Smoke Signals : ACTIVISTS SOUND AN ALARM ABOUT YOUR WOMEN, MEDIA IMAGES AND TOBACCO

In the next few years, Lisa, a 17-year-old high school junior, will confront a series of milestones. In four years, she’ll be able to walk into a bar and drink. In just a year, she’ll be able to vote. And when she reaches that magic age of 18, Lisa will also be able to buy cigarettes legally.

Of course, that particular rite of passage doesn’t mean much--Lisa’s been smoking since she was 12.

“I know how terrible it is,” she says emphatically. “I saw on some (TV) show all the stuff they put in it. It’s terrible. They’re death sticks.”

But the looming possibility of chronic heart and lung disease is not enough to get Lisa, who asked that her real name not be used, to stop. Nor is the fact that her grandfather is in the hospital dying of lung cancer. Or that her father--a surgeon--offered her $10,000 to quit.

Says Lisa: “You can’t quit till you’re ready.”

Lisa’s habit is shared by hundreds of thousands of girls nationwide who are spending their pre-adult years up in smoke. And that is alarming anti-smoking groups who don’t want to see girls--and young women--succumb to pressure from tobacco companies, media images or their peers.

The anti-smoking camp sees red flags everywhere. One recent research report revealed that teen-age smoking in general is on the rise. Another found a link between cigarette advertising and smoking among teen-age girls. And still another suggests that women are more susceptible to lung cancer than men.

Watch-dog groups complain about recent portrayals of smoking in a variety of media. The already besieged Camel ad campaign, featuring the cartoon character Joe Camel, has come under more fire for featuring female Camels for the first time. Ads with beautiful, slim models touting thin cigarettes remain a focus of criticism.

Even the popular movie “Reality Bites” has become a target because its young heroine, played by Winona Ryder, is a smoker.

Of course, teen-age girls and young women aren’t the only concerns of health officials and anti-smoking camps--they’re concerned about everyone who might be susceptible to positive images of smoking.

But they are worried that when it comes to young women, tobacco companies are becoming more savvy about which buttons to push. And advertising, together with other influences, can make for a potent lure.

“I think the powerful themes that the (tobacco) industry has used have been women’s liberation, empowerment and the whole appeal to thinness,” says research scientist Lloyd Johnston of the University of Michigan, who led a study of drug and tobacco use among high schoolers.

“Most of the women’s cigarettes are long and thin, the packs are long and thin, and the models are exceptionally long and thin. . . . Clearly there are different messages sent to the two sexes. For women, it’s thinness and elegance and being liberated. For males, it’s much more the macho or cool kind of image, self-contained, like the Marlboro man.”

The issue of young people and smoking has long fueled a volatile debate between anti-smokers and the tobacco companies.

“This is the first Camel ad that has these camel-ish-looking twiggy women cavorting in a nightclub, where the whole theme is ‘Light Up the Night,’ ” says Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, the Ralph Nader-founded medical watchdog organization. “The idea is to lure young, impressionable teen-agers who want to look sexy and be socially accepted, and this is just the ticket for them.”

The tobacco companies deny the allegations.

“(We) developed this campaign to change what had become adults’ perception that Camel was a tired, old brand that their grandfather smoked,” says Peggy Carter, a spokeswoman for R.J. Reynolds, manufacturers of Camels. “We have, as with any ad campaign, tried to stay fresh with the audience to whom it’s directed, which in our case is adult smokers.”

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Clare van de Mark, 15, started out as a “social smoker,” having an occasional cigarette with friends.

“Then I just started smoking whenever. It wasn’t like peer pressure. I was around it so much, it just grows on you.

“My friends didn’t even want me to start smoking,” says the 10th-grader, who describes herself as a B-average student and “serious about my education.”

“When I’d ask my (older) friends to buy me cigarettes they’d say, ‘You’re too young to smoke.’ But it was OK if they smoked. They were kind of protective.

