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Youth: Long a Focus in Tobacco Debate

By John Schwartz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 15, 1998; Page A19

As tobacco has muscled its way to the forefront of American policy debates, much of the discussion has focused on underage smoking and how to stop it. That's why the new cache of documents from the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. could have a profound impact across the tobacco battlefield.

The emphasis on youth is based on solid research. The average smoker takes that first tentative puff at 14, and nearly 90 percent of smokers begin before the age of 18. Those who who made it to adulthood without smoking, studies suggested, were unlikely to take up the habit later in life.

When the Food and Drug Administration announced its proposal to regulate tobacco products in 1995, then-Commissioner David A. Kessler called smoking a "pediatric disease." Keep young people from smoking, Kessler said, and you might gradually reduce the awesome toll of more than 400,000 tobacco-related deaths per year, more deaths than those caused by drinking, drugs, AIDS, auto accidents and suicide combined.

For anti-tobacco forces, fighting underage smoking has also been smart politics. Talking about children and teenagers was the safest approach to taking on the powerful tobacco industry. And restricting youth access to tobacco products did not necessarily conflict with the right of adults to make their own choice to smoke. Polling for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 1994 found that a large majority of Americans supported regulation aimed at youth smoking, even in tobacco states.

The nation's largest tobacco companies, for their part, have joined in the campaign, insisting that they don't want minors to smoke and adamantly denying charges by Kessler and anti-smoking activists that they deliberately target younger smokers. That position may now be be seriously undermined.

"The release of the Joe Camel documents proves what we knew all along: that the Joe Camel campaign was an illegal and unethical effort to get children to smoke," said Louise Renne, the San Francisco city attorney and one of the plaintiffs in the case that brought the new documents to light.

Youth smoking was the subject of the 1994 report of the surgeon general, and prompted the dramatic moment in May 1994 when seven tobacco company chiefs declared under oath before a congressional committee that they did not market to children and did not believe that nicotine is addictive or that their products cause disease.

"The law has always accepted the idea that kids are not of a sufficient age -- until they're 18 -- to make a legally binding choice," said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), one of the most vocal opponents of the industry in Congress and a longtime critic of tobacco advertising. Like age restrictions on drinking and driving, Waxman said, it's appropriate to keep young people out of danger until they are capable of making an informed choice.

The FDA isn't the only agency taking up the call to protect children from tobacco. The Federal Trade Commission too charged that RJR used its Joe Camel advertising to hook children illegally. Last May, the agency charged that the Joe Camel campaign violates federal law because the company knew, or should have known, that the campaign would lure minors into the habit.

Even though RJR subsequently withdrew the Joe Camel ad campaign, the case is still underway, said Jodie Bernstein, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. The documents released yesterday, she said, "are the types of documents that underscore the importance of our case."

The Justice Department also has made industry advertising practices part of its three-year investigation of tobacco companies. Just last week the department announced criminal charges against a biotechnology company that worked with the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. to develop a high-nicotine tobacco plant; sources familiar with the investigation said it is also looking at whether the companies misled Congress and federal regulatory agencies about whether they market to children. The Justice Department has seen the new papers, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Many public health groups have made underage smoking a key anti-tobacco strategy; when a coalition of public health groups came together in 1995 to push for FDA regulation of the industry to combat the tobacco industry, it called itself the National Center for Tobacco-Free Kids.

Bringing down youth smoking rates is a central theme of the proposed $368.5 billion national settlement between the industry and the states and many private attorneys suing it; Congress will take up legislation based to some extent on that agreement in coming months.

The industry has repeatedly said that it does not want people to smoke before the legal age. When the FTC first took on the tobacco industry in the mid-1960s with its efforts to put warning labels on cigarettes, the companies responded with a voluntary cigarette advertising code.

"The main purpose of the new code was to blunt the charge that the industry was massively seducing minors to take up smoking at an age when they were indifferent to the possible ultimate consequences of the step," wrote Richard Kluger in his exhaustive tobacco history, "Ashes to Ashes."

The code included bans on advertising in youth publications such as comic books, school newspapers and broadcast programs "directed primarily to persons" under the age of 21. It also included a provision prohibiting any ads or statements "that smoking is essential to social prominence, distinction, success or sexual attraction." The code allowed attractive models, but none who looked younger than 25 and so long as "there is no suggestion that their attractive appearance or good health is due to cigarette smoking."

Although some ads were stopped, for the most part the same happy, active people continued to grace the cigarette ads, and the effort was largely viewed as a smoke screen that allowed the industry to advertise as it wanted while proclaiming its adherence to lofty ideals.

Concern about children has even played a role among those within the industry who have turned against it. In an interview last year, Bennett S. LeBow, the head of Liggett Group Inc., said one incident contributed to his decision to settle with states suing the industry and to turn over internal industry documents. He said that a 7-year-old grandson had asked him, "Pop-pop, what business are you in?" and he responded that he made cigarettes.

"You mean like Joe Camel?" the child responded.