Exactly. Many would characterize Big Tobacco as immoral, but I’d say a more accurate word would be “amoral”. This industry doesn’t want its customer to die, but it has no objection to that happening.

This industry knows that as a completely predictable result of its massive promotion and sophisticated engineering of tobacco product, millions of people will get addicted and get sick and die. This industry has never hesitated to arrange for that result to happen. It doesn’t aim at that result — it aims at making money. It just doesn’t care that as a result, millions will die. It has never placed a value on human life that would cause it to do anything differently.

“Amoral” is something you think of how a machine works. That fits here. This industry has operated like a machine with a single, overriding objective: making money.

If the product weren’t inherently lethal, this might just be a story of corporate greed, another Enron, shamelessly lying to people to make money. Merely that.

With tobacco the story is about millions of lives snuffed out in the process. It’s about a product that kills 1 out of 5 Americans today. Kills that many precisely because it has been so effectively marketed and engineered for addiction.

Does Big Tobacco want to kill 1 out of 5 Americans? No, but it has no problem with that if it can make money that way. That’s amoral.

Oh, those heavy restrictions. Poor, poor Big Tobacco. I had no idea it was so hard to be in the tobacco industry.

OK. Let’s take those in order.

Tax: the tax hasn’t changed Big Tobacco’s profitability:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=MO&annual

Nor has the tax slowed down Big Tobacco’s predatory behavior.

The tax may help save teens from getting addicted. Then again, maybe not: Big Tobacco works to keep cigarettes available to teens for free:

http://tobaccodocuments.org/landman/514348983-9015.html

Ban on elecronic advertising: where have you been living? Do they watch TV there?

Cigarette ads are broadcast regularly on TV. They’re just not called ads; they’re called product placement, or sports sponsorships. Those are two ways this industry gets around the broadcast ban.

An internal tobacco industry memo boasts of its cigarette product placement on TV shows: “we have been able to encourage the use of cigarettes in . . . Vega$, Hart to Hart, Fantasy Island, Falmingo Road, and other such programs . . . providing exposure to cigarette smoking in attractive, relaxed settings.”

http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/egx62d00

Then there’s cigarette product placement in movies. Which puts cigarettes ads on the air every day. Every time Saturday Night Fever or Superman II airs on TV, cable, or satellite, a Marlboro TV commercial is running:

http://www.realitycheckny.com/RC_links/ProductPlacement.htm

http://www.quit.org.au/quit/FandI/fandi/c15s7.htm

http://www.saclung.org/tobacco%20control%20article.pdf

http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/bca72d00

http://tobaccodocuments.org/landman/268413.html

http://www.mediascope.org/pubs/ibriefs/tpm.htm

Auto racing may be an even more effective way this industry gets around the broadcast ban. In just one car race sponsored by Marlboro, the Marlboro brand name or logo was displayed 5,933 times, was onscreen for 46 of the 94 minutes of broadcast time.

Alan Blum, “The Marlboro Grand Prix: Circumvention of the Television Ban on Tobacco Advertising,” New England Journal of Medicine, March 28, 1991.

In 1994, Philip Morris and RJR received nearly $40 million in free TV time from their auto racing sponsorships alone.

Advertising Age, June 12, 1995.

This industry is very good at getting around advertising restrictions. With such tactics as product placement and sports sponsorships, it’s circumvented the broadcast ban for 30 years. The “complete ban on electronic advertising” doesn’t exist.

Which is not even mentioning industry image ads that are running right now. Pushing Big Tobacco’s PR and shining up its image, they just push the company instead of the product. It’s tobacco advertising that shines the brand without even mentioning a product brand name. The company is the brand, it’s pushed on TV, and it’s another hole in the broadcast ban.

Oh, those heavy, painful restrictions. Poor Big Tobacco.

Ban on billboard advertising: again, where do you live? Do they have convenience stores there? Gas stations? Point of sale ads? That’s tobacco’s newest billboards.

At some stores you can’t see the glass,
they’re so thick.

It’s another tactic Big Tobacco uses to get around advertising restrictions:

http://tc.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/11/suppl_2/ii47

http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/Script/DisplayPressRelease.php3?Display=289

In the USA, Big Tobacco spent over $11 billion in 2001 pushing its lethal product. $9 billion of that went into tobacco’s newest billboards: advertising in and around convenience stores.

My local ARCO has large poster sized cigarette ads on the store, in the store, on the pumps, on signs by the road, on poles on the corner of the lot. Then tops it off with a huge display of product and ad in the front by the cashier.

These ads are effective. They get to Big Tobacco’s most important audience: children:

http://tc.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/extract/13/3/209

http://health.yahoo.com/news/46306

Poor, poor, Big Tobacco. All those restrictions.