“One of my friends quit and that was fine,” adds Clare, who lives in the San Fernando Valley. “We all supported her, it was no big deal.

“It’s not even cool anymore,” she admits. “It’s looked down upon in society. It’s not even trendy anymore.”

But smoking does seem to be picking up among high schoolers, according to a 1994 report from the University of Michigan. Scientists, led by Lloyd Johnston at the school’s Institute for Social Research, found that although smoking rates had been steady for nearly a decade, they’ve increased about 2% in the past year for high school students.

Says Johnston: “I do think that the massive ads for cigarettes are effective in getting young people to start smoking.”

And even if most young women’s magazines, such as Seventeen and Sassy, don’t carry tobacco ads, he says, teen-agers will see them while looking through Mademoiselle, Vogue and Cosmo.

A strong link between cigarette smoking and advertising was recently reported in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. Researchers found that about 1967, there was a marked increase in girls 17 and younger starting to smoke--the same time cigarette ads targeted to women began to appear. The numbers peaked about 1973, declining as information about the harmful effects of smoking was pumped at the masses. But the study is considered significant for discovering a correlation between gender-specific ads and smoking.

The tobacco companies have long denied that they’re chasing after the youth market. They cite statistics saying that advertising doesn’t encourage teen-agers to start smoking, such as a 1992 Journal of School Health report stating that the major reasons for 10th-graders beginning to smoke were curiosity, social norms and peer pressure--not advertising.

Says Carter of R.J. Reynolds: “To direct (the Joe Camel campaign) at a youth market would indeed be the dumbest thing we could do.”

Says Karen Daragan of Philip Morris, makers of Virginia Slims, “Not only do we not market toward teens, but advertising and promotion is not effective in influencing people to smoke. It can help people choose a brand if they already smoke, and it can enhance brand recognition.”

But what about such brands as Virginia Slims, Capri and Misty that use powerful images of young, thin, attractive, vibrant women? An ad for Capri Ultra Lights says they’re “the super slim that’s surprisingly rich.” And Misty cigarettes are “fashionably inexpensive.”

Tobacco company marketing campaigns go beyond selling cigarettes. Virginia Slims has its V-Wear catalogue of chic clothes (leather jackets, vests) that can be bought only with proofs-of-purchase (Daragan says the items are available to smokers 21 or older, and participants must sign a form stating that). The brand also sponsors tennis tournaments.

Linda Sarna, a registered nurse and assistant professor at UCLA’s School of Nursing, takes these ads to task for emphasizing glamour and slimness.

The images become “insidious. It’s part of the fabric of our society and it’s difficult to escape.”

And it doesn’t help, she adds, that many young women view smoking as a way to stay thin and fear that if they stop, they’ll gain an enormous amount of weight.

“I see the public’s general thinking is that the lower weight is a better health advantage than not smoking.”

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For Lisa, who smokes Marlboros, cigarette ads are “just another page in the magazine.”

“I saw another thing on TV about how Camel cigarettes are attractive to teens . . . maybe that’s true for younger kids, but not for my friends.”

Since she started smoking, she has found few obstacles in buying cigarettes from neighborhood liquor and convenience stores.

“We had this 18-year-old live-in baby-sitter from Australia. She smoked, and I thought she was the coolest thing--I even dressed like her. One day I asked her for a cigarette--she just gave it to me. I used to sneak into her room to smoke. She left a year later, and by that time I was smoking.”

Lisa’s father “flipped out” when Lisa told him. “My mother, who smokes occasionally, didn’t believe me until I pulled out a pack of cigarettes from my purse and smoked it. She goes, ‘Oh my God,’ and that’s all she really said.”

But her parents still encourage her to stop--witness the ten grand cash offer.

“I know what happens from smoking,” says Lisa, who lives in Los Angeles. “My dad has taken me to the hospital and shown me pictures of lungs from people who have smoked. And I saw my grandfather in the hospital hooked up to all these machines. But the only time I see myself quitting is when I plan to have children, and that’s not going to be for a while. I’m addicted.”

