The American Cancer Society is warning teen girls that they are being targeted with a new campaign dressed in pink. But the message from Big Tobacco is the same – buy cigarettes.
Tobacco companies must think that young women are stupid. They are making pretty pink “purse packs” of cigarettes to attract young women smokers. As if selling cigarettes to third world nations is not bring in enough to offset the increasing number of Americans who are quitting. This is despicable, even for Big Tobacco.
“It’s so sad, because it is so appealing, and what people don’t realize is that it takes just four cigarettes within the course of an evening to set up this addiction,” Jeneene Brengelman of the American Cancer Society says.
Brengelman should know. She has been helping smokers quit for nearly 30 years and she says it’s tougher for women to quit.
The numbers confirm that. Lung cancer is declining in men, but increasing in women, now surpassing breast cancer as a leading cause of cancer in women.
In a desperate effort to increase sales of an increasingly unpopular pastime, Philip Morris USA and R.J. Reynolds have launched these obvious aggressive campaigns to target young teens. Besides the purse packs which contain “Superslim Lights,” they are clearly tying cigarette smoking to staying slim.
Reynolds has been equally repugnant calling cigarettes “stilettos” and “light and luscious.” Giveaways ran in magazines and included lip gloss, cell phone jewelry and wristbands, in hot pink. Misleading terms such as “light’ and “low-tar” are designed to lure the unsuspecting to their brand by indicating they are safer cigarettes.
For parents this is an opportunity to provide a life lesson. Look at what lengths tobacco companies will go to sell you on a “nicotine delivery system”, as insiders call cigarettes. Our team of skilled Jacksonville tobacco lawyers at Farah and Farah have seen firsthand the destruction that comes from an addiction to nicotine, pushed for decades by tobacco companies to create lifetime customers.
Pretty in Pink, Purple or Aqua – the message should be from parents to teens and youngsters that never lighting up is the best way to put out cigarettes.
