Deadly in Pink – Big Tobacco Lures Women and Girls
“Purse Packs” Depict Smoking as Feminine and Fashionable
In the last two years, the cigarette industry has launched its most aggressive marketing campaigns aimed at women and girls in over a decade. Tobacco-Free Kids aims to shed light on these marketing campaigns and encourage health advocates to call on Congress to pass FDA regulation of tobacco products.
Many teens that are getting over a drug and alcohol addiction will turn to nicotine. go to any AA meeting and at the break everyone is outside smoking cigarettes. What is worse an addiction to nicotine or drugs? I have heard from many that nicotine is by far the hardest addiction to beat.
Now the nicotine companies are targeting women, with campaigns to help them lose weight and look sexy. Today there are more than more than 21.5 million women and girls smoking in the United States. Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable death among women. Cigarette smoking kills more than 170,000 women in the U.S. each year, and while lung cancer death rates are decreasing for men, rates have yet to decline among women.
You can help, there is legislation before Congress now cracking down on tobacco marketing and sales to kids, prohibiting misleading cigarette descriptions such as “light, “low-tar” and “mild”, and requiring tobacco companies to disclose “previously secret information” about their products.
Links to additional information:
“Deadly In Pink”
Legislation Will Protect Kids and Save Lives
As a post script, my son thinks that he will smoke now and of course not be an “old” smoker because he will quit. My question to him was “don’t you think the old smokers were once young smokers”?
What do you think, should the tobacco companies targeted marketing be regulated?
Posts
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
The most amazing part of your story which proves my point. Once your mother was diagnosed with lung cancer she still could not quit. How sad for you and your family. I am happy for your father. Good point about the foods we ban, but we can’t ban smoking? It truly is a strange world.
The toabcco companies could not advertise their products if they did not lie about them – cigarettes are poison plain and simple. Yes, I am all for regulation of that industry, shoot I am all for banning it, and I am not much into gov’t being involved in business as a rule. What other poison do we allow to be sold for consumption? Shoot we have banned partially hydrogenated oils in food and some want to ban high fructose corn syrup – I think tobacco is a much worse threat.
My mom died from lung cancer 10 years ago – it is an ugly disease. She started smoking back in the day when there was no surgeon generals warning and the truth about the product was not really known. But, even after it was learned she could not quit. She did not even quit once she was diagnosed (okay she did for a short time, but once it was obvious there was no hope for her she went right back to the poison). She only truly quit when she was placed on oxygen 24/7 and the possibility of exploding the house was very real – of course she was also unable to go anywhere on her own to buy cancer sticks.
Thankfully, my dad quit smoking about the time mom was dx’ed and he has never gone back