State officials are starting a $28.6 million ad campaign, financed by a tax on cigarettes, that they hope will convince three-quarters of California's smokers to kick the habit by the year 2000.
Beginning Wednesday, ads with some of the strongest language ever used to attack smoking and tobacco companies will appear on television, radio, in newspapers and on billboards throughout the state, said Dr. Kenneth Kizer, head of the state Department of Health Services.The money for the effort is coming from a 25-cent per pack tax hike authorized under Proposition 99, a referendum passed last year. That brought the total state tax to 35 cents a pack.
The TV commercials are aimed especially at youths, pregnant women and minorities. They sharply condemn the way tobacco companies sell their products.
One commercial shows a smoke-filled room, packed with cynical executives devising a marketing campaign for cigarettes.
One executive discusses the need to lure 3,000 new smokers every day to replace smokers who die from tobacco-related illnesses or who quit.
"We're not in business for our health," the executive sneers.
"This is going to be a media campaign about a media campaign - as much about hype as hygiene," says one advertisement, running in 30 newspapers. It accuses the tobacco industry of "predatory marketing, the selective exploitation of the young, the selling of suicide."
Kizer said the 15-month campaign will be bigger than any run before.
"The average state spends about $100,000 a year on anti-tobacco messages and education," he said.
But the tobacco industry, Kizer said, spent about $3.2 billion in 1988 for advertising and promotion.
The state hopes the campaign, in tandem with teaching programs, will lead to a 20 percent decrease in smoking by June 1991 and a 75 percent reduction by 2000.
About one in four of California's 29 million residents smoke, buying more than 2 billion packs of cigarettes a year.