Tobacco related merchandise shows us yet another way Big Tobacco does an end run around restrictions. The tobacco industry still does its Marlboro Miles promotions, and Marlboro Gear, and Camel Cash, and so on and on. So, what about those MSA restrictions? The trinkets carry no explicit brand name or logo — but through colors, packaging, and design, the trinkets push cigarette brand images and messages.

Some examples:

http://www.trinketsandtrash.org/msa/dmstrategy4.htm

No health claims? What planet did you say you were from? On this planet, cigarettes are sold and promoted every day with filters, “light” and “ultra-light” labels, and recently, “reduced risk” promises.

As the tobacco industry said in its internal memos, these were “an effective advertising gimmick” that sold “the image of health reassurance.” Researchers agree: “over the past 50 years advertisements of filtered and low tar cigarettes were intended to reassure the many smokers who were anxious about the health risk of smoking.”

http://www.cancerpage.com/news/article.asp?id=4039

What’s that, the ads don’t say “healthier” in so many words? You’re right: the carefully written copy seldom promises anything in so many words. But of course the ads are clear enough in what they do promise. The name, the label, the image, the numbers, the context; the message is conveyed. The ad is beautifully constructed to make the claim without making it in so many words.

“You can switch down to lower tar and still get satisfying taste” and so on. “Merit” and similar names.

In a particularly revealing instance, Silk Cut Ultras were heavily advertised prior to New Year 1999 using the slogan “JAN ONE - What better time to move to 1 mg”. The ‘ONE’ refers to the 1 mg tar measured in the Silk Cut Ultra - which has been the theme of a campaign using several slogans involving ‘ONE’. The ‘JAN ONE’ ad was clearly intended to suggest that switching to Silk Cut Ultra was a worthy New Year’s resolution - effectively an unfounded health claim.

What’s that? “Light” isn’t a health claim? That’s what the tobacco industry likes to say. And yet Philip Morris’s Kraft General Foods markets a range of products using the word “Light” to indicate healthier, such as this ‘light’ peanut butter “for health nuts”:

http://tobacco.health.usyd.edu.au/site/supersite/resources/docs/industry_advertising.htm

http://www.ash.org.uk/html/regulation/html/big-one.html

Poor, poor, poor Big Tobacco. It can’t make health claims. Unless it implies them. Which it finds is as effective as making explicit claims:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=12573176

Big Tobacco is still making health claims, and in much the same way: carefully worded claims that lead the reader or viewer to believe something has been promised, when it hasn’t been in so many words:

http://www.wkyc.com/health/health_fullstory.asp?id=27393

And then there’s the heavy burden of FTC oversight. How heavy is this:

“Tobacco has been exempted from every major federal health and safety law enacted, by Congress including the Consumer Product Safety Act, the Fair Labeling and Packaging Act, the Toxic Substances Act, and the Hazardous Substances Act…Tobacco is the least regulated consumer product in the U.S.” Tobacco Use: An American Crisis, p. 53 and Washington Monthly, September 1993, p. 22

http://new.globalink.org/tobacco/trg/Chapter32/Chapter32POLITICSPage16.html

“The irony is that many of the poisons found in cigarette smoke are subject to strict regulation by federal laws which, on the other hand, specifically exempt tobacco products.” K. H. Ginzel, M.D, “What’s in a
Cigarette”, ACSH, October 1, 1990.

http://www.acsh.org/healthissues/newsID.832/healthissue_detail.asp

The fact is, a pack of cigarettes is less regulated than a box of macaroni and cheese.

“Are cigarettes just another legal product? No, compared to the legal treatment given other products, cigarettes are supralegal — they are a product that is above the law.”

http://www.acsh.org/factsfears/newsID.204/news_detail.asp

Gosh, poor Big Tobacco. It must be hell to be above the law.

The full loaf is clear. Smoking should be legal but sold in outlets and/or pharmacies. Tobacco shouldn’t be advertised anywhere. Warning labels should be large and powerful. Taxes should be used to keep that price point between preventing initiation/promoting quitting and creating a black market. Aggressive prevention programs (education, media, clean indoor air policy) and free access to cessation support should be run by every state. As for money, money will always be made on an addictive product, so let them make their money. However, let’s limit the human and economic impact so taxpayers and insurance premiums don’t continue to subsidize the industry’s profits. Anything less lets industry profit from a deadly product without maximum public protections.

As for advertising, there’s a reason Philip Morris supports FDA regulation and the likely increased limits on advertising that would follow. Philip Morris in particular, and all the other companies don’t need to advertise cigarettes any more since the tens of billions already spent have made smoking part of our social fabric. Smoking is rebellion. Smoking is individualism. Smoking is sensuality. To youth, smoking is instant maturity and adulthood.

If the industry put two years of its current $12 billion marketing budget into the flashiest, most powerful anti-tobacco and clean indoor ads they could muster with their collective marketing genius, they could denormalize and deglamorize tobacco overnight. Instead they spend prevention pennies on the promotion dollar to make boring, soft-sell, corporate image ads with pictures of middle class ex-smokers and flashes of website pages (low income people - who smoke at higher rates and really need the support - don’t relate and don’t have great internet access and the industry knows it. The industry’s interested in juries and voters).

