WEDNESDAY, Aug. 15, 2001 (HealthDayNews) -- The nation's leading cigarette makers have made little effort to comply with the spirit of a landmark agreement that would ban tobacco ads aimed at children, a new study suggests.
Under the terms of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) signed by the tobacco giants and 46 states, tobacco companies promised to stop advertising to minors. But the study, which appears in the Aug. 16 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, finds that children still are heavily exposed to tobacco ads.
Dr. Michael Siegel, an associate professor in Boston University's School of Public Health, and Charles King III, a Harvard Business School researcher, reviewed pre- and post-MSA advertising trends for 15 cigarette brands in 38 magazines with large national circulations.
"The numbers are really astounding. Kids are being bombarded," says Siegel.
Magazines were considered "youth-oriented" if either 15 percent or more of their readership or at least 2 million readers were ages 12 to 17, a standard cigarette maker Philip Morris adopted last year. They included such popular titles as People, Self, Hot Rod, Rolling Stone and Elle. The researchers classified three cigarette brands -- Camel, Marlboro and Newport -- "youth" brands, since more than 5 percent of junior high and high school smokers smoked them.
Magazine advertising for all 15 brands rose from $238 million in 1995 to $291 million in 1999, then dropped to about $217 million in 2000, the first year after the settlement. But the amount spent on youth brands in youth-oriented magazines was greater after the settlement: $56.4 million in 1995 vs. $59.6 million in 2000, with a large spike in 1999. The magazine business began experiencing a severe ad slump in 2000.
Using an ad-industry concept called "reach," Siegel and King say more than 80 percent of America's youth saw a magazine ad for "youth" cigarettes an average of 17 times last year. For Marlboro, the numbers were even more dramatic: 88 percent of the nation's young readers saw a pitch for the brand an average of 21 times in 2000 alone.
Siegel says cigarette companies advertise more heavily in magazines with higher youth readership, strongly suggesting that the industry is continuing to target children despite the MSA. "Even if it's not intentional but a massive coincidence, the important thing is, what is the exposure? The public health community feels that there is no reason why kids should be overwhelming exposed" to tobacco advertisements, he says.
Although the two researchers chose the 15 percent-or-2 million reader threshold arbitrarily, it's far too liberal to protect children from cigarette ads, they say. "It doesn't make sense to set a [youth readership] percentage limit. What you really need to do is look at the actual number of kids that are being exposed," Siegel says.
But Jan Smith, a spokeswoman for R. J. Reynolds, maker of the popular Camel, Winston and Salem brands, denies her company has ignored the settlement. "We do not, we will not target minors," says Smith.
The company does not buy space in publications for which minors make up more than 25 percent of the readership -- a somewhat looser threshold than King and Siegel used. And if detailed breakdowns of readership age aren't available, the company will buy ads only in magazines with a median reader age of 23, Smith says.
Smith says expecting children will be entirely shielded from cigarette advertisements is unreasonable "unless you ban cigarette advertising in magazines completely, and that was not the intent of the Master Settlement Agreement."
Brendan McCormick, a Philip Morris spokesman, says his company wants to see uniform standards for cigarette advertising that would insure that ads are aimed only at adult smokers. But he would not say whether the company's current policies regarding youth-oriented magazines are adequate to protect young readers from tobacco marketing.
In an editorial accompanying the journal article, two prominent tobacco-control experts argue that the latest findings -- along with evidence that states aren't using their shares of the $206 billion settlement to seriously fund smoking prevention and cessation programs -- should spur Congress to give drug regulators power over tobacco.
Dr. David Kessler, former head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Matthew Myers, of the National Center for Tobacco-Free Kids, argue that lawmakers could "save millions of lives" by giving the FDA the same authority over tobacco that it has over other products. "Consumers' choice is not a factor in decisions about defective tires, and it should not be a factor when tobacco is on the table," they write.
A comprehensive law would also allow the agency to advise the public about the dangers of tobacco and the importance of quitting, while giving it the power to force the industry to develop safer products, he says.
"If Congress is concerned about the health of our nation's children and the death toll from tobacco, then it's critical that it give the FDA the same kind of broad authority over tobacco that it has over food and drugs," Myers says.
What To Do
An estimated 3,000 children take up smoking each day. Smoking-related diseases claim 400,000 lives a year in the United States.
To find out what your state is doing with its tobacco settlement dollars, visit the National Center for Tobacco-Free Kids.
To learn more about the damaging effects of smoking on your health, check the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the State of California or Tobacco.org.
For more on anti-smoking initiatives, try Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights.
