Category Archives: Tobacco advertising

What the hell? New American Spirit ad still has false advertising

This ad was in Sports Illustrated in July. What the hell? They were supposed to stop with this false advertising!

I thought the FDA and RJ Reynolds had reached an agreement to knock this stuff off — a new ad in my Sports Illustrated last month STILL advertising that Natural Spirit cigarettes are “100 percent additive free.”

I posted about this back in March. This was a settlement in response to FDA ruling that RJR had to drop its advertising that Natural American Spirit cigarettes were somehow more “natural” than other brands, when in fact, they simply are not. There’s simply little or no difference between this particular RJR brand and other cigarettes. It’s not safer in any, way, shape or form.

Reportedly, the FDA and RJR reached this agreement in January. From a March article about the agreement:

In the memorandum, Reynolds said it would “remove the phrase[s] ‘Additive Free’ … [and] ‘Natural’ from all Natural American Spirit cigarette product labels, labeling, advertising and promotional materials,” with the caveat that Santa Fe will still be permitted to use the term Natural in the Natural American Spirit brand name.

Yet, here in AUGUST, there is still an ad in Sports Illustrated, eight months after the agreement with the big, fat words “Additive Free” in the ad. So, I’ve tried looking into it and I can’t find any information other than a lawsuit has been filed against RJR and the FDA over the agreement.

Was the agreement supposed to take effect in 2018? Is RJR simply ignoring the settlement? I have no idea. But, it pissed me off.

And Jesus, it pisses me off that Sports Illustrated keeps taking tobacco advertising, too.

 

 

Jesus, Sports Illustrated, what the hell is wrong with you?

SI cover

A few months ago, I chastised Sports Illustrated for printing a bunch of photos of some Spanish golfer smoking cigars (I don’t do golf, hell if I remember the guy’s name, but he’s apparently a big character on the Senior PGA Tour).

SI Golf pushed it even further this month, with a photo of a couple of golfing equipment builders smoking on its cover. Jesus Christ, who still puts smoking photos on their magazine covers? I get it that it’s cigars, not cigarettes, but you can’t even smoke a cigar anymore in a Marvel movie (true!).

SI, a magazine that is read by a lot of teens and young adults, also takes a lot of advertising for cigarettes, chewing tobacco and e-cigarettes. They also will take ads for the COPD Foundation and the lung cancer awareness. I really think SI is one of the worst magazines I’ve seen out there for continuing to promote tobacco products and for giving Big Tobacco a venue for its advertising.

Si ads
Seriously … both of these ads were in a Sports Illustrated magazine about 20 pages apart a year or two ago.

I have no problem with tobacco ads in adult magazines like Playboy or Penthouse, but SI is read by all ages. And most magazines for all ages have stopped taking tobacco ads (In fact, I helped convince Discover magazine to stop taking American Spirit ads … God’s honest truth.).

This has been for some time been a burr up my butt, but actually putting smoking on their cover really ticks me off. You guys need to guy a clue. Seriously. Knock it off with the promoting smoking and promoting tobacco products, you shills.

 

 

The Merchants of Doubt: A Review … and the curious case of Michael Siegel

Merchants_of_DOUBT

“The Merchants of Doubt” is a fascinating book by science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. I had an interest in the book because it explored how industry forces have used scientists to create doubt about their products and/or initiatives … and that all began with the tobacco industry back in the 1950s … hence my interest in the book.

Merchants of Doubt has a pair of chapters regarding the tobacco industry … first about the lies and obfuscation attempted by the industry when information first came out about the dangers of smoking and lung cancer, then 20-30 years later, the industry used many of the same techniques to try and deflect about the dangers to non-smokers from secondhand smoke.

One of the fascinating things about this book is that from the 1950s and the great tobacco coverup all the way to global warming cover-up 40-50 years later, a small cadre of ideologically driven scientists were involved in all these issues. Why scientists would involve themselves in science as disparate as lung health and oncology to global warming? The initial assumption would be that these scientists were all paid off by various industries to deflect and create doubt about their products, but actually money is a less important factor than you would think. Ideology is the biggest factor.

Fred Seitz
Fred Seitz

The book revolves around three Cold War physicists who got involved with the tobacco industry, the oil industry, the chemical industry, etc., primarily because of their politics. These guys — three guys — did a tremendous amount of damage over the past 50 years by being very, very loud and determined and having a lot of industry backing.

