[Intl-tobacco] Across Europe, Women are Lighting Up

[robert weissman]

Across Europe, women are lighting up
By Elisabeth Rosenthal
International Herald Tribune
Monday, November 22, 2004


BERLIN As she inhales deeply from her Club cigarette, Monique Bender has
no qualms
or guilt about the pack-and-a-half-a-day habit she started a decade ago,
at age 13.
Smoking seems to come almost as naturally as breathing to young women
here in the
former East Berlin.

"I haven't tried to quit and I don't want to," said Bender, an affable
young woman
in jeans with red-streaked hair and a pierced lip. And why should she?

"Every woman I know smokes," she said, "and most of the men. It would be
strange if
I didn't, too."

Even as smoking rates are declining among European males, they are rising
dramatically among young women in many parts of Europe and the world,
portending an
epidemic of cancers and heart disease in the next decades if the trend
is not
reversed.

The statistics are particularly alarming in southern Europe and the
former Eastern
bloc, where few women smoked two decades ago, but where young women are
now being
specifically targeted by advertising.

For young women in Berlin, a lighted cigarette is almost as common an
accessory as
a watch: on display as they drive to work, sip wine in trendy bars or
hang out with
friends outside school.

Just off the Alexanderplatz, ads for organic supermarkets and toothpaste
alternate
incongruously with billboards featuring sexy women in business suits
with smoke
blowing from their lips. Here, cigarettes are a sign of liberation.

In Germany, half the women aged 15 to 30 smoke today, according to
government
surveys; in the former East Germany, the prevalence of smoking has gone up
threefold among women since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.

This a record for Europe, but the figures are alarming elsewhere as well. I=
n
Scotland, 24 percent of 15-year-old girls smoke, compared with 14
percent of boys
that age. Smoking among teenage girls is on the rise in England,
Belgium, Austria,
Czechoslovakia and Finland. In fact, in virtually all European Union
countries,
teenage girls are more likely than boys to smoke, a World Health
Organization
survey found.

"What used to be seen as a male habit is now common in both sexes, and
more girls
are starting than boys," said Dr. Amanda Amos, a professor of health
promotion at
the University of Edinburgh. And once they start, scientific studies have
repeatedly shown, women have a far harder time breaking the habit than men.

Though smoking generally takes a decade or two to produce serious
disease, rates of
lung cancer in women are already starting to surge throughout Europe,
"in both
younger and older women and in almost all countries," according to a
study this
year by the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon.

Lung cancer has recently overtaken breast cancer as the leading cause of
cancer
deaths among women in Scotland.

More than 100 women die a day in Germany as a direct result of smoking,
according
to the International Network of Women Against Tobacco, a U.S-based group
with
members in 70 countries opposed to tobacco use among women.

"The trends with women smoking are going up, not down," said Dr. Martina
P=C3=B6tschke-Langer, head of the cancer prevention unit at the University =
of
Heidelberg's Cancer Center. "The tobacco industry has focused its
advertising
campaigns on the young, especially girls and women."

Each year the industry spends =E2=82=AC3 million, or $3.9 million, in Germa=
ny alone.
"That's very hard to combat," P=C3=B6tschke-Langer said.

Cigarette companies deny that they specifically target young people or
girls,
saying that their advertising is designed only to help adult smokers
choose a
brand.

"We do not market to kids under 18, which we believe is inappropriate,
but we feel
we should be allowed to communicate with adult smokers, from all walks
of life,"
said Nerida White, director of external relations for Philip Morris
International.

The worsening smoking rates in girls and women stand in stark contrast
to rates
among males, which have decreased steadily in most European countries
for the past
10 years. Although more men than women still smoke across Europe, that
balance is
starting to change.

In Sweden, where smoking among men has decreased nearly 46 percent since
1985,
there are now more women than men who smoke, according to WHO
statistics. Nearly
equal percentages of men and women now smoke in England and Ireland.

In Greece, more men than women still smoke. But where smoking rates
among men have
decreased 5 percent in the past 20 years, rates among women have nearly
doubled.

In Berlin, many women said they felt women tended to smoke more than
men. "I don't
know any woman who doesn't smoke," said Sevdag Galleski, 38, wrapped in
an elegant
long gray coat as she took a cigarette break with a small crowd of shiverin=
g
co-workers on the tree-lined central concourse of Unter den Linden. Her
employer, a
large multinational, forbids its workers to smoke on the sidewalk
outside its
headquarters on the most glamorous thoroughfare of old East Berlin.

The contrast between male and female smoking habits is particularly
striking in
some of the former Eastern bloc countries, and among less well-educated
women. In
Hungary, between 1995 and 2003, smoking rates among men declined to 42
percent from
49 percent; among women, they rose to 29 percent from 22 percent.

For many youths in these countries, experts said, smoking is connected
with a touch
of post-Communist nihilism as well as the desire to emulate what they
perceive to
be cool in the West.

In Germany's hip Prinz magazine, advertisements for cigarettes are mixed
with ads
for skis, fast cars and Armani cologne. One proclaims that Pall Mall
cigarettes are
"New York's taste," displaying a New York street scene with a yellow
taxi and a
bus - without mentioning that smoke-free New York is today a smoker's worst
nightmare.

Outside Berlin's State Opera House, in the city's east, a cluster of
girls in red
vests who were about to begin their shifts as attendants sent a cloud of
smoke over
their heads. "To me it's no problem - I like smoking and I'm not really
concerned
about the effects," said Thea Rossler, 23.

In some parts of Europe, well-educated girls and women are joining the
ranks of
smokers as well. In studies of teenagers in Scotland, it was mostly the
"top girls"
who smoked, Amos said. The top boys, who tended to be interested in
sports, had
lower smoking rates, she added.

Anne Carolen Weidner, a public relations officer with a steel workers'
federation
in Germany, gave up smoking just last year, when she was diagnosed with
breast
cancer at age 37.

"Definitely it's more the women who are smoking among my friends - and
these are
women who have good jobs and professions," she said. "It goes with an
image of a
strong woman who is independent, who can succeed at both her family and
her work."

"I think advertising has promoted that."

Smoking has been linked to a wide range of illnesses, from cancer to
heart disease.
The clearest tie is to lung cancer, but cervical and ovarian cancer have
been
associated with smoking as well. Although cigarette companies have tried
to promote
"light" cigarettes to women, scientists have concluded that these brands
are just
as addictive and dangerous to health as conventional varieties.

Natalie Caldarola, 27, who works in a Berlin shoe store, said she would
not mind if
Germany followed the lead of countries like Ireland, which has banned
smoking in
restaurants and bars.

"I started at school when I was 15 and I know I have to stop, but you are
surrounded by it here," she said. "As always, I say 'maybe next year.'
And then
next year, it's 'next year' again."

But Germany is not likely to follow soon. While the European Union has
sought to
impose a ban on tobacco advertising in all of its member states, Germany ha=
s
protested that decision. Cigarette taxes, and therefore prices, remain
low in
Germany compared with other EU states. The price of a pack of cigarettes
is just
over =E2=82=AC3 in Germany, compared with more than =E2=82=AC5 in Italy and=
 France.

P=C3=B6tschke-Langer said tobacco companies had been host to promotional
activities to
attract young girls, sponsoring movies, for example, or giving away free
cosmetics
along with cigarettes. German schools have accepted donations of
computers from
tobacco companies.

"We are fighting for a smoke-free environment," P=C3=B6tschke-Langer said,
"but we have
a long way to go."