See Through the Smoke Don’t Ban Cigarettes, Ban Cigarette Promotion; It’s Time to Throw Tobacco Out of American Sports

On television this month from Indiana, whenever Indy 500 race cars are on the track, several of the fastest will double as movable billboards for cigarettes.

That’s one way the industry bypasses a 1971 federal law prohibiting televised tobacco advertising.

Some other ways:

* At some sports events, cigarette ads are placed to catch the eye of the viewing public through the eye of the TV camera. Near scoreboards, for instance, or in other choice photo positions, tobacco signs adorn many American stadiums, ballparks and racetracks.

* In recent years, women’s tennis tournaments have been promoted by tobacco interests whose role is routinely mentioned by reporters.

* Two other prominent national motor sports groups--the stock car and drag racing associations--plug tobacco during races nearly every weekend.

All of this they do even though, for three decades, every U.S. surgeon general has identified smoking as life-threatening.

The nicotine in a cigarette is so addictive, according to a finding by the National Institutes of Health, that a drug classification for tobacco is being considered.

“Tobacco is a poison,” Joycelyn Elders, the new surgeon general, told a Washington group the other day.

A critical question: Why are so many sports people playing ball with poisoners?

The plain answer: It pays. There are nice rewards for those who will help the tobacco companies hook new enthusiasts for an addiction so overpowering, some research shows, that it is as hard to kick as heroin.

Despite an annual tobacco-related death rate of more than 400,000--by comparison with, for example, 58,000 American deaths during the whole of the Vietnam war--cigarette smoking has lost none of its appeal to the addicted.

That’s what makes effective pushers so valuable.

Thus, any sportsman or woman with a tobacco sponsorship is frequently the most valuable player on the cigarette team.

INDY: TOBACCO ROAD

Most human beings have habits they would like to end--habits as harmless, but persistent, as a craving for fudge or ice cream.

Throw in the addictive element, and, as most smokers discover, they are nailed fast.

Their addiction and its consequences--including some fatal second-hand-smoke illnesses--have finally provoked America to fight back. This year, as never before, tobacco is under siege.

City, state and federal officers have all begun handing down long-overdue no-smoking regulations or otherwise promoting smoke-free areas. And increasingly, ballpark and other stadium administrators have been insisting on smoke-free events without tobacco billboards.

That, however, doesn’t mean that the battle against tobacco has been won--or that it is turning into a rout--as some say. Far from it. Millions of Americans spent $47.5 billion on tobacco last year, when hundreds of thousands of new smokers were, as usual, recruited--most of them children.

The only difference this year is that nonsmokers are no longer sitting on their hands. There has been widespread campaigning in most states for a cigarette-free country.

That seems to have won the approval of most leaders everywhere--the major exception being a persuasive bunch in professional sports.

Even in Europe, where Formula One racing thrives and smoking is much more prevalent than in the United States, some countries prohibit cigarette advertising. Thus, when tobacco-sponsored cars race in England, Germany and France, the tobacco stickers have to come off the cars.

It is unlikely that, after a British race, a car owner could promote cigarettes on television with comments of the kind Roger Penske made in the Indianapolis winner’s circle a year ago when he told U.S. viewers, “I’m just thrilled for Marlboro.”

After winning, driver Emerson Fittipaldi said, “Marlboro is back up.”

It all helped give the Indianapolis track the look of a 1990s Tobacco Road.

A TRAP FOR CHILDREN

Surveys show that three adult smokers out of four would quit if they could. Every educated adult knows that smoking can lead to premature death.

Tell that to a kid today, though, and he’s likely to laugh at you.

Children, therefore, are a tobacco salesman’s one, great, natural constituency. And happily for cigarette manufacturers, whose most loyal customers die off every year, the sports world provides one simple, easy way to keep reaching new generations.

For, pollsters report, numerous teen-age smokers are sports fans or wanna-be athletes.

Tobacco’s increasing need for new customers was recently stated mathematically by Suzi Gates, health communications officer for the Atlanta Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“As a very conservative estimate, there were more than 418,000 smoking-attributable deaths last year,” she said.

Still, every day last year, hundreds--some say thousands--of teen-agers began experimenting with and then got hooked on cigarettes.

“Most (smokers) are hooked by the time they’re 20,” Elders said. “What’s sad is that they’re addicted before they’re old enough to have adult judgment.”

Of the kids who grow up to join the crowd of 46.3 million American smokers, a majority emerge from two groups: the undereducated and the poor.