The book begins with a Cold War physicist named Frederick Seitz, who worked on the atomic bomb in the 1940s. I was fascinated by the description of Seitz; a conservative pro-business, anti-regulatory right-winger. He let his ideology drive

Seitz reminded me of a well-known scientist who has been involved in tobacco control, but several years ago, turned against the rest of the scientists in the tobacco control field. I’ll get to him later. “The Merchants of Doubt” doesn’t really get into this guy, because as near as I can tell, he became active about 10 years ago and the “Merchants of Doubt” stops exploring the area of tobacco control about 20 years ago.

fred-singer_0
Fred Singer

Anyway, the book explores several scientific/ environmental controversies and the roles played by the same very small and very determined group of scientists to deflect and confuse the public. It begins with tobacco and lung cancer, then “Nuclear Winter”, Ronald Reagan’s ridiculous “Star Wars Initiative”, the attacks on Rachel Carson and “Silent Spring”, back to the tobacco industry and the wars of words over secondhand smoke (of which I was involved for several years) and finally into the huge battle over global warming, which of course is still ongoing.

I’ll quote several passages here from the book:

The tobacco road would lead through Star Wars, nuclear winter, acid rain and the ozone hole, all the way to global warming. Frederick Seitz and his colleagues would fight the facts and merchandise doubt all the way.

When it came to the original fight over smoking and lung cancer, one would assume that after the 1964 Surgeon General’s report came out unequivocally showing the link between smoking and lung cancer, but the tobacco industry fought back, with help from Seitz and others, creating its own “science” simply to confuse people … ie, to create doubt in the minds of the consumers. It was a technique refined and perfected decades later by the fossil fuel industry to create doubt about global warming (97 percent to 98 percent of scientists believe global warming is a fact and that it is man-made. However, much of the public has been led to believe there is no consensus about global warming and that there is still a lot of “debate” over the issue.).

bill nierenberg
Bill Nierenberg

From the Merchants of Doubt:

(In science) a conclusion becomes established not when a clever person proposes it, or even a group of people begin to discuss it, but when the jury of peers — the community of researchers — reviews the evidence and concludes that it is sufficient to accept the claim. By the 1960s, the scientific community had done that with respect to tobacco. In contract, the tobacco industry was never able to support its claims with evidence, which is why they had to resort to obfuscation. Even after decades of tens of millions of dollars spent, the research they funded failed to supply evidence that smoking was really OK. But then, that was never really the point of it anyway.”

Hill and Knowlton documents showed that the tobacco industry knew the dangers of smoking as early as 1953 and conspired to suppress this knowledge. They conspired to fight the facts and to merchandise doubt.

Doubt mongering also works because we think science is about facts, cold hard definite facts. If someone tells us that things are uncertain, we think that means the science is muddled. This is a mistake. There are always uncertainties in any live science, because science is a process of discovery.

So what prompted these scientists like Seitz and a pair of  Cold War physicists — Bill Singer and Bill Nierenberg — to turn their back on the scientific method? They were all highly educated and brilliant in their fields, but in the end, they became nothing more than shills. In fact, Seitz was literally a paid shill for Big Tobacco.

The Merchants of Doubt offers an explanation:

“Bad, bad sicence. You can practically see the fingers wagging. Scientists had been bad boys; it was time for them to behave themselves. The tobacco industry would be the daddy who made sure they did. It wasn’t just money at stake; it was individual liberty. Today, smoking, tomorrow … who knew? By protecting smoking, we protected freedom.”

Later, a small but loud group of scientists was relied upon to fight against the rising tide of evidence that secondhand smoke was dangerous to non-smokers. Singer, a physicist, who had zero training in oncology or pathology or biology, led the charge. Again, it came down to a blind devotion to right-wing, pro-marketplace ideology.

From the book:

“One answer that has already emerged in our discussion of acid rain and ozone depletion: these scientists, and the think thanks that helped to promote their views, were implacably hostile to regulation. Regulation was the road to Socialism — the very thing the cold War was fought to defeat. This hostility to regulation was part of a larger political ideology, stated explicitly in a document developed by a British organization called FOREST — Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking tobacco. And that was ideology of the free market. It was free market fundamentalism.”

“Our society has always understood that freedoms are never absolute. This is what we mean by the rule of law. No one gets to do just whatever he feels like doing, whenever he feels like doing it. I don’t have the right to yell fire in a crowded theater; your right to throw a punch ends at my nose. All freedoms have their limits, and none more obviously than the freedom to kill other people, either directly with guns and knives, or indirectly with dangerous goods. Secondhand smoke was an indirect danger that killed people.”

“Why did this group of Cold Warriors turn against the very science to which they had previously dedicated their lives? Because they felt they were working to ‘secure the blessings of liberty’ If science was being used against those blessings — in ways that challenged the freedom of free enterprise — then they would fight it as they would fight any enemy. For indeed, science was starting to show that certain kinds of liberties are not sustainable — like the liberty to pollute. Science was showing the Isaiah Berlin was right: Liberty for wolves does indeed mean death to lambs.”

Which brings us to the curious case of Michael Siegel.

