Turning Up Heat on Tobacco Firms : As Taxpayer-Funded Anti-Smoking Ads Get Bolder, Some Say They Overstate the Dangers of Cigarettes

Surely you’ve seen it: the television commercial depicting a tobacco executive telling a series of lies, his head shrinking into his collar as he repeatedly contradicts himself.

Finally his head vanishes in a puff of smoke.

Then there’s the ad that follows a smoker through his day, numbering the people who come into contact with his secondhand smoke--37 people, including his wife and daughter, who “will die a little, because they were forced to breathe the smoke from his cigarette.”

Since 1990, California’s Department of Health Services has been buying time on television and radio and space on billboards to change public attitudes about smoking. These ads have won the enmity of the tobacco industry as well as numerous national and international media awards.

The most recent commercials, many of them targeting teen-agers and emphasizing the dangers of secondhand smoke, are tougher than ever.

Indeed, there has never been a media campaign quite like this before--and you would have to look at negative political ads to find advertising that attacks the opposition with such joyful abandon.

These messages, with their savage bite, are the most visible use of the 25-cents-a-pack tobacco tax included in Proposition 99, the voter-approved anti-smoking initiative.

The measure did not mention a media campaign at all, but the legislation that authorized spending of the tax money required one and gave state officials only four months to begin it.

“There’s been nothing like this ever before in the rest of the world,” said Colleen Stevens, who heads the state’s anti-tobacco media campaign.

There is some evidence that the ads have been working. A period of rapid decline in cigarette sales in California coincides with the launching of the first barrage of ads in April, 1990.

When Stevens, a career health administrator with a degree in social work, began to put together the first advertising campaign, she had nowhere to turn for advice. California health officials had produced educational health films and public service messages before--mostly low-budget announcements shown at no cost at odd hours on commercial television. But this was to be an ambitious program with a big-time budget--more than $28 million in the first two years.

But public health officials point out that the amount is a pittance compared to what tobacco companies are spending to peddle their products--an estimated $1 million a day in California.

From the start, the ads took aim at the tobacco industry.

One of the early spots portrayed a corporate executive asking his colleagues to help him solve a problem. “We need more cigarette smokers,” he declares. “Pure and simple. Every day, two thousand Americans stop smoking and another 1,100 also quit.

“Actually, technically, they die. That means that this business needs three thousand fresh, new volunteers every day. So, forget about all that heart disease, cancer, emphysema, stroke stuff.”

Just days before the department was going to release the first commercials, then-Gov. George Deukmejian got his first look at them.

Department officials waited in suspense for several days before Deukmejian, a pro-business conservative, delivered judgment on the campaign. The ads ran.

Gov. Pete Wilson suspended the ad campaign in 1992 during one of the state’s seemingly never-ending budget crises. The American Lung Assn. successfully sued to restore the funding. But Wilson’s action interrupted advertising for many months.

Since the lawsuit, the governor has been protective of the tobacco-control media budget. In January, he called for spending $12.9 million on the ad campaign in the coming fiscal year--the same level as this year. But recently, he cut $2 million from that proposal.

Stevens praises Wilson’s support for the ad campaign: “I think this is a governor who believes in prevention, and (smoking) is the No. 1 preventable cause of death and disability in the United States.”

She agrees with observers who say the most recent commercials and billboards make the earlier media campaign seem tame by comparison.

“We’re finding ways of making our messages clearer and more meaningful,” Stevens said.

Using market research techniques, the health department has learned how to target its messages--aiming at teen-agers and members of ethnic groups that have relatively high smoking rates.

From the start, the state has bought advertising time on the Fox Network, which has high viewership among young people and minority groups.

Lately, the state has been reaching out to a youthful audience by airing ads on MTV.

The department’s outdoor advertising campaign emphasizes the effect of smoking on nonsmokers: “Try secondhand smoke!” states one recent billboard. “Get all of the effects of smoking without those pesky filters! Secondhand smoke kills.”

A television ad states that “5,100 Californians die every year from breathing secondhand smoke.”

These and other ads have prompted complaints from pro-smoking groups, charging that the messages overstate dangers to nonsmokers by assuming a national death rate due to secondhand smoke of 50,000 deaths a year.

“Even the Environmental Protection Agency (which concluded that secondhand smoke can cause cancer) won’t endorse 50,000 deaths a year,” said Bob Merrell, who heads Californians for Smokers’ Rights.