“(Incidence of smoking) is radically down for those with one or more years of college,” Gates said. “But it’s still rising for smokers with a high school education or less. And it’s higher yet if you’re just above the poverty line.

“As a group, cigarette smoking is rising fastest among adolescents.”

And that’s what makes pushing tobacco so unreservedly shameful for athletes, or for sports organizations or others in sports.

“The tobacco companies are focusing on two markets now,” Gates said. “Youth and international.”

The Joe Camel campaign, she said, adds up to one way to interest kids.

The international campaign, which is tobacco’s response to aggressive anti-smoking activity in America, focuses on Third-World countries particularly.

The Third World is home to unlettered millions of potential smokers. It is, in truth, home to the planet’s largest collection of ignorant kids and adults who, living slightly above the poverty line, are poised to give cigarette companies another century of lovely profits.

In the old days, the “merchants of death” were munitions makers. Now they export tobacco.

Worldwide today, that might be America’s greatest sin.

THE LINCOLN DIMENSION

If cigarettes are so hazardous that they give thousands of the addicted no realistic choice but to die smoking, shouldn’t it follow that no person in the able-bodied, thriving world of sport should take money for pushing tobacco?

Here’s a workable platform:

* No smoking at any stadium, racetrack or school.

* No distribution of free smokes.

* No tobacco sponsors for athletes or sports events.

* No tobacco signs or billboards in sports venues.

* Specifically in auto racing, no tobacco signs or symbols at the track or on race cars or drivers’ uniforms or their other paraphernalia.

Those who disagree with any of the above often cite first-amendment, free-speech privileges and argue that they aren’t doing anything wrong because, if a product is legal, it’s perfectly proper to promote it.

As an alibi, that is plausible but fallacious.

The truth is that tobacco is legal in America today in part because as a society, we don’t have much interest in making another drug illegal. Prohibition didn’t work with alcohol in the 1920s, it isn’t working very well with cocaine and other drugs in the ‘90s, and there’s no reason to believe it would work with tobacco.

The real question is this: Just because a poisonous product is legal, do we have to promote it?

A century and a half ago, an American president, Abraham Lincoln, faced an intimidating, uncertain situation that was somewhat similar if unspeakably worse.

Slavery was legal then, commanding the explicit approval of the Constitution. And so Lincoln at first couldn’t emancipate the unpaid servants of the South.

But he could keep hard-eyed apologists and propagandists from promoting and extending slavery into the vastness of the West.

The genius of Lincoln’s solution was in drawing a line. He would accept an evil temporarily. But even if it meant civil war, he would not allow the poison to spread. And in the crucible of a frightful war, slavery, as Lincoln perhaps foresaw, died.

DRAWING A NEW LINE

In today’s America, things needn’t come to war, but one good place to draw the line is against tobacco’s apologists and propagandists. Last year alone, $500 million was spent to advertise cigarettes, Gates said from her Atlanta office, and no less than $3.5 billion went into tobacco promotions.

“The $3.5 billion didn’t all go into sports,” she said. “But much did.”

That any went into sports is embarrassing.

A civilized society should make one change immediately. It should put an end to the promotion perversion, prohibiting not tobacco but all tobacco ballyhoo.

But are Americans that civilized?

Recent polls suggest that about half the citizenry still supports smoking in restaurants, as well as offices, and that more than half are in favor of tobacco sponsors for sports events.

Such attitudes, social scientists say, are typical of the historic national response to misconduct in America. Historians note that in Lincoln’s century, for example, slavery held the support of nearly half of all voters--even in Northern states--and that until the present century, nearly half the population, women included, opposed women’s right to vote.

But what if Americans of good will decided to outlaw tobacco propaganda. Would any legitimate businesses be imperiled?

“A ban on (tobacco promoters) would do significant damage to motor racing,” said Bryan Tracy, vice president of the National Hot Rod Assn., drag racing’s major sanctioning group.

Most race car owners agree.

Others argue that in a sports boom era, new sponsors would take up much, if not all, of the slack.

Even with fewer sponsors, though, it would seem more responsible for any sport to quit pushing destructive devices that ambush children and painfully end so many lives.

The question is, in fact, whether a sport deserves to exist if it can’t operate without creating addicts to a deadly substance.

In the days when slavery was legal, Lincoln often said, “If slavery isn’t wrong, nothing is wrong.”

Today, if hooking children on cigarettes isn’t wrong, nothing is wrong.