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 national ad campaign, which launched yesterday, is the result of a federal government lawsuit filed against tobacco giants in 1999.
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.
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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.
