Tobacco Companies Targeted Asian-Americans

by Bob Burton

A team of four U.S. and Canadian researchers combed through 500,000 pages of internal tobacco industry documents -- made public as a result of U.S. court cases -- to investigate promotion strategies aimed at Asian-American and Pacific Islanders, called the "AAPI" market in industry jargon.

Their findings in the September 2002 edition of Tobacco Control, published by the British Medical Journal, add to earlier discoveries that the tobacco industry developed detailed strategies for other specific groups including African-Americans and homosexuals.

The strategies developed to target Asian-Americans in the United States may well be used now in Asia, says Simon Chapman, editor of Tobacco Control and professor of public health and community medicine at the University of Sydney.

"In the tobacco industry, strategies that successfully boost sales in one country are quickly globalized. What works targeting Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States today, may well be used in Asia and the Pacific tomorrow," he said.

"The global tobacco companies strategy is to compensate for declining sales in some countries such as the United States by boosting sales in regions such as Asia and the Pacific -- where the protection of public health from tobacco is less advanced," Chapman said.

Tobacco company strategies included emphasis on "Asian-owned stores, direct marketing of specific cigarette brands through community cultural events, youth-orientated promotions, and corporate sponsorship," wrote researchers M. Muggali, R. Pollay, R. Lew and Anne Joseph in the journal.

The Asian-American and Pacific Islander communities have doubled in the United States to 7 million since the 1980s.

Two-thirds of the largest groups of Asian Americans -- from China, the Philippines, Japan, India, Korea and Vietnam -- are clustered in five states including California and New York.

Three quarters of those from the Pacific Islands -- predominantly from Hawaii, Samoa and Guam -- live in California and Hawaii.

The geographical concentrations of the communities and the fact they were growing at a faster rate than other ethnic groups made them particularly attractive to the tobacco companies.

One document that the market research company Loiminchay prepared for the Lorillard Tobacco Co in 1990 bluntly stated that "other tobacco companies are aware that this community which is [generally] predisposed toward smoking, is a potential gold mine".

Central to the tobacco company's strategies was a corporate sponsorship program aimed at key organizations and community events.

Chapman argues that corporate sponsorship by tobacco companies is a cynical exercise.

"Corporate sponsorship by tobacco companies -- while often presented as community-minded philanthropy -- is always aimed at boosting sales and creating political allies to be mobilized when a tobacco control initiative threatens to curtail profits from their deadly products," he said.

RJ Reynolds sponsors groups such as the National Association of Asian-American Journalists and the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Phillip Morris, the world's biggest tobacco company, has also sponsored events such as the Nisei Week Japanese Festival in Los Angeles.

Asian-Americans are heavily represented among convenience store owners, reaching up to 80 percent of those in New York City and a thousand stores in southern California.

In 1993, for instance, a special team from RJ Reynolds met with the New York and Southern California chapters of Korean-American Grocers Association (KAGRO).

It agreed to sponsor a KAGRO seminar at a cost of $10,000 "to give us the opportunity to address the membership regarding the negative impact of an increase in the FET (federal excise tax)".

It proved to be a worthwhile investment, with all KAGRO chapters agreeing in May 1994 to collect petition signatures from customers opposing tax increases.

When a local city council in Tennessee proposed legislation to ban smoking in public places, the alliance that the company had developed proved critical.

"The Memphis sales team quickly pulled together an impressive list of allies to confront the council. Contacts were made with the Tennessee and Memphis Restaurant Associations, the Korean-American Grocers and the Black Business Association," an RJ Reynolds lawyer was quoted as claiming in tobacco industry documents cited in the magazine.

"The results were overwhelming. The smoking ban failed. And the bill's sponsor even voted against it!" the lawyer was quoted as having said.

While the most recent documents the researchers gained access to were from 1995, Chapman doubts little has changed today.

"The documents unmask the invisible influence the industry used for decades -- and still does -- to expand its sales and profits at the expense of the health of tens of millions of people," he said.

"The pressing challenge now is to ensure that the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control is strong enough to defeat the tobacco epidemic and protect public health," Chapman said, referring to an international agreement that the World Health Organization is spearheading and which is under negotiation at present.

"We can't let tobacco industry lobbying result in a draft convention that is watered down in order to make it palatable to the tobacco industry," he added.