While commercial promotions have been severely restricted, media stories, however negative, are keeping tobacco in the picture.
By George Gay
The following is a transcription of a conversation between Ian Wright and Irene Demur recently overheard at an international tobacco conference.
Wright: Tobacco advertising and promotions are banned in the U.K., right?
Demur: Wrong.
Wright: OK, if you want to be pedantic, there are a few obscure exemptions to the ban, but, taking a specific case, it is not possible to promote cigarettes in a newspaper, right?
Demur: Wrong.
Wright: You’ve lost me.
Demur: Well, it’s just a matter of changing circumstances—as in when, after tobacco adverts were banned, the emphasis was switched to promotions, and when promotions were banned, the emphasis was switched to sponsorships ….
Wright: You are correct, of course, but in the end, the tobacco industry ran out of road, so my example of there being no way that cigarettes could be promoted in a newspaper today is correct, right?
Demur: Wrong.
Wright: Are you being difficult?
Demur: Certainly not! You should have been more precise in stating your specific example by asking, “It is not possible for those with a pecuniary interest in selling tobacco to promote cigarettes in a newspaper, right?” Then I would have agreed.
Wright: You seem to be suggesting that others, without such a pecuniary interest, might promote cigarettes in newspapers, but that seems absurd.
Demur: Right. But it happens, and even those who vigorously oppose cigarettes and smoking sometimes play a part by de facto giving legitimacy to such promotions.
Wright: But why?
Demur: I’m afraid that is one question I cannot answer. Perhaps you should ask those involved.
In August, The Guardian ran a story titled “Totally lit: It’s suddenly fashionable to be seen with a cigarette, but experts fear for young.” The story gives the writer’s view of how risky cigarette smoking is but quickly moves on to say that recently in the U.K., some celebrities have been seen smoking or indulging in, horror of horrors, that most dangerous of activities, carrying cartons of cigarettes—presumably adding hernias to the list of risk factors.
A rather puny attempt is made to rationalize these actions, and then, with input from anti-tobacco professionals, we are told that while in the 1950s and 1960s smoking was seen to embody coolness and glamour, since then, overall smoking rates have been declining, with, from 2021, higher rates of decline among younger adults than among older people. The story also says that surveys by Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) have found that the younger you are, the less likely you are to be aware of the full health risks of smoking, though no attempt is made to interpret why this seems to translate into higher rates of smoking decline among the young.
In any case, in the 1990s, the story goes on, smoking rates stopped falling because cigarette marketing was rife and smoking once again had “cultural cachet.” Hazel Cheeseman of ASH (her title wasn’t given, but I believe she was at that time the deputy chief executive and chief executive designate) was quoted as saying that she hoped there wouldn’t be a repeat of what happened in respect of smoking during the 1990s. However, the worry was that despite a tobacco advertising ban having been in force for more than 20 years, the tobacco industry had lots of ways of projecting its image, including through social media.
Let’s draw breath here and ask why The Guardian or the anti-tobacco professionals it quotes might believe the tobacco industry would spend its resources “projecting its image” when The Guardian is willing to project that image free of charge or project at least what the newspaper sees as the industry’s image but which image large parts of the industry, now busying themselves with lower-risk products, would no longer recognize.
The story, taking up the equivalent of a full page, spread over two pages, six and seven, includes a portrait picture, 19 cm x 11 cm, of a cool-and-glamorous-looking female model holding a lit cigarette to her mouth. There is another picture, 10 cm x 8 cm, showing a female model wearing shorts decorated with illustrations of red lips holding cigarettes (no, I don’t know either) and two pictures, each 6 cm x 5 cm, showing—inexplicably, given the thrust of the story—a female model smoking in 2002, though possibly not while on a modeling assignment, and Anne Bancroft smoking while playing Mrs. Robinson (the baddy—geddit?) in the film The Graduate, which was made in 1967.
This story was de facto cigarette promotion, aimed almost exclusively at women, dressed up as a warning about smoking. Take another look at the story’s heading. It’s suddenly fashionable to be seen with a cigarette (read: a few people who we didn’t know smoked enjoy the occasional cigarette, and we thought we could blow this up into a tabloid story), but experts fear for the young (read: but we need to cover our backs in case the story is seen as promoting cigarettes, so we’ve convinced some anti-tobacco professionals to take part).
This raises the question as to why anti-tobacco professionals allow themselves to be suckered into trying to give legitimacy to such stories. There is of course the possibility that these professionals need to keep smoking alive so they don’t find themselves out of work just short of pensionable age, a view that is supported by the fact that many of these people also oppose vaping in a backhanded way.
But while I regard myself as being cynical to the point of nihilism, I don’t buy such an argument, which leaves me with the above question hanging in the air. Why, for instance, would Cheeseman be happy to be quoted in a story with the sort of imagery described above as saying: “[w]e know smoking-related imagery can encourage people to try smoking. It is therefore plausible that these depictions of smoking might influence some young people to try a cigarette.” In fairness to Cheeseman, I should point out that when she refers to “these depictions of smoking,” she is probably referring to the story’s rather vague reference to social media use among young people, though the reference doesn’t specify smoking imagery nor depictions. However, looking at the story, it is the smoking imagery of the story’s pictures that stand out, and you cannot help but wonder whether Cheeseman and the other no-doubt well-meaning anti-tobacco professionals mentioned in the piece were happy to be associated with it.
My advice to them would be to refrain from panic. No matter the situation, it is always worthwhile giving yourself 20 seconds to think, and 20 seconds of thought is enough to tell you that the whims of celebrities are here today and gone tomorrow. Mostly, and not unreasonably given the way they make their livings, what they do is aimed at attracting publicity, which they have managed admirably in this case, partly because of the anti-tobacco professionals whose comments have allowed the story to run. If the anti-tobacco professionals have more than 20 seconds, they might like to research the number of times that celebrities have taken to fine cigars without causing any long-term increase in consumption of these products by either themselves or others.
I think that one minor reason why smoking imagery was so prominent in the story was because it was used to brighten up what was a double-page spread in which the smoking piece was squashed between two ill-health stories: “Majority of most popular takeaway dishes rated as unhealthy, study shows,” which sported only modest pictures of a pizza and a burger, and “Shortage of medicine for alcoholics ‘scandalous,’ says doctor,” which had no illustrations.
The Guardian has been banging the drum about unhealthy food for some time, and on Aug. 28 last year, it led with the story, “Ultra-processed foods causing a tidal wave of harm,” say experts. An interesting aspect of that story was a quote from one expert that said, “[t]here is now significant evidence that these products inflame the gut, disrupt appetite regulation, alter hormone levels and cause myriad other effects which likely increase the risk of cardiovascular and other diseases much in the same way that smoking does.”
One question this raises concerns the cause of death when somebody who smoked tobacco and ate ultra-processed food (UPF) dies of one of these diseases. Was the death caused by eating UPF, cigarette smoking or a combination of both and, perhaps, other factors? I assume that it is impossible to know, but I also assume the death would nevertheless be put down to smoking because, I believe, the death of a smoker from a “smoking-related” disease is automatically put down to smoking, no matter what other risky activities the smoker got up to during her life.
And you can also assume that this means that deaths from smoking have been and are exaggerated whereas deaths from UPF consumption, alcohol consumption, pollution, etc., have been underestimated. But things won’t change, because preventative medicine runs on the parallel rails of hypocrisy and inertia.
