Daily Doc: PM, Nov. 20, 1978: Justifying The Social Cost
Daily Doc: Justifying The Social Cost
Title: A Public Relations Strategy
PM, Nov. 20, 1978
Bates #: 2501160781/0803
May 13, 2000
What the tobacco industry (TI) can and cannot discuss publicly receives quite a bit of consideration between the industry and its public relations arms. With regard to the "social costs" argument against smoking (the idea that smokers cost society more in lost work time, treatment, hospitalization, etc.), TI public relations firms like this one, Campbell Johnson, Ltd., mused that "with a general lengthening of the expectation of life we really need something for people to die of. " To explain people's overall blase' reaction to information that tobacco can kill, Campbell Johnson explains to the Tobacco Advisory Council (TAC), that for the wealthier, more developed countries, in the absence of
"[W]ar, poverty and starvation...cancer, as the disease of the rich... may have some predestined part to play. The argument is obviously not one that the tobacco industry could use publicly. But its weight, as a psychological factor in perpetuating people's taste for smoking as an enjoyable if risky habit, should not be under-estimated."
CITATION
Title: A Public Relations Strategy
Type of Document: Report
Author: Campbell Johnson Ltd.
Recipient: Tobacco Advisory Council (TAC)
Date: 19781120
Site: Philip Morris document site http://www.pmdocs.com/
Page Count 23
Bates No. 2501160781/0803
URL: http://www.pmdocs.com/getallimg.asp?DOCID=2501160781/0803
Litigation Usage: N/A
Found Using Search Criteria: WHO and strategy
QUOTES
(From Sec. 2.6, Page 4)
But it may be doubted whether the re-iteration of the doctors' message on the smoking-linked diseases had anything like the effect they hoped for. Familiarity has bred, if not contempt, certainly a degree of indifference. May people may have more than a sneaking sympathy for the implications of the view expressed in a "Times" leader at the time of the second Royal College of Physicians report. This raised the question whether the Government should respond to the dangers of smoking "by going beyond a general endeavor to see that the facts and the most probable inferences to be drawn from them are sufficiently appreciated." It added that "there is this important difference between the epidemics attributable to smoking and other epidemics to prevent which public health regulation gave been imposed: smokers directly involve only themselves in their diseases." And in commenting on the alleged economic costs to the nation of the ill effects of smoking, it asked whether the Royal College of Physicians had taken account of the savings in support and medical attention after retirement in those cases where death before retirement had been induced by smoking. "It is part of the gruesome equation that tobacco has the social function of limiting the number of elderly dependents that the economy must support."
2.7 This last point, a brutally realistic one, implies that, with a general lengthening of the expectation of life we really need something for people to die of. In substitution for the effects of war, poverty and starvation, cancer, as the disease of the rich, developed countries, may have some predestined part to play. The argument is obviously not one that the tobacco industry could use publicly. But its weight, as a psychological factor in perpetuating people's taste for smoking as an enjoyable if risky habit, should not be under-estimated.
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