Tobacco ad legend yearns for good ol' days

TRIGAUX E-mail: Click here Archive

© St. Petersburg Times,
published December 2, 2001

To: Tobacco giant Philip Morris

From: The Marlboro Man

Re: Stop your whinin' and sell more cigarettes!

Bet you didn't think you'd hear from me again. But your lily-livered corporate shenanigans forced me to rise from the grave. And that's not easy for a tobacco marketing legend like myself, even if emphysema and lung cancer put me 6 feet under back in 1995.

I'm not much for writing memos, but you're messing up the outrageously profitable tobacco business that I helped build. Massive lawsuits? International tobacco controls? Cigarette advertising bans? Fewer smokers? Company name changes? I pass away and in no time flat you're begging for mercy.

Well, no more. The Marlboro Man is lightin' up and back in the saddle again. But where to begin?

Let's start with this silly new name change from the legendary Philip Morris to Altria. Heck, that sounds like some tree-huggin' society. Your critics say swapping names is just a smokescreen to hide the fact that you are a world leader in cigarettes. Sure sounds like it to me.

And what were you corporate boys thinking when you picked "Altria"? I hear an Alabama company called Altria Healthcare Corp. already uses the name. That's a good one. A tobacco company picks the same name as a health care business.

Some fancy name picker tells you Altria sounds good because it suggests the Latin word altus, meaning "high." And you claim the name change is supposed to convey the breadth of your products beyond cigarettes, including your Miller beer and Kraft food brands.

Hey, you might as well have picked the name Wheeze 'n Cheese instead.

Now let's talk about this litigation mess you're in.

The bad news is you and the other big tobacco companies agreed in the late '90s to pay most of the U.S. states $246-billion in settlements over 25 years. The good news is that even though the anti-smoking folks expected that money would be spent on preventing teen smoking and covering health care costs, that's not happening.

I hear a National Conference of State Legislatures study found more than $13-billion of the $21.3-billion paid so far is going elsewhere, to everything from tax cuts to pork-barrel projects. Only 5 percent has gone to smoking prevention, and 31.6 percent to health care. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gives 43 states failing grades on adequate tobacco education.

Nice work, boys. That means one more generation of American smokers will soon be lifetime customers.

You done pretty good on watering down that lawsuit. You can always count on the greed and shortsightedness of politicians when you hand them billions.

Then there's Florida, where you tobacco boys bungled a lawsuit and got stuck last year with a record-setting, $145-billion punitive-damage award in a smokers' class-action case.

Now I hear you're finally appealing that whopper price tag, arguing the trial procedure was "backward" and full of critical errors. It's about time. You can stall that appeal in court for years to come.

Some of these other recent lawsuits are more bothersome:

You got lucky this fall in West Virginia. Big Tobacco won that first-of-its-kind legal battle when a jury rejected a class-action lawsuit that tried to force tobacco companies into providing free medical checkups for a quarter-million smokers. Nearly identical suits are pending in Louisiana and Oregon.

Next thing you know, some smoker's going to sue you boys so you'll have to pay to whiten his yellowed teeth, freshen his breath and take his smoke-laden wardrobe to the dry cleaners.

In California, you've got your hands full with the largest judgment ever made in an individual smoker's suit. Last June, a Los Angeles jury awarded smoker Richard Boeken, 57 and suffering from lung and brain cancer, more than $3-billion in damages from Philip Morris. Boeken claimed you hid the health dangers of cigarettes. Can't he read the warnings on a pack of smokes?

A judge later reduced the award to $100-million and Philip Morris has appealed even that award as excessive. I hear Boeken smoked Marlboros. I'm flattered, though I could have told him what was coming.

Now some of you big tobacco executives need to keep a closer watch on those health nuts up in Maryland's Montgomery County.

Last month, the county government there finally vetoed legislation that would have regulated smoking in the privacy of people's homes. And that only happened after a flurry of worldwide ridicule and public backlash.

Had that measure become law, it would have set fines of up to $750 for people who smoke in their homes if the smoke crossed property lines and offended neighbors.

I hear conservative commentator and local resident George Will compared the county government to the Taliban on national TV. Smart fella, that George. Send him a couple of Marlboro cartons.

But how did you boys let this nonsense get so far? Don't you know this isn't the end of such tobacco challenges?

And just wait 'til I get my hands on the industry "butt" heads behind last month's introduction of these so-called "safer" cigarettes called Omni and Advance. Omni's bragging about reducing many of the "specific carcinogens" that are a major cause of lung cancer in smokers. And Advance's slogan is "All of the taste, less of the toxins."

Gee, boys, how can the public resist such endearing pitches? Already, the American Medical Association is rippin' your ads as "dangerously misleading." And just last week, the National Cancer Institute issued a report saying people who switch from regular cigarettes to brands marketed as "low tar" or "light" do not reduce their chances of getting diseases related to smoking.

Is this any way to run a tobacco industry?

Now I was all ready to remind you that tobacco's long-term success lies overseas, but I guess you already know that. With a world population boom and the global marketing muscle of the Marlboro Man to help, we ought to be breakin' out the champagne to celebrate our future profits.

Only trouble is, some of these less-developed nations seem to be catching on about the health costs of smoking.

Just last week in Geneva, a United Nations-sponsored tobacco control treaty was hammered out. There's terrible talk about international bans on cigarette ads. Imagine, not wanting my macho figure in magazines and on billboards and TV?

But I'm proud of you boys. You showed your clout. Despite heavy pressure by the World Health Organization, I hear the United States opposed any across-the-board prohibition of tobacco advertising by claiming it violates American free speech guarantees.

Man o' man, that's a good one. Wish I'd thought of it.

Just don't get smug on me. That's how you tobacco boys got in trouble in the first place.

Don't forget that nasty World Health Organization keeps insisting smoking and tobacco-related disease kills 4-million people per year worldwide. The group says deaths are expected to reach 10-million per year by 2030, with 70 percent of them in developing countries.

It's a good thing the Marlboro Man likes you boys. With fatality figures like those, I'd be tempted to say the tobacco industry just might have its own niche in the terrorism business.

Just kidding.

Of course, I still recall when Philip Morris hired me in the early 1960s to portray the Marlboro Man in TV and print ads. You made me smoke up to five packs of Marlboros per take in order to get the right look. Later, you'd send me gift boxes of cigarettes.

By 1985, I had developed emphysema. Lung cancer arrived in 1993. After unsuccessful attempts at chemotherapy and other treatments, I died in 1995.

A year later, my widow sued every cigarettemaker in the country for conspiring to hide facts regarding the addictive nature of nicotine.

Now don't take that personally, boys. As you know, big lawsuits are just another cost of doing business.

Now that I'm back, I'm gonna make sure this tobacco industry stands tall in the saddle.

After all, what have I got left to lose?

-- Robert Trigaux can be reached at trigaux@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8405.

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