Merchants of Doubt, part two —
the curious case of Michael Siegel

I’ve never met Michael Siegel, never corresponded with him, never interacted with him in any way, shape or form. So, any psychoanalysis I give about him is strictly based on what I’ve seen from his writing online. While reading “The Merchants of Doubt,” I kept thinking about this tobacco control scientist, really a leader in the movement for several years, who turned against the movement about 10 years ago. The story of Frederick Seitz really reminded me of this guy. I knew about him only because on old discussion forums about secondhand smoke, when the dangers of secondhand smoke were still being hotly debated, this guy’s name kept coming up over and over from Libertarians and smokers fighting smokefree laws, quoting him and his “studies” debunking the dangers of secondhand smoke. It took a couple of minutes of Google searches and I found his name — Michael Siegel. Like the line from “Star Wars”, that was a name I had not heard in a long time. I don’t think I had given him five minutes’ thought in the past five years.

Michael-Siegel1
Michael Siegel

I had assumed years ago that Siegel was just some tobacco industry paid shill, but believe it or not, he really isn’t. He was a guy who actually was pretty active in tobacco control for a number of years and is still quoted to this day by some media outlets as a “tobacco control expert.” However, Siegel pretty much turned against the tobacco control movement about 10 years ago when he got kicked out of a listserve of tobacco control experts and scientists for — depending on what side you’re on — being too contrarian or too argumentative.

Siegel then decided to make it his personal crusade to be the thorn in the side of the tobacco control movement. Seven, eight years ago, he was attacking pretty much any and all studies being done on secondhand smoke. Again, the EPA, Surgeon General, Centers for Disease Control, World Health Organization and vast majority of scientists have reached the unequivocal conclusion about the dangers of secondhand smoke. All I can do is laugh at this guy Siegel (again, he seems to be a pretty smart scientist, he worked at Boston U.), railing that the Centers for Disease Control and Surgeon General’s Office (and the Food and Drug Administration when it comes to e-cigs) have no idea what they are talking about. “The CDC and Surgeon General and FDA are wrong, but I’m right, because I’m smarter than all of them.” Seriously, read the guy’s blog … that’s what he’s saying.

hitler obama
Seriously, if this was the avatar of a member of my fan club, I would seriously be questioning if I was on the right path

Again, I was able to find his blog and found to my delight that he seems to have abandoned his personal crusade against secondhand smoke studies and has now decided to change course and go after any and all studies regarding e-cigarettes. I swear if this guy isn’t receiving a paycheque from Blu E-cigs, then he’s a schmuck, because he oughta be; he’s absolutely doing the bidding of the E-cig industry. His crusade now appears to be to defend the e-cig industry against all these nefarious studies making them look bad. I have to be honest, I just busted up laughing when I saw this.

This is how ridiculous this guy is. One of his posts is about recent studies showing that the use of e-cigs among teens has exploded in the past two years. Meanwhile, the use of cigarettes among teens has collapsed. It’s just plain simple common sense that teens are switching from cigarettes to e-cigs because they’re easier to buy and because they’ve been given the idea by e-cig marketing that e-cigs are cool and more harmless than cigarettes. This is what Michael Siegel writes about this. This is an example of just how far gone this guy really is. He’s so busy nitpicking others purely for the sake of nitpicking, he appears to have long since stopped seeing the forest for the trees:

However, it is not true that the progress we have made in reducing youth smoking is being threatened by youth experimentation with e-cigarettes. The only way that our progress in reducing youth smoking could be threatened by e-cigarette experimentation is if e-cigarettes were a gateway to youth smoking or if e-cigarettes were as hazardous as smoking.

I just want to say to this guy: “Dude, what the fuck? What is wrong with you?” No one is saying e-cigs are as bad as cigarettes. What people are saying is that they are a different nicotine delivery system and that kids are simply transitioning from one nicotine delivery system (cigarettes) to another (e-cigs) and that this is not necessarily a step in the right direction … because it’s STILL NICOTINE … and it’s still incredibly physically addictive. So, yeah, e-cigs are a threat to the progress in reducing youth smoking for that reason alone, douchebag. This guy spends all his energy parsing language from government agencies and it appears to me he has massively lost sight of the big picture … nicotine addiction by its very nature is not a good thing.

I thought it was just me about this guy, but I found two other bloggers who have had more direct interactions with him who reach the same conclusion … that he is one weird guy and one damned difficult guy to figure out.

