Tobacco execs launch attack on anti-smoking ads - Tobacco News - Smoking Lobby Forum for Smokers Rights and Smoking Bans
9
JUN

Tobacco execs launch attack on anti-smoking ads

Share this article: Share this article del.icio.us Share this article digg Share this article google Share this article netscape Share this article reddit Share this article myweb Share this article fark Share this article furl
USA Today, 2003-06-09


LOS ANGELES — After smoldering for years, tobacco executives are asking courts to ban anti-smoking ads that portray them as callous killers who try to get kids addicted to nicotine.



At issue are aggressive campaigns aimed at teenagers and funded by 13 state governments and an anti-tobacco foundation. Tobacco companies say they don't mind radio and TV spots that say smoking is unhealthful. But in a lawsuit filed in California, the companies say that nasty personal attacks are unfairly tipping juries against them in smokers' personal-injury suits.



In a Delaware complaint, one company says that Delaware, California and 44 other states promised they wouldn't pillory cigarette makers when the states signed a $206 billion settlement in 1998 that repaid their Medicaid costs of treating sick smokers.



Health officials have been calling tobacco moguls manipulative evildoers since 1990, when California targeted youths with that theme.



"The ads are saying to kids, 'Do you want to rebel? Then rebel against the tobacco industry that's been marketing to you,' " Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell says.



The tobacco industry's legal counterattack is part of a war over the next generation of smokers. The implied question in the two lawsuits is whether cigarette companies, with smoking rates falling across the USA, will gain a veto over the content of messages aimed at cutting the number of young tobacco consumers.



Why have tobacco firms waited until now to sue? Because their long streak of defeating smokers in civil jury trials has been broken. The companies are blaming a string of courtroom setbacks on the advertising onslaught that paints them, in the words of their California complaint, as "loathsome persons motivated by cynicism, greed and malevolence."



About 95% of smokers' cases still are dismissed before trial, but smokers suing as individuals have won 14 verdicts and lost six in eight states and Puerto Rico since 1996. (Big Tobacco has a better record defending class-action suits; cigarette makers' latest win came last month, when a Florida appeals court overturned a $145 billion punitive damages judgment and ruled that 700,000 smokers were not entitled to sue as a class.)



In the federal suit they filed in April in Sacramento, tobacco giants R.J. Reynolds and Lorillard allege that the California attacks "prejudice potential jurors." This wasn't an issue before 1997, when the Legislature repealed a law that immunized cigarette makers from smokers' claims. Since then, juries have voted big awards for plaintiffs in four of five California trials.



In Delaware, Lorillard alleges that the American Legacy Foundation, formed by the National Association of Attorneys General, has unlawfully demonized tobacco executives in nationwide radio and TV spots since 2000.



To score with teenagers, anti-smoking ads must be hard-hitting and "edgy," health activists say. California spends more than any other state on anti-smoking ads — $21 million a year — and produces the most provocative campaigns. One billboard shows a Marlboro Man-type cowboy telling a buddy, "I miss my lung, Bob."


But it's California's TV spots that go too far, tobacco companies say. Some examples:


  • A cynical executive tells colleagues that the tobacco industry needs 3,100 new smokers a day because 2,000 Americans quit smoking, "and another 1,100 also quit. Actually, technically, they die."
  • Cigarettes fall from the sky onto a playground, wowing preteens. "We have to sell cigarettes to your child," a voice-over says. "We need a half-million new smokers a year just to stay in business."


Daniel Dohahue, R.J. Reynolds senior vice president and general counsel, says, "California has put its rather heavy thumb on the plaintiffs' side of the scale of justice." Surveys show that the ads "have a corrosive effect on the incoming attitude of jurors," he says.


Ed Sweda, senior attorney at the Tobacco Products Liability Project at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, says jurors have been influenced far more by internal documents showing that the companies have long been aware of smoking's dangers.


The American Legacy Foundation launched its campaign in 2000 with an ad titled "Body Bags." Young people haul 1,200 body bags off trucks and stack them outside a purported tobacco company. An angry kid with a bullhorn then says that tobacco kills 1,200 Americans a day.


A foundation radio ad provoked Lorillard to sue. Dramatizing the point that tobacco contains the chemical urea, a youth calls Lorillard at its Greensboro, N.C., headquarters, pretending to be a dog walker and offering the company dog urine. (The company declined.) "Outrageous," says Ronald Milstein, Lorillard vice president.


The two sides are far apart on free-speech issues. "The leitmotif in these cases is an effort to limit speech," says Ellen Vargyas, general counsel of the American Legacy Foundation. Reynolds' Donahue says anti-smoking forces have no right to "attack on an ad hominem basis, in a fictionalized setting, the executives of these companies, and portray fiction as fact."


Making the insult worse, cigarette companies say, is that the firms pay for them. California's anti-smoking messages are financed through a 25-cent-a-pack tax on tobacco sellers. The American Legacy Foundation has received $1.2 billion that tobacco firms paid under their settlement with 46 states in 1998. The settlement's terms allow ads about tobacco's risks but forbid "vilification" of sellers.


Manufacturers aren't suing to squelch state ads outside of California. That's because most states have shifted from an anti-industry approach to softer anti-smoking messages — teenagers reasoning with friends. Teens were starting to view the villain-bashing as "predictable and preachy," says Lynn Deml of the Minnesota Department of Public Health. California health Director Diana Bonta says the in-your-face attack ads truthfully reveal "deceptive" cigarette marketing tactics.


Officials credit the ads, as well as tax increases on tobacco products, with reducing smoking in the state. California's adult smoking rate, down from 22.9% in 1988 to 16.6% now, is second-lowest in the USA, behind Utah's 13%. The state's 5.9% youth smoking rate is the nation's lowest, health officials say.


At a hearing today in Sacramento, a federal judge likely will decide whether to ban broadcasts of 49 tough ads produced by California. The Delaware case could reach trial next spring.

Jun 09, 2003 9:47 am   Email to a Friend

This article hasn't been commented yet.

Write a comment

* = required field

:

:

:


4 + 6 =