The news that tobacco companies are not abiding by a 1998 agreement whereby they would stop promoting cigarettes to children is not exactly surprising.
It is disappointing though, and pressure should be applied to the tobacco companies to get them to stop targeting children.
According to a report published earlier this month in the New England Journal of Medicine, the companies continue to advertise in youth-oriented magazines those brands that are popular with youths.
Researchers found that immediately after the settlement, advertising involving three brands popular with youths — Marlboro, Camel and Newport — increased.
Tobacco companies, researchers found, spend considerably more money advertising youth brands in youth-oriented publications than they do for brands (Winston and Virginia Slims, for example) targeted to adults. That is the case both before and after the settlement.
Still, with overall tobacco use on the decline in the United States, the tobacco companies are becoming increasingly aggressive in foreign countries.
According to a report in last Friday's New York Times, a new study of schoolchildren 13 to 15 years of age in 68 countries, conducted by the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that about 11 percent of the children in Latin America and the Caribbean were offered free cigarettes by a tobacco company representative in 1999 and 2000.
In Russia, nearly 17 percent said they had been given free cigarettes. In Jordan the figure climbed to 25 percent.
"This is the right time for the tobacco industry to seduce children overseas. They are looking to increase the number of smokers in developing countries and elsewhere abroad because in the United States they are losing their market," Vera da Costa e Silva, director of WHO's tobacco program, told the New York Times.
And a study published this month in the British Medical Journal states that smoking will kill one-third of all the young men in China within the next few decades unless habits there change.
More needs to be done to portray smoking for what it is — an insidious habit that causes serious health problems and significantly lowers life expectancy.
Nationally, only 5 percent of the money being given to the states as part of the tobacco settlement is being used for smoking prevention, according to the CDC. The CDC believes that at least 20 percent needs to go to tobacco prevention programs for there to be a significant impact.
Increased funding and increased awareness by parents and their children are needed to win the war against tobacco.