One is a blog written by a guy who goes by the name “Orac” who starts a blog entry about Michael Siegel by saying, “I don’t know what to think of Michael Siegel.” This blog entry is great and articulates better than I can everything wrong with this guy (I will articulate my own misgivings about Michael Siegel later, but seriously, Orac does it better.). Orac says that while it appears Siegel makes a lot of good arguments in some of his posts about secondhand smoke, what gives him a “bad feeling in the pit of his stomach” is that Siegel relies a lot on the term “junk science,” which is a term actually invented by the tobacco industry and that Siegel on his blog literally has nothing whatsoever positive to say about any study on tobacco, secondhand smoke or e-cigs that he personally wasn’t a part of. I haven’t plowed through eight years of Siegel’s blog, who has the energy, but everything I’ve personally seen is to the effect of, “this person study was bullshit, I’m smarter than this guy…”

Like Orac (not me) says:

Looking through Dr. Siegel’s blog, in fact, I had a hard time finding any articles in which he had anything good to say about any studies of the effects of indoor smoking bans. Recent posts have savaged a studies from Scotland, Indiana, and Ireland. I looked for a single example of Dr. Siegel praising an SHS study, and I was unable to find one. Surely they can’t all be bad, can they? And if they’re all bad, then I have to wonder: Why does Dr. Siegel still believe that SHS is harmful to health if in his opinion the science of recent studies is so bad? A little balance every now and then would be helpful; it’s little wonder that tobacco cranks love to cite him, given that the overall gestalt of his blog, I’m sorry to have to say, is more than a little crank-like, at least to me. True, I could be mistaking passion for crankery, but even so that’s the impression that, try as I might, I can’t entirely shake.

Finally, what makes me uncomfortable about Dr. Siegel and his stance is that he’s inconsistent. For example, appropriately, he likes to rail against “science by press release.” Damn straight. I find such abuse of science as disturbing as he does. Unfortunately, when it serves his purposes, Dr. Siegel doesn’t appear to be above doing something rather similar, as I noted in July. That’s when he championed a “study” by David W. Kuneman and Michael J. McFadden (a study to which he claimed to have contributed by going over the authors’ data analysis) on his blog before it was ever published. McFadden is a die-hard anti-SHS regulation advocate who runs a website called Pennsylvania Smokers’ Action Network, which features a particularly stupid bit of propaganda called Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains, while Kuneman runs a website called The Smokers’ Club. The study, entitled Do Smoking Bans cause a 27 to 40% drop in admissions for myocardial infarction in hospitals? A preliminary study was published not in a peer-reviewed journal, but on Kuneman’s website.

Thank you, Orac. Thank you for convincing me it’s not just ME (and Michael McFadden is a total freaking Libertarian crank). If Siegel were interested in legitimate science, wouldn’t he be dissecting these secondhand smoke and e-cigarette studies and as part of a peer-review process rather than on his blog, rather than associating with idiot losers like Michael McFadden? I’d love to hear from Siegel about that. More on Siegel’s blog in a minute. In the end, Orac says Siegel basically  “comes off like a crank.”

I found another pretty hilarious post about Siegel from another blogger named Carl Phillips, who is a researcher in the field of alternatives to tobacco who has actually has dealt with Siegel. He rips into Siegel for attempting to start up a $4.5 million crowdfunding campaign to study e-cigs as a means of smoking cessation. Here are my two favourite passages from Phillips’ rant:

I wrote to Siegel about (speaking just for myself) is that what he was doing also appeared to violate the spirit, and perhaps the letter, of rules of public research ethics. It is extremely dicey to ask a threatened community for research funds. E-cigarette users are terribly worried about the political climate, and thus are likely to respond to any request for funds that comes with a promise of doing something about the regulatory threats to their ability to choose to vape. Thus anyone asking for such funds needs to be very careful to make sure they are not promising too much. … By contrast, Siegel presented only a hand-waving description of what he planned to do. When confronted with concerns with potentially problematic details of the (unspecified) protocol he or his staff always (to my knowledge) responded with some equivalent of “oh, we will take care of that — don’t worry.” This is the behavior of a shady corporate consultant, immediately responding to every question with reassurance in spite of apparently never having thought about it before, not of a careful researcher. I am certainly not calling either Siegel or his staff shady, but when your behavior looks like that of someone who is shady, it should be a red flag.

Siegel is notorious for being part of the cabal that blames evil corporate influences for never-specified nefarious impacts on research and policy. Funny how that does not seem to bother him when he wants to fund his own research with corporate donations.

So, I have one blogger saying he comes off like a crank and another saying he and his staff are behaving in a shady manner. Orac also posted a comment that Siegel seems to enjoy too much playing the role of gadfly. That really resonated with me and then there was this passage in “Merchants of Doubt” referring to scientists such as Seitz and Singer:

“They promoted claims that had already been refuted in the scientific literature, and the media became complicit as they reported these claims as if they were part of an ongoing scientific debate. Often the media did so without informing readers, viewers and listeners that the ‘experts’ being quoted had links to the tobacco industry, were affiliated with ideologically motivated think tanks that received money from the tobacco industry (or in later years the fossil fuel industry), or were simply habitual contrarians, who perhaps enjoyed the attention they got promoting outlier views.

