‘Emphysema Slims’ : Doctors Attack Smoking With Ridicule

A doctors’ group is successfully chipping away at the tobacco industry with a biting campaign aimed at convincing youth that smoking is ridiculous, a national convention of family physicians has been told.

“If I can show that instead of making you look glamorous, smoking actually makes you look like an idiot--that you burn holes in your clothes, you smell, you have zoo breath, you have yellow teeth--then I have a chance” to persuade youths not to smoke, Dr. John W. Richards said.

Speaking before the American Academy of Family Physicians last week, Richards said Advertisements promoting cigarettes and other unhealthy products are “cannibalizing our young people.”

‘Barfboros, Wimpstons’

Richards’ 5,000-member organization, Doctors Ought to Care (DOC), created posters, T-shirts and billboard messages that mockingly promote “Barfboros,” “Wimpstons” and “Emphysema Slims”--”You’ve coughed up long enough, baby.”

Richards told about 1,000 people at the annual convention that trying to educate youths about health doesn’t work, and statistics are boring to them.

Americans are bombarded by a cigarette ad about once every five minutes during their waking hours, and physicians should all join in the effort to turn the tables on Madison Avenue, he said.

“If I can show that instead of making you look macho, smoking actually causes impotence, which it does, then I might have a chance,” Richards added.

Alcohol, Drugs Opposed

In addition to being president of DOC, Richards is an assistant professor of family medicine at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta. DOC was founded in 1978 by Dr. Alan Blum of the same college, who remains chairman and is at the convention.

The doctors’ organization also takes on products and ads that promote drinking and drug use. It turned the slogan “Miller Time” into “Killer Time,” and has a billboard depicting a boat submerging alongside the words “Cutty Sank--People, like ships, sail better when they’re not loaded.” Another ad says: “VD: The gift that keeps on giving.”

But its primary objective is to ridicule, satirize and parody the healthy, adventurous image projected by cigarette makers.

Names Parodied

To DOC, Benson & Hedges is “Benson and Heart Attack,” country fresh Salem is “Country Fresh Arsenic,” “More” is “More-on,” and Virginia Slims became “Emphysema Slims” or “Virginia Slime.”

“Red Man” chewing tobacco became “Dead Man Chew,” and the ad “I smoke for taste” was transformed into “I smoke for smell,” showing a pinup poster man with a cigarette up his nose.

Richards said the group’s effectiveness is hard to measure, although he noted that cigarette use is down considerably in the last decade. But he said the unusual billboards never fail to grab motorists’ attention: “We just count the skid marks” to find out how much they are noticed.

How to Say No

“We should take advantage of every available opportunity to get the (health) message across; we can’t just wait for them to come to the doctor’s office,” he said. “ ‘Say no to drugs’ is great, but we don’t teach them how to say no.”

He urged physicians to:

- Put a sticker on the covers of magazines in their waiting room saying they disagree with the implication in some ads that cigarettes are glamorous, and that they do make a person “sick, poor and dead.”

- Have a health fair.

- Write letters to the editor of their local newspaper.

- Conduct sporting events with tongue-in-cheek names such as the previously held “No Tar Fun Run,” “Emphysema Slims Celebrity-Professional Tennis Championship,” “Disad-Vantage Golf Tournament.”

“As family physicians, we are the right people to be fighting for the health of these young people against those who would put profit above their suffering,” Richards said.

“Make no mistake about it--tobacco, alcohol, other drug use and the problems of teen-age sexual activity are diseases, they are not moral issues.”