[Intl-tobacco] Free Samples to Kids: New York Times article (fwd)

[Robert Weissman]

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/24/business/24SMOK.html?pagewanted=all

August 24, 2001
New York Times

Big Tobacco Is Accused of Crossing an Age Line
By GREG WINTER

Sara Bogdani had just turned 17 last summer when she slipped into a short
skirt and started working as a Marlboro girl.

While the rest of her high school friends spent their vacation laboring in
restaurants or lounging at home, Sara donned a red hat, a T-shirt with a
cowboy on the back and a knapsack full of Marlboros and other Philip
Morris (news/quote) cigarettes.

Then she hit the streets of Tirana, the capital of Albania and her
hometown, offering a smile and a free pack to anyone who professed a love
of smoking and looked, well, almost as old as she was.

"As long as they weren't 14 or something, it was O.K.," Sara said in a
telephone interview, noting that a co-worker was also 17. As for her
bosses, "they were just glad if you gave out all the cigarettes," said
Sara, who now works with an antismoking group.

Just as it is in the United States, giving cigarettes to teenagers is
illegal in many countries, including Albania, where Marlboro girls stroll
the streets. But while the practice has all but disappeared from American
cities, it goes on with striking regularity in many developing nations,
and Philip Morris is far from the only tobacco company that the World
Health Organization has accused of crossing the line in trying to entice
those underage with free cigarettes.

A new study of schoolchildren 13 to 15 in 68 countries, conducted by the
W.H.O. and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that
about 11 percent of the children in Latin America and the Caribbean were
offered free cigarettes by a tobacco company representative in 1999 and
2000. In Russia, nearly 17 percent said they had been given free
cigarettes. In Jordan, it was 25 percent.

"Can you imagine if that happened here?" asked Armando Peruga, tobacco
coordinator for the Pan American Health Organization, the Washington-based
office of the W.H.O. "There would be a big uproar."

Others say this is part of an overall strategy on the part of the tobacco
companies, one that is likely to become even more commonplace.

"This is the right time for the tobacco industry to seduce children
overseas," said Vera da Costa e Silva, director of the World Health
Organization's tobacco program, which has begun documenting the
distribution of cigarettes to smokers under 18 by Philip Morris and its
European competitors. "They are looking to increase the number of smokers
in developing countries and elsewhere abroad because in the United States
they are losing their market."

Sugar and honey can be found in some of the cigarettes that British
American Tobacco sells in the South Pacific, for instance. Health
officials contend that the ingredients are added to lure children who
might otherwise shy away from the acrid taste of cigarettes. The company
denies the accusation, saying that there is not enough of the additives to
mollify the harshness of smoking. But internal documents from as long ago
as the 1970's from its American subsidiary, Brown & Williamson, point out
that "it is a well-known fact that teenagers like sweet products.

"Honey might be considered," the documents added.

Local tobacco companies are sometimes even more overt than the global
cigarette makers in reaching out to young people, health officials say.
Members of India's Parliament severely criticized the Indian Tobacco
Company in 1997 for inviting children to a kick-off party for one of its
brands. Parliament members complained that the teenagers smoked, drank
alcohol and posed in advertisements for the cigarettes.

In its quest to recast the company's image, the chief executive of Philip
Morris, the only American tobacco company that directly sells and promotes
its own cigarettes overseas, pledged three years ago to follow the same
rules abroad that it does in the United States - which now includes not
handing out free cigarettes to anyone, much less to minors.

But while health officials and attorneys general begrudgingly give Philip
Morris high marks for curtailing marketing to American children since the
1998 settlement with the states, they rarely say the same about its
promotions overseas.

Health officials in many countries contend that the way Philip Morris
products are promoted overseas often places cigarettes directly in the
hands of children from Eastern Europe to Africa and the Middle East.
Cigarettes are still handed out freely and sometimes by young people who
are no more than children themselves.

"As we start to squeeze them here in terms of not selling to children,
they need replacement smokers," argued Mohammad N. Akhter, executive
director of the American Public Health Association in Washington. "They're
finding these substitute smokers in the third world."

Philip Morris has long recognized that passing out free cigarettes is a
risky proposition. In 1995, well before the tobacco settlement limited the
practice to nightclubs and other adult-only settings in this country,
Philip Morris stopped giving out free samples to Americans, specifically
because it was too hard to prevent children from receiving them.