I think that final sentence hits the nail on the head about Michael Siegel and here’s why I think that. Siegel definitely has a very ardent following. I saw it 7 or 8 years ago on old Topix message forums, Libertarians quoting his blog posts left, right and centre. Here’s what really bothers me about Michael Siegel. On his blog, one of his followers, someone who has posted repeatedly on his blog, in fact, has an avatar of Barack Obama with an Adolph Hitler mustache and hairstyle. I know if I considered myself a serious scientists and one of my ardent followers had an avatar mashing Adolph Hitler, arguably the most evil man in history, and Barack Obama, I certainly would be asking myself, “what the hell am I doing here?” I would be asking myself why people like that were a member of my fan club. It appears to me (I’m playing armchair psychiatrist here), that this is someone who enjoys being a “rebel” an “outlaw”, whatever and enjoys having a fan club of like-minded people … Internet cranks and Libertarians. Someone touched upon in “The Merchants of Doubt.”

I got a lot of out “Merchants of Doubt.” One of the things I didn’t expect to get out of it was that maybe I finally understand this secondhand smoke contrarian I remember hearing so much about 8 to 10 years ago.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arrrggghhh — Sports Illustrated April 20 edition: An ad for cigarettes, followed by an ad about lung cancer

Si ads
Page 21 of the April 20th Sports Illustrated on the left, page 119 on the right.

 

This made my head explode. Sports Illustrated’s policies on tobacco advertising are starting to make my head explode.

We all know SI takes tobacco advertising — a LOT of tobacco advertising. Not only do you find cigarette ads in nearly every issue, you will also find chewing tobacco ads and ads for Blu e-cigarettes. Usually full-page.

SI’s insistence on continuing to take tobacco advertising has drawn the ire of more than a few anti-tobacco advocates. SI is a magazine that is read by a lot of teenagers (I started reading it in my teens).

Well, I usually don’t react to the ominpresent tobacco and e-cig ads in SI, but this one really took the cake. In the April 20th edition of the magazine, there is an ad for Natural American Spirit cigarettes on page 21 (Though the brand likes to play up its Native American roots, these aren’t actually Native American cigarettes, it’s a brand that been owned for 15 years by Reynolds American, the same conglomerate that owns RJ Reynolds.).

SI ad 1

Natural American Spirit cigarettes ads are especially odious because the brand markets itself as being “organic” and “natural” and “additive-free.” Their ads are complete B.S. These guys have been reamed over the coals by the Department of Justice for not-so-subtly claiming that by somehow being “natural,” their cigarettes were more healthy than other brands. Reynolds is now required to add onto these ads these disclaimers: “Organic tobacco does NOT mean a safer cigarette” and “No additives in our tobacco does NOT mean a safer cigarette.”

SI ad 2

Anyway, on page 86 is a full-page ad for cigars and then on page 119, the killer, another full-pagead for an organization called “Stand up to Cancer,” with a testimonial from actor Tony Goldwyn (he was the bad guy in “Ghost,” remember that movie?), who lost his mother to lung cancer. The ad focuses on the advances being made today to combat lung cancer: “My mom didn’t have many options. Today’s lung cancer patients do.”

I suppose I should give SI some modicum of credit for not being so insensitive as to put the Natural American Spirit ad on the facing page from the ad about lung cancer. But, still my head went “BAM!”

bam!
An illustration of my brain after thumbing through my April 20th Sports Illustrated

 

Here you have a product that is the No. 1 cause of lung cancer — by a MILE — being advertised on page(s) 21 and 86, and then an ad about the cost of lung cancer on page 119. The whole thing just felt shameless to me by Sports Illustrated. C’mon, man, the time has long passed for that magazine to simply say “no” to cigarette advertising. Newspapers rarely, if ever take cigarette ads (contrary to public belief, there’s no law against it, newspapers just simply as a rule don’t take cigarette ads), and many, many magazines refuse to take cigarette ads. Several years ago, I got really mad at Discover magazine for having a Natural American Spirit ad, and that magazine is absolutely directed at kids, moreso than SI. I got a nice letter from them apologizing and promising they would no longer take tobacco ads (I think I got a free subscription for a year out of the deal, too. It must have been a persuasive letter.).

“Merchants of Doubt”: Big Oil, Big Chemical take a lesson from Big Tobacco

Merchants of Doubt

I have put this documentary in my Netflix queue, though I have a feeling it will be really bad for my blood pressure. This is a documentary by the Robert Kenner, who also made “Food, Inc.” about how the oil industry, chemical industry and pharmaceutical companies have copied the same techniques used for many years by Big Tobacco to “change the narrative” about the dangers of their product (in the case of the oil industry, global warming), by sowing the seeds of doubt and confusion in the American product. The movie has the same title of a book I have to get my hands on by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway.

