Antismoking Groups Flare over Pink Cigarette “Purse Packs”
Antismoking organizations took advantage of the final day of Breast Cancer Awareness Month last Friday to register their protests over Philip Morris USA’s plans to introduce a new Virginia Slims cigarette product with heightened appeal for young women.
The company has said it will launch new Virginia Slim “Super Slim” cigarette in the first quarter of 2009. The cigarette, in both light and ultra light flavors, is smaller in diameter than a standard cigarette and will come in a narrow pink rectangular box with squared ends. While the box will hold the standard 20 cigarettes, it will be slimmer than a standard pack and will apparently be marketed as a “Purse Pack”.
A joint statement issued Friday by a number of health-advocacy non-profit groups scored Philip Morris for targeting women, and particularly young women, with the new product.
“Philip Morris shows contempt for women and their health by putting a pink gloss on a product that causes lung cancer and heart disease, two of the leading killers of women,” read a joint statement issued by the American Cancer Society Action Network, the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, the American Medical Association and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
According to the statement, the pink “purse packs” will make smoking look feminine and fashionable, while the use of “slim” in the name will set up a link between smoking and weight loss—something that might appeal to young women with body-image issue.
The groups also call for Congress to enact a pending bill to give the Food and Drug Administration jurisdiction over tobacco products, including regulating the use of the term “light” in cigarettes and imposing tighter restrictions on tobacco marketing that kids might see. The House has approved a rule giving the FDA that power; it now waits in the Senate.
The American Legacy Foundation, the non-profit group behind the Truth antismoking campaigns, joined with the Susan G. Komen for the Cure organization to protest the new Virginia Slims products.
The new “Purse Packs,” wrapped in pink packaging and clearly designed to appeal to young women, present a serious public health issue at a time when tobacco-related diseases kill more than n 178,000 in the U.S. annually, according to the two groups.
“Philip Morris’ timing of this announcement is particularly outrageous,” ALF president and CEO Cheryl Healton said in the statement. “The pink ‘Purse packs’ of cigarettes—the deadliest consumer product in the world—are an insult to the women and their families who have suffered from breast cancer.”
Cigarette makers have run afoul of many of these same advocacy groups before for allegedly designing their products, packaging and marketing campaigns to appeal to women and underage children. Most recently, R.J. Reynolds caught flack from the same opponents a year ago for introducing its “Camel No. 9” brand extension.
The groups charged that packaging for that Camel product, featuring shiny black boxes with flowery designs in light blue or hot pink, was meant to appeal to women, and that even the name was intended to carry connotation of a famous Chanel perfume. Ad taglines called the cigarettes ‘light and luscious”, and one creative said a new thinner size was “available in stiletto.”
In the summer of 2007 ALF and other groups urged the publishers of 11 women’s magazines such as Vogue, Cosmopolitan and Glamour to stop accepting ads for Camel No. 9. About 40 members of Congress, led by Rep. Lois Capps, D-CA, added their support to the effort.
But the magazine publishers refused to drop the ads, saying that Congress should set up clearer legal guidelines for tobacco advertising. Without those, the publishers said, bowing to pressure from outside groups to refuse the ads is “at odds with the basic fabric of our country’s legal system.”
