Why we must say no to cigarette advertising

THE EDITOR: We must appreciate the gratitude of our leading sports personalities to Witco.

Witco has been highlighting their performances and helping to record with fanfare and magic the excellence they achieved. Gratitude is a virtue not as valued today perhaps as it once was. Witco’s place in our future, however, must be determined on a more basic issue: the nation’s health. Witco argues that it has the right to advertise cigarettes because smoking is a personal adult choice; people have the right to know what is available. If they could isolate the adults to give them this message, they might have a point. But as they use their advertising wiles to influence this adult population, the youth of all ages drink in the romance and glory of heroic men riding forward in masculine oneness. We know youth’s urge to experiment, to imitate, to accept appearances and not consider consequences.

So, depending on the quantity or absence of ‘wealth’ they may smoke zoots or butts or ends as they have been called at different times, or they may purchase their own packs. They are now like the ‘big boys’/men. And they apparently have greatest difficulty in quitting addiction later. Smoking is described as one of the four main causes of death, hospitalisation and avoidable physical suffering. Accumulated evidence shows that smoking kills, grows cancer in the lungs and elsewhere, rattles the throat and chest, and even punishes non-smokers who hang around the puffers. The smoke companies have been paying millions of dollars to individuals, groups and Governments as penalty or compensation or forced contribution to the medical services for the enormous cost of tending the smoking sick.  They also paid huge fines for withholding information on the dangers of cigarettes and on their content. Some say they know so and so who smoked from nine to ninety-five and suffered nothing. Sure! People also fell five storeys or were tossed across the road by a truck or drank dirty drain water or poison or lived in a family where everybody got malaria but nothing happened to them.

The fact is there are extremes ( the few who either hardly suffer or suffer quicker than anybody else) and there is the average (where most of us are). But we’ve passed the stage of argument. Tobacco companies have been moving out from the ‘advanced’ countries into the less developed ones where people are less knowledgeable, less sophisticated, more like societies of over fifty years ago. After all, we passed through stages when arsenic, cocaine, lead, asbestos were all considered totally harmless or beneficial. Sensible societies avoid them now. It’s tobacco’s turn to move off the scene. This is fortunate for our health and our children’s, unfortunate for the tobacco addicts and shareholders. But the managers will find other areas for investment and exploitation: horticulture perhaps (once tried), or housing (like HCL), or security or food processing for big FTAA markets or whatever their experts decide. Certainly we wish them well in a new wealth-producing, health-positive venture from which our country will benefit. But, certainly, no smoke advertisements now.

VAN STEWART
Diego Martin