Lucky Strike cigarette ad 1940s

The purveyors of doubt have been extremely successful in shaping public opinion on global warming, unfortunately, by creating the idea that “there is no scientific consensus” that man is causing climate change, even though 97 percent of scientists involved in the fields of climate, meteorology, etc., have actually reached this consensus. By finding a few loud voices (and likely paying some of those voices handsomely) to rail against the consensus, the industry has pretty effectively changed the discourse and changed public attitudes about global warming. Most polls show roughly half of respondents don’t believe mankind is creating the problem of global warming.

merchants of doubt book

Tobacco was very successful in its campaign to confuse the public for decades. For years, Big Tobacco found its own scientists to refute the growing evidence that cigarettes were behind the epidemic of lung cancer cases that began around the 1930s (roughly 30 years after cigarettes starting becoming popular.). Some of the same exact people who cut their teeth in a massive disinformation campaign for tobacco actually went on to work for the chemical industry and oil industry.

From a New York Times review of “Merchants of Doubt”:

“If you can ‘do tobacco,’ ” one of the perpetrators is quoted as saying, “you can do just about anything in public relations.”

The awesome book, “A Cigarette Century” chronicles in exquisite detail the steps that the tobacco industry went to counter the concerns over cigarettes. The U.S. Surgeon General’s report on lung cancer and smoking came out way back in 1964 and you would have thought this would be the death knell for the tobacco industry. Yet, the smoking rate remained stubbornly high over the next 30 years. Why? Doubt. Confusion. Paid shills. No one knew what to believe.

The tobacco industry established its own laboratories and did its own research, partly to generate data it believed would disprove the fears over lung cancer and smoking. Instead, the tobacco industry’s own data confirmed those fears and the industry kept this information under wraps for decades until it finally came gushing out in the 1980s and 1990s mostly through the discovery process of numerous lawsuits against the tobacco industry.

Meanwhile, the industry continued to maintain the safety of its products, putting filters on the cigarettes (which essentially do nothing) and having doctors in ads and promoting their products as safer than other brands. Incredibly, as late as the mid-1990s, tobacco executives continued to insist during congressional hearings that nicotine was not addictive, despite the reams and reams of evidence proving otherwise.

Like I said, this movie will not be good for my blood pressure. One of the reasons I get so worked up about it was arguing with my mom after my dad died of lung cancer at 49. First, she insisted that it was Hodgkin’s disease, not lung cancer from the four packs a day he smoked. Then, she claimed if he got lung cancer, it was from air pollution. The “air pollution is causing the epidemic of lung cancer” line is  STRAIGHT out of the Big Tobacco disinformation campaign from the 1950s. Twenty-five years later, that stuck in my mom’s head. Twenty-five years later, she used that as a rationale to continue smoking and now she is dealing with severe COPD.

Sigh. The lies people tell. And the people that listen to them.

 

 

Ireland to try and follow Australia’s lead in requiring plain cigarette packages

_75429104_cigarettes

Ireland, a longtime leader in the tobacco control movement (Ireland was actually the first countries to impose a nationwide smoking ban way back in 2004, which may or may not have had anything to do with the decline of the pub industry in that country, depending on who you ask), is making a push to force cigarette companies to remove all their branding from their packages and sell cigarettes in plain packaging only.

Australia has already taken this step, and New Zealand is the other country considering it. Australia was sued by several tobacco companies but ultimately, the Australian Supreme Court upheld the law. Tobacco companies are fighting New Zealand’s law, too, so Ireland can be assured that if they try a similar law, they will be taken to court.

(I’m guessing that because of the First Amendment, a similar law would likely not be upheld in the U.S.)

At this point, the legislation has passed the Irish Cabinet. Leading the cause in Ireland is Dr. James Reilly, the Irish Minister of Health and an ardent tobacco opponent. He wants to get the Irish smoking rate under 5 percent by 2025 (currently, it is at 22 percent).

The thought behind the plain packaging is that each cigarette package is a miniature advertisement for their product. If you remove the packaging logos, then you will no longer have ubiquitous advertising for that product every time someone remove a pack of cigarettes out of their pocket.

Not an outrageous concept, because really, what cigarette company do you think of when you see this to the left? logo_marlboro-box_usa-1 See you already know what the brand is, even without the brand name in the logo. The logo has become that recognizable.

Dr. Reilly says:

The introduction of standardised packaging will remove the final way for tobacco companies to promote their deadly product in Ireland. Cigarette packets will no longer be a mobile advertisement for the tobacco industry.”

British American Tobacco, obviously opposed, responds that there’s no evidence plain packaging would lower smoking rates and that it would just play into the hands of black marketeers, who could sell any tobacco product in any box, without anyone knowing the wiser:

“There is no credible evidence that plain packaging will work in terms of stopping children taking up smoking or encouraging current smokers to quit,” the firm said.

