A secret R.J. Reynolds report in 1984 recommended that the company aggressively pitch its cigarettes to "younger adult smokers," a term critics say means teenagers.
R.J. Reynolds, however, said it refers to smokers ages 18 to 24.The company filed the report Wednesday as part of the discovery process in a Minnesota lawsuit, one of at least nine in which states are trying to recover money spent treating tobacco-related illnesses.
"Younger adult smokers are critical to RJR's long-term performance and profitability," says the report, which cited federal research showing smokers begin as early as age 12 and rarely pick up the habit after 25.
"If younger adults turn away from smoking, the industry must decline, just as a population which does not give birth will eventually dwindle," according to a copy of the report obtained by the Associated Press.
Minnesota Attorney General Hubert Humphrey III said "young adult marketing" is "nothing more than a candy-coated euphemism for marketing to kids."
"We have no intention of letting the tobacco industry's Orwellian jargon keep us from discovering the truth," he said.
The 77-page document is central to the state's case, which accuses the tobacco industry of intentionally trying to maintain its markets by appealing to children and teen-agers.
"It is an extremely damning document," said Richard Daynard of the Tobacco Products Liability Project at Northeastern University in Boston.
On a page titled "Younger Adults' Importance as Replacement Smokers," a chart used federal data to show that nearly 10 percent of male smokers had started smoking by age 12, with a median starting age of just under 17, and that no one started after age 25.
R.J. Reynolds spokeswoman Peggy Carter emphasized that the report defined young adult smokers as ages 18 to 24.
"Nowhere in this report does (report author Diane) Burrows suggest that the company market to anyone younger than 18," Carter said.
The secret report was among truckloads of material tobacco companies turned over in response to a demand for any documents concerning nicotine addiction or the relationship between tobacco and children.
The report tracks a half-century of marketing for five key brands: Pall Mall, Winston, Marlboro, Kool and Newport.
The report praised Marlboro, for example, for using the Marlboro cowboy, "a mature, even older man," to respond to the desires of younger adult smokers to express their maturity and independence through smoking.
But it criticized Pall Mall for initially failing to put filters in its cigarettes, saying "Pall Mall became out of step with its times when the cancer scares of the mid-1950s created the filter boom." By the time Pall Mall incorporated filters in 1965, the brand had "few younger adult smokers left to defend," the report said.
It advised the company to capitalize on tested approaches, such as emphasizing the theme of "moving up in the world." It also noted that Hispanics, blacks and females were gaining importance in the market and should be key targets.
The Minnesota case has yielded other documents that tobacco critics call smoking guns. Filed in May, for example, was a secret industry report claiming that Philip Morris and Brown & Williamson boosted sales by deliberately enhancing their cigarettes' nicotine levels.
More than half the states are at least studying the possibility of suing tobacco companies to recover smoking-related health care costs. The Minnesota case is scheduled to go to trial in 1998.