The reality is that the industry doesn’t “want” their clients to die, but they don’t care if they do as long as they can maintain replacement levels. All the remedies outlined in the case affect their replacement capacity. Safer cigarettes are another half loaf strategy that won’t sell to anybody but juries and voters. The product is doomed to failure from the start - being safe and healthy is not the smoker profile. They simply don’t care who dies.

All in all, you might be right that the DOJ is in trouble with this case, but your non-legal commentaries are quite specious. It’s only a matter of time before the mounting science and costs (human and health care) overwhelm your rhetoric. It might take another decade or two, but it’ll happen in my lifetime.

What a bunch of alarmist crap. 85% tax, a complete ban on electronic advertising, a complete ban on billboard advertising, no tobacco related merchandise, no health claims, FTC oversight. . .these restrictions aren’t enough? Why don’t you just come right out and say you want smoking to be illegal?

That’s certainly what you want, no? You’re already all but saying you don’t believe cigarettes should be sold. . .not by Philip Morris, not by anyone (and heaven forbid anyone make money by selling them!). Let’s bring back the tobacco prohibition from the turn of the century! Adults can’t be trusted to make their own decisions, right?

Meanwhile nobody is forcing people to smoke, nor preventing people from quitting. Not Philip Morris, nor anyone else. The sale of cigarettes to minors is already illegal, and has been for decades, and allegations of marketing to minors have comprised the WORST part of the gov’t case. Six months into the trial, and we have yet to see a single ad puported to specifically target minors. (Hint to DOJ prosecution. . .by their very nature you can’t hide large public marketing campaigns. . .where’s the beef?).

Slow poison? Living is slow poision! Last time I checked human mortality was 100%. All smokers die. . .all non-smokers die. Its disingenuous to say that Philip Morris *wants* its customers to die. Of course they don’t. . .at the very least that’s bad for business! Do you really think that if Philip Morris had a safer cigarette they wouldn’t sell it? The real shame is that the same ones who are trying to ban cigarettes simultaneously block every effort by the tobacco companies to market a safer cigarette. “No such thing as a safe cigarette” they scream!

The real issue is that the federal government makes a mockery of science by denying that nicotine is a drug that should be regulated by the fda. I wonder why Bazerman doesn’t have the guts to say this? Maybe he likes the status quo where he gets paid $800/hour in the endless litigation?

By the way, I loved how Bazerman only listed male researchers - Paul Slovic (Decision Research), Baruch Fischhoff (CMU), George Loewenstein (CMU), Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard), Sendhil Mullainathan (Harvard), David Laibson (Harvard), Mall Rabin (Berkeley), Eldar Shafir (Princeton), Cohn Camerer (Cal Tech), Richard Thaler (University of Chicago), Cass Sunstein (University of Chicago), and others.

Boys will cite boys.

But when your product, used exactly as intended, kills your customer, sickens and maims and kills millions of customers, yes, there is a conflict between making money and doing the right thing. Fortunately for Philip Morris, this has been no painful conflict for it. It has chosen, always, and with no hesitation, to make money. It has put its profits above lives.

Philip Morris, like the rest of the tobacco industry, has a single, overriding objective. Overriding. It makes money at the expense of people’s health, automony, dignity, independence, and lives. That is the only way it makes money. That’s what its product does.

And that, in a nutshell, is why it’s not a great thing tobacco executives get paid well. They’re getting paid to addict 14 year olds to slow poison. That’s the business Philip Morris is in, and that’s what they get paid to make happen. They do it very well.

Exactly. As the CEO of tobacco giant Philip Morris says, it has “a single overriding objective”: making money.
******

Amazing! Go figure, a publically owned cigarette company, and American DOW component that sells a highly regulated, highly taxed, legal product to consenting adults is in the business of “making money”? Who ever would have thunk it?

And the NERVE of that company to actually “pay” its executives when they do a good job for the shareholders! How DARE THEY!

I can’t wait to see this Harvard prof. Bazerman get up on the stand and explain the differences between the corporate structures of Philip Morris, et al, and every other corporation in the United States and elsewhere in the world! I’d love to hear his “opinion” on what is so unique to the corporate structure of Philip Morris, et al, that compels them to commit RICO violations!

The fact remains that without disgorgement or other retrospective remedies, the gov’t has got just about ZERO left they can ask for, so no wonder they are grasping at straws here!

Exactly. As the CEO of tobacco giant Philip Morris says, it has “a single overriding objective”: making money.

www.altria.com/download/pdf/Investors_LCRemaks_MorganStanley4Nov04.pdf

A single, overriding objective.

At Philip Morris, people’s lives don’t come first, they don’t come second, they don’t count at all.

Philip Morris has a single objective: making money. It will override all other objectives to make money.