SCIENCE / MEDICINE : Health vs. Profits: It’s Time Tobacco Firms Developed a Conscience

Dear Nicotine Pushers,

We health fanatics gave a cheer when Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, the new secretary of Health and Human Services, shot down R. J. Reynolds’ naked attempt to target black neighborhoods with a new cigarette aimed just at them. Little did we know the same company was waiting in the wings with an even more insidious bid for tainted profits.

According to a report in the Washington Post in mid-February, you folks at R. J. Reynolds have prepared a detailed marketing strategy for so-called “virile females.” These, I gather, are poorly educated white women between the ages of 18 and 24. Dakota is the brand, but it’s destined for a market test in Texas--Houston, to be exact--this coming April.

Now, I know you read the report and denied having this strategy. But you folks just don’t have a high deniability factor when it comes to health fanatics like me. You allegedly worked out extensive proposals (“Project V.F.,” for Virile Female) for marketing to young women whose favorite pastimes are cruising, partying, hot rod shows and tractor pulls--all of which they like to do with their boyfriends. Also, according to the Washington Post account, your target women want to marry those same boyfriends as soon as possible, and keep hanging out with them doing virile things.

I guess that you people must know a few other basic facts. Like, young women are the only category of Americans whose smoking rate continues to increase. Like, nicotine is one of the most addictive of all drugs, including hard drugs, so it pays to get your clients hooked while they’re young. Like, lack of education means fewer barriers to your attempts to create addiction. Enter the V.F., a high-concept target group for the drug you hustle.

Now, I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt for a minute here, and pretend you don’t know certain other facts, including evidence that lung cancer has steadily increased in women for decades, finally surpassing breast cancer as the leading deadly malignancy in women. You folks spend about $2.5 billion a year advertising your drug, which puts you in a pretty solid position compared to, say, crack pushers, who have to wait for the customers to come to them.

Nevertheless, with only a few million a year in government money--somewhere around a hundredth or a thousandth of what you spend--we health fanatics have managed to put a big dent in cigarette addiction in America. And needless to say, we’re going to keep on doing it, as long as the government funds keep trickling down.

So you export the stuff to disadvantaged countries where we can’t compete with your “Be More American” style ad campaigns. Or you target inner-city blacks, who are under so much stress from poverty that they’re easy marks for all drugs, yours being no exception. Or, most insidiously, you go after young women with no more than a high school education, knowing full well that less educated people are harder for us health fanatics to reach with the real facts about tobacco.

Let me point out another unpleasant truth that you may have managed to repress while you were making these marketing plans. These young women, who want so much to get married and hang out with their boyfriends (now husbands) are going to get pregnant, and are going to get that way while they are using and abusing your drug. And since they are going to be hooked on it, they are going to continue using it while their babies grow inside them, and after the babies are born.

Some of these babies are going to suffer stunted growth in the womb. (“Warning: Smoking by pregnant women may result in fetal injury, premature birth, and low birth weight,” is how the surgeon general puts it.) And they are going to breathe tobacco smoke passively after birth, increasing their vulnerability to colds and flu. So Dakota, when you think of it, really targets mommies and babies, doesn’t it?

I know, there’s this profit thing. It’s the American way. But didn’t R. J. Reynolds just make a $25-billion merger? How much profit do you fellows need? Do you really have to go after teen-agers and their babies?

On this profit theory, one might think we health fanatics could cut some sort of deal with you--you make a bundle producing the birth defects and cancers, then we clean up taking care of them. The cash register would ring both ways. But unfortunately we have this thing called conscience. Sometime we’ll have to tell you about it.

And oh yeah, there’s this free speech angle you’ve come up with now. As long as the drug you push is legal, you think you have a right to talk to anybody about it any way you like (though you do need to slap on those surgeon general’s warnings). Now some of us think there are gray areas--that there are drugs that could be legal to sell while certain kinds of speech about them are restricted. But let’s say we can’t restrict your speech. Go ahead and target anybody you please. You’ll find the First Amendment cuts both ways. Because health fanatics like me are going to keep hammering away at you fellows every time we can get near a typewriter.

Sincerely yours, Intolerable health fanatic