“Instead, Minister Reilly’s plain packaging bill will simply play into the hands of the criminals who are ready and waiting to supply people, regardless of their age, with cheap tobacco products.”

I have no idea if removing branding will decrease smoking and is an effective tactic toward combating smoking. Somewhat on the fence on this, but I find it an interesting debate.

 

 

Great article comparing today’s e-cig ads to vintage cigarette ads

1933-v-2012-e-cigarette-ads-can-target-the-free-flowing-disposable-income-of-the-crucial-nightlife-crowd

This is a point I’ve been making for weeks now. E-cig companies are making their ads almost identical to cigarette ads from 40 and 50 years ago, using sex and sophistication to sell their products.

Business Insider came up with a feature showing the amazing similarity between today’s e-cig ads and vintage cigarette ads. The problem with this? Tobacco companies are on record using sex, sophistication and even cartoon characters with the expressed purpose of marketing those cigarettes to teens (or, what the industry liked to call “new smokers.”)

It’s no secret e-cig use has been growing exponentially the last couple of years, and in particular, it’s becoming increasingly popular with kids. One of the reasons for the use of e-cig among kids is that until now, it’s been legal to sell e-cigs and e-cig products to kids, so it’s a lot less hassle for kids to get their hands on them than cigarettes (and ultimately much cheaper, too).

It wouldn’t be that big of a deal except e-cigs contain nicotine and as we all know, nicotine is one of the most physically addictive products on Earth, so the e-cig companies can act all innocent, but they know damn well kids are buying their product and their product will addict kids to nicotine.

Anyway, here is the gallery from Business Insider with these amazing comparisons.

 

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Baseball stars who endorsed tobacco products — a lot of them died young

Roger Maris
Roger Maris died of cancer at 50

Again, another idea from Haruko.

She showed me an ad with Stan Musial, Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams advertising cigarettes and I got the bright idea to see how many ads there had been with baseball stars hawking tobacco products.

And when I looked, I said, “WHOA!”

I found dozens upon dozens upon dozens of ads going all the way back to the early 1900s. I was really shocked. I had never seen these ads before. I knew full well that tobacco companies had used many, many movie stars over the years to sell cigarettes, but I wasn’t aware of all the baseball ads.

The first ad that popped up hit me like a ton of bricks — Roger Maris. Roger Maris, as we all know, smoked five packs a day to deal with the stress of going after Babe Ruth’s home run record. He also died at the age of 50 from cancer. (Strangely enough, his family has always been fiercely private about what exactly Maris died of. There’s been varying reports that he died either of head and neck cancer, lung cancer, lymph gland cancer or lymphoma; I’ve found articles saying all four. The family has always been reticent to discuss it and the story seems to have changed at times about what exact kind of cancer he had. All I can think of is they don’t want people saying, “Well, Maris did it to himself.” Anyway, I digress. He died of cancer. At the age of 50.)

Maris also had a fairly short career. He was basically done at 30 and completely out of baseball at 33. I’ve always wondered if his heavy smoking habit helped break his body down so quickly. It definitely couldn’t have helped.

Babe Ruth died of throat cancer at 53
Babe Ruth died of throat cancer at 53

Another ad that jumped out of me was Babe Ruth endorsing Old Gold. He was a smoker and chewer who died of throat cancer at 53. There’s more. DiMaggio was in a ton of cigarette ads. And while he lived into his 80s, he died of lung disease (likely COPD). Another one that jumped out at me — Jackie Robinson, who died at 52 of diabetes (and it’s known today, not then, that smoking is a risk factor for diabetes).

Another tobacco ad featured Harry Heilmann, a very good hitter in the 1920s. He died of lung cancer at the age of 56. Another chew ad featured Nellie Fox, a Hall of Famer who died at 47 of melanoma.

Anyway, here is a slideshow of these old baseball tobacco ads:

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“Rush” and the history of tobacco advertising in racing

Haruko and Chris Hemsworth
Haruko and James Hunt

 

We were watching Haruko’s new favourite movie, “Rush,” the other night and of course my one track mind got stuck on how James Hunt’s 1976 McClaren was splashed with advertising for Marlboro.

It got me thinking, that 1) Would the constant advertising for Marlboro make Rush an R-rated movie, or does this advertising fall into this vague category of “historical accuracy,” that allows some tobacco use and images in films (Somewhat of a mute question since Rush had enough sex and F-bombs to garner an R-rating anyway, but I did wonder.)

Secondly, I wondered if tobacco companies still advertise through automobile racing?

