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Tobacco promoters target Asian-Americans
By Bob Burton
CANBERRA - For
the past 15 years, the Asian-American and Pacific
Islander communities in the United States have been
specifically targeted by the tobacco industry to boost
flagging sales and win allies to help defeat
anti-smoking initiatives, tobacco-control researchers
say.
A team of four US and Canadian researchers
trawled through 500,000 pages of internal
tobacco-industry documents - made publicly available as
a result of US court cases - to investigate
tobacco-promotion strategies aimed at Asian-American and
Pacific Islanders, called the "AAPI" market in industry
jargon.
The researchers' findings in this
month's edition of Tobacco Control, published by the
British Medical Journal, add to revelations that the
tobacco industry developed detailed strategies for other
specific groups, including African-Americans and the
homosexual community.
Likewise, the strategies
developed to target Asian-Americans in the United States
may well be used now in Asia, says Simon Chapman, editor
of Tobacco Control and professor of public health and
community medicine at the University of Sydney.
"In the tobacco industry, strategies that
successfully boost sales in one country are quickly
globalized. What works targeting Asian-Americans and
Pacific Islanders in the United States today may well be
used in Asia and the Pacific tomorrow," he said.
"The global tobacco companies' strategy is to
compensate for declining sales in some countries such as
the United States by boosting sales in regions such as
Asia and the Pacific - where the protection of public
health from tobacco is less advanced," Chapman said.
The core features of tobacco-company strategies
included emphasis on "Asian-owned stores, direct
marketing of specific cigarette brands through community
cultural events, youth-[oriented] promotions, and
corporate sponsorship", wrote researchers M Muggali, R
Pollay, R Lew and Anne Joseph in Tobacco Control.
Driving the interest of the tobacco industry was
the doubling of the Asian-American and Pacific Islander
communities in the United States to 7 million over the
1980s.
Two-thirds of the largest groups of
Asian-Americans - from China, the Philippines, Japan,
India, Korea and Vietnam - were clustered in only five
states, including California and New York.
Three-quarters of those from the Pacific Islands -
predominantly from Hawaii, Samoa and Guam - lived in
just two states, California and Hawaii.
From a
marketing perspective, the geographical concentrations
of the communities and the fact that they were growing
at a faster rate than other ethnic groups made them
particularly attractive to the tobacco companies.
One document that market-research company
Loiminchay prepared for the Lorillard Tobacco Co in 1990
bluntly stated that "other tobacco companies are aware
that this community which is (generally) predisposed
toward smoking is a potential gold mine". Central to the
tobacco company's strategies that emerged was a
corporate sponsorship program aimed at key organizations
and community events.
Chapman argues that
corporate sponsorship by tobacco companies is a cynical
exercise.
"Corporate sponsorship by tobacco
companies - while often presented as community-minded
philanthropy - is always aimed at boosting sales and
creating political allies to be mobilized when a
tobacco-control initiative threatens to curtail profits
from their deadly products," he said.
RJ
Reynolds sponsored groups such as the National
Association of Asian American Journalists and the
Organization of Chinese-Americans. Phillip Morris, the
world's biggest tobacco company, sponsored events such
as the Nisei Week Japanese Festival in Los Angeles.
The tobacco companies were also aware that
Asian-Americans were heavily represented among
convenience-store owners, reaching up to 80 percent of
those in New York City and a thousand stores in southern
California.
In 1993, for instance, a special
team from RJ Reynolds met with the New York and southern
California chapters of the Korean-American Grocers
Association (KAGRO). It agreed to sponsor a KAGRO
seminar at a cost of US$10,000 as it "would give us the
opportunity to address the membership regarding the
negative impact of an increase in the FET" (federal
excise tax). It proved to be a worthwhile investment,
with all KAGRO chapters agreeing in May 1994 to collect
petition signatures from customers opposing tax
increases.
When a local city council in
Tennessee proposed legislation to ban smoking in public
places, the alliance that the company had developed
proved critical.
"The Memphis sales team quickly
pulled together an impressive list of allies to confront
the council. Contacts were made with the Tennessee and
Memphis Restaurant Associations, the Korean-American
Grocers and the Black Business Association," an RJ
Reynolds lawyer was quoted as boasting in the
tobacco-industry documents cited in the Tobacco Control
magazine. "The results were overwhelming. The smoking
ban failed ... And the bill's sponsor even voted against
it!" the lawyer was quoted as having said.
While
the most recent documents the researchers gained access
to were from 1995, Chapman doubts little has changed
today.
"The documents unmask the invisible
influence the industry used for decades - and still does
- to expand its sales and profits at the expense of the
health of tens of millions of people," he said.
"The pressing challenge now is to ensure that
the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control is strong
enough to defeat the tobacco epidemic and protect public
health," Chapman said, referring to an international
agreement that the World Health Organization is
spearheading and which is under negotiation at present.
"We can't let tobacco-industry lobbying result
in a draft convention that is watered down in order to
make it palatable to the tobacco industry," he said.
(Inter Press Service)
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