When Ads Leave a Bad Aftertaste

One secret of success in business is to identify a niche where a new product might find acceptance and to move aggressively to market it. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. hoped it could do just that with a new cigarette called Uptown which, it freely admits, was to be aimed specifically at black consumers. Reynolds was preparing to test market the cigarette next month in Philadelphia’s large black community.

Those plans have now been canceled. Credit local protests for that. Most of all, credit Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, secretary of health and human services, who denounced Reynolds for “promoting a culture of cancer.” While the tobacco company was within its rights to make the marketing pitch, Secretary Sullivan was right to raise the overriding health issue.

“Uptown’s message,” said the nation’s highest health official, “is more disease, more suffering and more death for a group already bearing more than its share of smoking-related illness and mortality.” The reference is to the unhappy evidence that smoking is not only falling off more slowly among blacks than among whites, but that among younger and poorer blacks it is increasing.

Reynolds has cried foul, arguing that its product was unfairly singled out for attention and condemnation. The company has a point. All cigarette promotion, after all, aims either at creating new users or simply enticing those already gripped by a life-threatening habit to change brands. What is really at issue here are the deadly and enormously costly human and societal consequences of tobacco addiction, without reference to particular brands or particular communities.

Dr. Sullivan’s denunciation and warning about tobacco’s terrible toll, on all smokers no matter what race, can’t be repeated often enough.