Mike Salsbury/The Olympian
Mary Selecky displays some of the messages used in the Department of Health's anti-smoking campaign.

TV, movie images of smoking make education more difficult

JIM CARLILE, THE OLYMPIAN

Cigarette companies peddle the same image they did when Jane Neuharth started smoking in 1974. Suave, sexy, manly, liberated and fun, depending on the brand.

"I am pretty concerned with the image of smoking because I have three children. I don't want them to be tricked into addiction because of a seductive image," said Neuharth, who quit smoking after 10 years. It's the image, she said, that helped sucker her in when she started.

Washington state, however, has taken a lead in making sure kids don't think smoking is seductive. For a lot of people, cigarettes now conjure up images of smoking through a hole in your throat or watching the contents being squeezed out of a smoker's aorta. This is the result of the efforts of the Washington state Department of Health and its secretary, Mary Selecky.

Every time someone smokes on TV or in a movie, it makes her job harder, Selecky said.

"Every time we see a positive reinforcement (of smoking), it has to be changed over and over and over again," she said. "There's no doubt that the marketing techniques and advertising budgets of tobacco companies outstrip what we are doing in Washington state."

Indeed, in 1997, cigarette companies spent $5.66 billion dollars promoting their products.

Before the big tobacco settlement, the entire budget for anti-smoking efforts by the state was $2.5 million.

Things are looking up, though.

The 1998 settlement between the tobacco industry and 46 states resulted in a windfall for Washington -- $4.5 billion over 25 years. More than $5 million over the past year has already gone toward a media campaign involving the commercials.

The result has been a series of graphic commercials including the 26-year-old with a fat face she got from her medication; Zack, the boy whose father died as a result of smoking; and the aorta-squeezing ad.

"I'm all in favor of those ads," said Mike Baram, an Olympia resident who smoked for 17 years. "If someone had given me the same shock treatment 40 years ago, I probably would never have started."

Selecky said the effectiveness of the ads is being monitored through telephone surveys, but that's not the only way she gets feedback.

"I'll find myself on the plane coming to Seattle from Spokane," she said. "Somebody would say, 'What do you do?' and I'd say, 'Department of Health.' A woman said, 'I think I saw one of your ads. Eeew.' I said, 'You must have seen aorta.'"

People react to that ad and remember it, she said.

Debi, the woman who smokes out of the hole in her throat, has also gotten much attention.

"When I see that poor woman smoking out of the hole in her throat, it makes me shudder and think, 'There but for the grace of God, it could have been me," said Gay Sorensen, Olympia, an ex-smoker.

The smoking ads have already run 20,000 times. By the end of June they will have run an additional 27,000 times.

"I like those provocative commercials because I know they tell the truth. I have worked on a cancer ward for ear-nose-throat patients and that image is really very tame," said Neuharth of the aorta ad. "But it makes my children gasp and they want me to explain it. I hope that being inoculated with truth will help them sometime down the road when cigarettes seem cool to their companions."

A new message

Selecky has worked for the state of Washington since 1975 and, during that time, she has seen immense leaps in public perception of cigarettes and laws forbidding their use in certain areas.

"Then, smoking was not banned in public places. Hospitals, public buildings, movie theaters," all had smoking areas, she said. "We really have a very different culture now. The message today is that we're going to make it hard for you to smoke."

Smoking laws aren't the only things that have changed. The image of smoking itself has shifted. "The era I grew up in the 60s...social norms gave you a message that smoking women were fast women," Selecky said.

That didn't stop her from smoking for a few years, though.

"In college, you'd pick up a cigarette every now and then because the girls are sitting around on a Saturday night," she said. She was only a serious, carry-your-own-pack smoker for about two years - which may be why she is so passionate about the subject.

Selecky and her department have launched a three-pronged attack on smoking. Of the major focuses, the first is youth smoking.

"We win a bigger battle if you never start," she said. "The second group is adults who are ready to quit and that's who the quit line is focused at...The third one is pregnant women."

Pregnant women are the only group in which we have seen a significant decrease in tobacco consumption, Selecky said.

For all the other areas, though, Selecky isn't so optimistic.

"We're losing the battle," she said. "We've got to change the tide."

Jim Carlile writes for The Olympian. He can be reached at 357-0204.

Smoking and the movies

- "Licence to Kill" was forced to include a health warning because Philip Morris paid $350,000 to get cigarettes featured in this James Bond movie.

- American Journal of Public Health showed that current movie heroes are three times more likely to smoke than the real-life role models of American society.

- Smoking in movies did not decline over the decades even though the percentage of adults who smoke dwindled from 42.4 percent in 1964 to 25.5 percent in 1990.

- Young adults smoking on camera more than doubled from 21 percent in the 1960s to 45 percent in the 80s.

- From the Dartmouth study of 250 of the top grossing movies between 1988 and 1997, there were 3,346 occurrences of tobacco identified.

- On average, tobacco is shown on screen for only two minutes per movie, and 75 percent of the movies contained less than five minutes of tobacco exposure.

About this series

Today's story is the fifth in a six-week series about quitting smoking. Three Olympian staff members have decided to quit smoking and share their experiences each week of the process. The series also covers topics related to successful quitting.

-Week One: Quitting isn't the problem, it's staying cigarette-free.

-Week Two: Withdrawal symptoms.

- Week Three: Teen smoking.

-Last week: Lifetime smokers who persist despite health problems.

-This week: The image of smoking in society.

-Next week: Free at last: Smokers who have quit for years share how they did it.

Read the entire series

If you have missed any part of the series, you may read it all online at news.theolympian.com/smoking/.

The Olympian Copyright 2000

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