And that’s why anti-smoking groups aren’t just attacking advertising. They are also scrutinizing smoking on television and in movies. Their latest target is the film “Reality Bites”--specifically, the Winona Ryder character, a new college grad and neophyte video director who smokes up a storm throughout the film.

“Let’s think about the larger message,” says Susan Swimmer, fitness, food and features editor of Seventeen magazine. “I’m in no way suggesting some form of censorship, but I think those of us who are sending a larger message have a responsibility. She could have smoked five cigarettes (Swimmer counted 15 smoking scenes). I think they went a little overboard. I’m not saying smokers don’t exist, but it would be as believable to not have them smoke. That was the choice they made, and I think it was the wrong choice.”

Time magazine said of the film: “Winona Ryder in ‘Reality Bites’ showed that among Generation X, smoking is cool.”

The film’s screenwriter, Helen Childress, takes exception to that.

“I thought something like this might happen,” says Childress, who wrote the movie while a student at USC a few years ago. “I thought people might get a little put off by that character trait. (She says that Ryder herself doesn’t smoke.) That’s kind of the reality, though. Half the people I know do smoke, and it’s not that big of a deal. It’s like, no one cares. . . . I wasn’t doing it to make her cool or a bad role model. It was just because I smoke when I write, and I just put that in. I was making an honest documentation of what was going on around me.

“I know smoking’s bad, and hey--I want to quit,” she adds. “I certainly wasn’t trying to win over smokers.”

If they tune out advertising, both Clare and Lisa are keenly aware of the much-publicized health risks that go along with smoking.

Clare says her mother made her write a four-page report on the effects of smoking. Although she calls the project “a very big pain in the butt,” she did learn about links between smoking, cancer and heart disease; the effects of secondhand smoke, and about additives in cigarettes.

“It freaked me out,” she says, “and it did make me think about quitting because it made me sad about what may happen later on. I know I’m not going to smoke when I get married, and when I have kids, I’m definitely quitting. . . . When I first started smoking, I got bronchitis and I quit for a month after that. But I haven’t been sick at all this past year. My friends and I are really healthy, we eat well, take vitamins, and smoking is the one thing we do to ourselves that’s bad.”

But it’s difficult for Clare to focus on the distant future.

“When you read about something like (cancer), you don’t really apply it to yourself. This is going to happen to another person, and it’s hard for me to think about getting lung cancer and dying of it. You can’t live in paranoid fear of cancer--we do live in L.A. and we have smog. . . .

“I don’t plan on smoking for the rest of my life, just until I get sick of it. Maybe that’s unrealistic, but it works for me.”

UCLA’s Sarna would like young women to think about the future--long and hard.

“There’s a lot of attention in the media on breast cancer, which is well-deserved,” she says, “but (in recent years) lung cancer has become the No. 1 cause of cancer-related deaths in women. If you look at the current health publications for women, you’ll find there’s almost nothing about the negative effects of smoking or about lung cancer. If they do, they’ll talk about fetal risk--but most women are not pregnant most of the time.”

Women may even be more susceptible to lung cancer than men, according to a recent report out of the Yale University Medical Center.

Dr. Harvey Risch found that men who smoked about a pack of cigarettes a day for about 40 years had a risk of contracting lung cancer that was nine times higher than the rate of male nonsmokers. But female smokers’ risk was 27 times the rate of female nonsmokers.

The reasons are inconclusive, although Risch speculates that a woman’s disadvantage might be her slightly smaller lung capacity.

“I used to be a cross-country runner,” Lisa says. “I could run a pretty good mile in about six or seven minutes. At the end of last year I tried it--no way. It took me about 10 minutes. I have chronic bronchitis, and of course, it’s directly from smoking. It does scare me. But I smoke more than the times I really think about it.”