Leading tobacco companies in the US have begun running television and newspapers advertisements as punishment for deceiving the public about the dangers of smoking.
The court sided with the government in 2006, ruling that companies broke civil racketeering laws and defrauded consumers by lying about the health effects of smoking.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Lorillard Inc, Philip Morris USA, RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company and Altria Group were ordered to make “corrective statements,” but a series of appeals meant the move was delayed for over a decade, The Guardian reports.
“The tobacco companies’ basic strategy for everything, whether it’s science or regulation or litigation, is delay,” said Stan Glantz, an expert on tobacco company strategy at the University of California San Francisco.
Full-page ads will appear in the Sunday issues of more than 40 newspapers until April, as well as on prime-time television slots over the next year. The ads will not appear on social media, however, and some experts warn that it could have limited reach, particularly among younger audiences.
One commercial reads: “Cigarette companies intentionally designed cigarettes with enough nicotine to create and sustain addiction,” while another reports that “more people die every year from smoking than murder, AIDS, suicide, drugs, car crashes, and alcohol, combined”.
These statements are a “big win for public health, but Big Tobacco’s deceit and manipulation continues,” says Jim Knox, managing director of American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network California.
The tobacco industry still “manipulates products to get around existing regulations, produces and promotes new tobacco products and spends billions of dollars on marketing to deceive the public and to addict young, new customers to replace dying smokers,” he writes in the Sacramento Bee.
Smoking remains the nation’s leading preventable cause of death and illness, with nearly half a million Americans dying from tobacco-related disease every year.
-
August 23 editorial cartoonsCartoons Saturday's political cartoons include deficit dimness, steamroller-in-chief, and more
-
5 museum-grade cartoons about Trump's Smithsonian purgeCartoons Artists take on institutional rebranding, exhibit interpretation, and more
-
Settling the West Bank: a death knell for a Palestine state?In the Spotlight The reality on the ground is that the annexation of the West Bank is all but a done deal
-
China's soaring dementia ratesUnder The Radar Government launches action plan after cases in China increase 50% faster than global average
-
The tobacco industry could be the beneficiary of health agency cutsThe explainer Anti-tobacco initiatives may go up in smoke
-
Is this the end of cigarettes?Today's Big Question An FDA rule targets nicotine addiction
-
The complicated problem of banning menthol cigarettesThe Explainer Banning menthol smokes will save lives, public health officials say. But this is an election year.
-
The dramatic rise of vaping in the UKfeature Increasing numbers of children are using e-cigarettes adding to the growing chorus of alarm over the potential impact on public health
-
New Zealand’s new smoking banfeature Anyone born in 2009 or later will not be able to buy cigarettes but there are concerns about a growing black market
-
The pros and cons of vapingPros and Cons UK government's ban on disposable e-cigarettes suggests a shift in perceptions towards alternative nicotine products
-
Neanderthal gene ‘caused up to a million Covid deaths’Speed Read Genetic tweak found in one in six Britons means cells in the lungs are slower to launch defences
