Tobacco Has Dead Aim on Latinos : Health: ‘Slick and sinister’ ad campaigns targeted to minorities are taking a heavy toll. Cigarette smoking is high among youth. And cancer rates show substantial increases.

If things had gone as anticipated, this week the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. would be test-marketing a new--and now infamous--product: Uptown cigarettes. If things had gone as planned, African Americans would once again be targeted as potential addicts to a cigarette designed to have special appeal to them.

But things didn’t work out the way they were supposed to.

R.J. Reynolds’ plans went awry when the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Louis W. Sullivan, courageously and passionately took a stand agains the company’s “slick and sinister” advertising campaign “promoting a culture of cancer.” Within days of Sullivan’s bold denouncement, the plan to test-market Uptown was withdrawn.

Sullivan deserves our active support as he continues his effort to cultivate greater responsibility among our corporate citizens. For too long, we have stood by in silence while cigarette companies mounted “slick and sinister” ad campaigns to encourage minorities to buy, smoke and become addicted to cigarettes. For too long, and at numbers that are growing too fast, too many African Americans, Latino Americans, Native Americans have suffered serious illness or death because of cigarettes.

Though tobacco firms deny it, a drive through a black or Latino neighborhood or a glance through a black or Latino publication makes clear a simple fact: For years, cigarette companies have targeted minorities as the “new smokers”--the smokers who will replace the millions of Americans who have kicked the habit.

Despite what seems obvious in the proliferation of billboards and slick magazine ads, little outcry was heard when Rio, Dorado and L & M Superior cigarettes were introduced in the Latino market years ago. And little is being said now. Yet they were doing exactly what Uptown was designed to do: appeal to a largely low-income minority group already over-burdened with health problems.

One measure of the cigarette companies’ effectiveness is the soaring cancer rate among Latinos, who historically had rates far lower than non-Latinos. That is no longer the case. Today, in some Latino communities the incidence of lung cancer approaches, and sometimes exceeds, the rate in the white population.

The Colorado Tumor Registry reported a 32% increase in lung cancer among Latino men between 1970 and 1980, compared to a 12% increase among white men. In my home state of New Mexico, deaths caused by lung cancer nearly tripled for Latino men from 1958 to 1982, while doubling among non-Latinos.

Every year, nearly 390,000 Americans die as a result of smoking. In 1985, one in every six deaths in this country was caused by cigarettes. Unfortunately, the worst is yet to come. Because there typically is a 20-year incubation period between the onset of smoking and the development of cancer, during the next 20 years we must brace ourselves for even higher cancer rates in minority populations--and many thousands more deaths.

We simply cannot stand idly by and watch this happen. We must work with Secretary Sullivan to counter the onslaught of advertising aimed at minorities, and in particular, advertising targeted at Latinos, the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population.

We need to do a better job of convincing Latino children of the dangers of smoking. A Los Angeles school study, “Know Your Body,” reported that 13.1% of Latino fourth- and fifth-graders said that they had smoked a cigarette, compared to 9.3% of black students and 6.7% of whites. Among the girls, more Latinas smoked than did blacks or whites. Another study, conducted in the early 1980s, reported that 28% of Mexican-American youths smoked, compared to 19.1% of whites and 15.2% of blacks. We need to ensure that all of our children get the message that smoking isn’t cool or glamorous--it’s deadly.

We can begin by countering the cigarette companies’ marketing strategy. Over the years, public-service announcements and educational materials have been geared toward white, upper-middle-class Americans. The declining number of smokers--from a high of 54% in the mid-1950s to 32% in 1987--proves that the anti-smoking messages are effective. We must now devote more time, attention and resources toward encouraging Latinos of all ages to kick the habit.

Countering the cigarette companies’ marketing strategy will not be easy. In fact, it is almost impossible to compete with them on a dollar-for-dollar basis. In one year alone--1986--the tobacco industry’s expenditures for advertising and promotion totaled a whopping $2.4 billion. For years, tobacco companies have been among the top three advertisers in minority markets.

But we cannot let money dictate the outcome. To do so would be to condone the trade-offs between profits and good health and life.