The short answer is apparently not, though I’m not a NASCAR fan and I wouldn’t have a clue if there’s still a Skoal car out there. But, according to Wikipedia , which had a pretty detailed entry about tobacco advertising and car racing, “tobacco was all but out of North American motorsport by 2013.” Tobacco advertising died out for two reasons — the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement forbid certain kinds of tobacco advertising (this apparently mostly affected IndyCar racing), and a number of countries around the world started forbidding tobacco advertising on cars.

According to Wikipedia, tobacco advertising was last used on vehicles in Formula One in 2008. A number of countries outright forbid tobacco advertising on vehicles. Marlboro still sponsored a Formula One team up until 2011, and while they couldn’t splash “Marlboro” on the car, the car was still painted Marlboro red and white.

Formula One World Championship
James Hunt’s McClaren M23 Marlboro car

Tobacco advertising in car racing used to be HUGE … remember the NASCAR championship was called the Winston Cup for many years … that didn’t stand for Winston, North Carolina, it stood for Winston cigarettes. It began slowly in the late 1960s, and as tobacco advertising was banned on television in the early 70, tobacco companies needed another outlet to advertise their products — so they poured millions of dollars into car racing in the U.S. and around the world. By the mid 70s, tobacco advertising was all over Formula One, Indy Car Racing and NASCAR. Not only were cigarettes advertised at races and on cars, but smokeless tobacco, too like Skoal and RedMan.

Hunt’s Marlboro McClaren was an iconic car in racing history. (As an aside, Hunt was a heavy smoker and died of a heart attack at 45. His use of cocaine may have contributed to his heart attack, as well.). Niki Lauda even drove a Marlboro McClaren after Hunt retired.

One thing that is interesting is there’s been at least two cars that have advertised Nicorette and Blu E-cigs. Products to help people quit smoking are getting into the racing racket.

Haruko’s review of “Rush.”

Rush is a surprisingly good and extremely exciting movie from Ron Howard. It was very surprising to me that this movie didn’t make that much money (only $27 million in the U.S. and $90 million worldwide — some Marvel movies make that much in a weekend) and didn’t garner more Oscar buzz. The movie is really that good and seemed to somehow fly under the radar last year. It’s simply the best car racing movie I’ve ever seen.

I think the movie got overlooked a bit because Ron Howard is still not taken that seriously by film critics. Like Steven Spielberg, he has a reputation for making good (and commercially successful), but not great movies, so I think a lot of film intelligentsia has a hard time giving him his due when he makes a genuinely great film like “Rush.”

Hunt and Lauda
Hunt and Lauda

Rush tells the story of 70s Formula One racers James Hunt and Niki Lauda and their rivalry. The movie remains pretty true to life, even copying some of the play-by-play announcers  from the 1970s. The one thing the movie embellished was the relationship between Hunt and Lauda. In the film, they hate each other, but become friends after a horrible accident to Lauda. In real life, they were always friends. Hyper-competitive rivals, but friends nonetheless. They didn’t hate each other, they just hated losing to each other.

What I loved most about this movie is that unlike a lot of movies made today, most of the driving scenes are for real, with real cameras placed strategically on the cars, instead of CGI cars. A couple of the accidents are obviously CGI (like one scene in which a vehicle flips in the air over Lauda’s head), but it’s done so well, it doesn’t look fake. Too many movies today rely on CGI technology, rather than going to the trouble of getting difficult shots. I was blown away by the racing scenes and wished I had seen them in the theatre. Real ’70s vintage cars, real footage, real stunt drivers. The lack of CGI really gives “Rush” a very 1970s feel. I honestly felt like I was watching a 40-year-old movie.

I was also surprised at the language and sex in a Ron Howard film (again, making it feel like a 70s movie, yeah, movies had a lot more sex in the 1970s.). This is very much an R-rated film (perhaps another reason why it didn’t do that great at the box office.)

I really hope this film becomes a cult classic on DVD like a lot of films that kind of got missed at the box office, like Big Lebowski or Apocalypse Now.

Photo gallery:

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What? — Oh you cannot be serious — Santa used to sell e-cigs

2013_12_17_santa_01

I take back everything even remotely uncritical I might have said about e-cigs in previous posts. Watch these guys and watch their advertising.

This is really despicable. I mean, c’mon, really? A billboard in Florida advertising e-cigs using Santa as an icon to sell their product.

Santa hasn’t been used to sell cigarettes for more than 50 years. Even the tobacco industry, in all its venality, eventually realized that was just simply too evil.

But, some e-cig company didn’t see a problem with it. And this isn’t from 1955, this is from last month.

I’m reminded of the sexy ads used to sell e-cigs, especially the ones with Stephen Dorff. I mentioned a few days ago e-cig companies are using the same techniques that cigarette companies used for 100 years to sell their products — trying to make their products look sexy, suave and sophisticated. Now, whoever came up with this brainstorm just looks like an idiot, like the people who used babies and Santa Claus to sell cigarettes 60 years ago.