to rate its youth prevention programs' value as a legislative tool. Furthermore, the kinds of information the companies gathered from participants in the youth programs were very similar to the information tobacco marketers need to sell their products to young people: lifestyle, social habits, aspirations, attitudes about smoking (or not smoking.)

The analysis, published in the June issue of the American Journal of Public Health, found no evidence that the industry's youth programs ever discussed nicotine addiction or identified other dangers of smoking. Rather, they often stressed the "adult" choice that smoking constitutes, a theme that one key internal Tobacco Institute document said with some hope "might prevent or delay further regulation of the tobacco industry."

The researchers analyzed nearly 500 industry documents made available by tobacco litigation during the 1990s.