Smoking's cool image remains a puzzle for health crusaders

LONDON (Reuters) -- Smokers have good reason to feel like outcasts after last month's $145 billion damage award against U.S. tobacco companies, government threats to ban cigarette advertising and mounting data on the health risks of smoking.

Walk past any office building in Britain or the United States where lighting up in public places is frowned upon and you can see a huddle of outlawed smokers taking a quick puff.

But even as overall smoking rates decline in Western countries, public health campaigners face the perplexing reality that far from being a furtive activity, smoking remains irredeemably cool, among people in their 20s at least.

The British Medical Journal recently added grist to the mill of arguments for further clampdowns on cigarette promotion when it published industry papers that explained, in executives' own words, the inner workings of tobacco marketing.

Advertising agencies deliberately encourage young people to smoke and do so without ethical qualms, said the report's author, Gerard Hastings, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland.

"Young people don't smoke tobacco, they smoke an image, an idea," said Hastings, who reviewed briefs and market research from five advertising agencies dating back to 1995.

"They tap into the idea that smoking is cool and get a direct line into what's really important to a 16-year-old. By contrast, public health people have to come along with a rather tedious message, which is finger-wagging and under-resourced."

Official British statistics show that in 1998 smoking was more prevalent among 20- to 24-year-olds than other age group. Over time, smoking has remained more popular among poorer and less well-educated people.

Across western Europe, women between 18 and 35 have driven an overall 3.1 percent rise in cigarette consumption since 1995, according to a report by market analysts Euromonitor.

"The decline in smoking has been heavily concentrated in older age groups, reflecting the fact that almost as many young people are taking up smoking but more established smokers are quitting," Euromonitor said.

New research this month from Sir Richard Doll, the doctor who first identified a link between smoking and lung cancer in Britain in 1950, showed that giving up has halved the number of British lung cancer deaths and started a similar U.S. trend.

Doll and Professor Richard Peto of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund warned that 1 billion people would die from smoking this century if current trends continued, far worse than previously thought.

Regulators are picking up the triumphalist mood of litigation against the U.S. tobacco industry and getting tougher on cigarette makers. A global treaty planned by the World Health Organization would crack down further on tobacco promotion.

British American Tobacco chairman Martin Broughton said last week that the company was confident of overturning the ruling against it that formed part of the $145 billion damages verdict of the Engle smoking lawsuit in July.

But, in line with tobacco company arguments that too strict regulation is an infringement of individual liberty, the BAT chief condemned health officials for being taken over by "zealots" who blocked dialogue with tobacco producers.

At Philip Morris as well, David Davies, EU vice president for Philip Morris International, told Reuters, "We will support regulation that recognizes that informed adults should be free to make informed choices about tobacco."

Even for a very heavy ex-smoker like Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who wrote about smoking in the Guardian newspaper last month, anti-tobacco attitudes threaten civil liberties.

He wrote: "It is impossible not to feel a certain civic solidarity with the smokers, who are in many ways treated as second-class citizens, prohibited from practicing their addiction in most public places, burdened with guilt, and aware of their pitiful condition, like the lepers of the Middle Ages."

A new cultural interpretation of smoking in Britain offers little comfort to those who wish smoking would go away, or could be banned by rule of law.

Even if tobacco companies had not poured money into promoting their brands or anti-smoking lobbyists had not counterattacked, Britons would still have smoked, says the author of "Smoking in British popular culture 1800-2000."

From the pensive pipe of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes to the macho cigarette of movie star Humphrey Bogart, images of tobacco are deeply ingrained in the culture, according to author Matthew Hilton.

"Smoking has always been incredibly important to our identity, but it's double-edged. The more smoking is attacked, the more important it will become to that identity as well," said Hilton, a lecturer in social history at Birmingham University in the English Midlands.

Hilton noted that some recent public health messages had begun to treat the decision to smoke or not as a matter of lifestyle choice. "'Non-smoking' must be just as cool an individual means of self-expression as smoking," he said.

"The rational decision one has to make not to smoke is becoming interesting and seems to be tied to a period of life. Now you get people who smoke from their late teenage years, educated people who get jobs as professionals. These are the people most likely to give up in their 30s."

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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