Even so, Philip Morris said it had continued to hand out some samples
abroad. Company executives acknowledged that Geoffrey C. Bible, its chief
executive, told them in 1998 to eliminate the discrepancies between their
marketing at home and abroad, hoping to dispel accusations that Philip
Morris solicited teenage smokers. But they characterized his instructions
as a "vision" of what the company should do, not a proclamation of any
formal new policy.

Where it does pass out free samples, Philip Morris stressed that it has
strict rules against giving tobacco to minors, a self-i imposed code that
sometimes exceeds what foreign governments require.

Still, company executives added, Philip Morris is a large enterprise,
sprawling across dozens of countries.

Executives at its international headquarters in Switzerland look over
ideas for each marketing campaign, hoping to spot transgressions, but they
are not capable of watching every move their employees make, they say. In
some countries, Philip Morris promotes and distributes its cigarettes
through independent companies, which are even harder to monitor.

"I'm not telling you that our policy is 100 percent respected around the
world," said Remi Calvert, a spokesman for Philip Morris's international
division. "It should be, but we're not perfect."

Mr. Calvert said distributors that strayed from company policy were
promptly fired, as in Albania.

"We're trying to improve," he said. "We have a very, very clear policy.
Perhaps not everyone is following it."

Dressed to raise eyebrows, plying crowds at concerts and trendy cafes, the
Marlboro girls span the globe.

Teenagers may not be the intended audience, but they are no strangers to
the free samples, either.

"I got a pack," said Hachimou Isaka, a 15-year-old in Niamey, Niger, where
giving tobacco to minors is prohibited. Through a radio contest last
April, Hachimou won tickets to a concert that Philip Morris sponsored in a
30,000-seat arena, the country's biggest. To his great delight, Hachimou
said women only slightly older than he was doled out packs of Bond Street,
one Philip Morris overseas brand, along with hats and T-shirts, to
thousands of fans.

"There were a lot of kids, so many that I couldn't count," Hachimou said,
estimating that some were as young as 10. "All the spectators got some
cigarettes," he said.

"We were really happy," he said. "We were clapping because we got free
cigarettes. I would go again. I love smoking. I love cigarettes."

The star of the concert, was Pierrette Adams, a Congolese singer beloved
throughout West Africa. She is also the wife of Florentin Duarte, director
of Philip Morris in Niger, who was at the concert in an unofficial
capacity, watching with the rest of the crowd.

Philip Morris said that it only gave free cigarettes to spectators at the
concert who traded in old packs of competing brands. It also said that it
tried to keep minors out, and thought that its efforts were effective.

Philip Morris already exports more than 60 percent of the nearly 1.1
trillion cigarettes it sells yearly, and children in overseas markets have
been of keen interest for the company in the past. A 1990 survey
commissioned by the company, called the "youth generation study," examined
Middle Eastern youth, from 13 to 25, tracking how much they smoked, what
their favorite brands were and how much extra spending money they had.
Similar studies were done in Europe and Asia.

With an international debate raging around cigarette advertising, and
talks sponsored by the World Health Organization under way to develop a
worldwide agreement on tobacco marketing, Philip Morris says that trying
to appeal to children would be folly. The strategy could easily backfire,
the company said, giving rise to regulations so stringent that simply
doing business would be difficult.

Outside of the United States, however, the growing social and political
taboo against underage smoking is usually far weaker. Nor is there an army
of state officials, lawyers and antismoking advocates trying to keep tabs
on nearly everything tobacco companies do.

Muna Hamzeh, the director of education in Jordan's Ministry of Health,
says she crossed paths with several Marlboro girls in November at a cafe
in Amman, the capital. The girls littered the tabletops with free packs,
Ms. Hamzeh said, and passed them out liberally to teenage boys, some as
young as 16.

Jordanian law prohibits the distribution of cigarettes to people under age
18. One of the girls later admitted to being 17 herself, she said.

Afterward, Ms. Hamzeh conducted an informal survey of teenage boys.
Several said they had accepted cigarettes from the Marlboro girls - for
the most basic of reasons. "They wanted to talk to the girls," Ms. Hamzeh
said.

Over 30 percent of Jordanian boys between 12 and 18 smoke, more than four
times the rate in the United States, according to the World Health
Organization. As in many developing nations, smoking is viewed more as an
intractable part of life than as something for law enforcement to tackle.
Ms. Hamzeh met with police and court officers to urge them to enforce the
law in Jordan, but she doubts that much will change.

"You know," Ms. Hamzeh said, "nobody cares."