7686: You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby.

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

Big tobacco shifts ads to target world’s women
Marketing focuses on flavored brands, shiny packaging

By Christine Mathias

A sweeping survey of over a dozen developing countries and their attitudes toward tobacco has found that young women are increasingly being lured into the death trap that is cigarette addiction.

Having successfully conquered the global male demographic, the tobacco industry is shifting its focus to the female market with flavored brands and bright-and-shiny packaging.

I started smoking when I was 15, despite having crazy asthma, probably because kids I knew smoked, my mom smoked, and I was convinced of my own invincibility.

I told myself throughout my 20s that I would quit when I decided to have a baby, because I refused to be one of those girls with the bulging abdomen, a glass of Gallo and ash hanging off the end of my Pall Mall. Now I’m in my early 30s, with no desire to have a kid, and my best-laid-plan has gone kaboom.

My husband and I are on the nicotine patch, and I’ve cut my intake by 75 percent, but that last 25 percent seems like a climb.

But I have the benefit of easy access to smoking cessation products, hotlines, free literature and support groups, and, to a lesser degree, skyrocketing tobacco prices to act as a deterrent. The women in the surveyed countries, including Bangladesh, Thailand, and Uruguay aren’t going to walk into Costco and buy three weeks of Nicoderm for 30 bucks.

And with incredibly high numbers of male smokers in these regions, no national campaigns to guilt people into quitting and very few restrictions on advertising and marketing, not smoking begins to lose its luster. Because despite the risks, smoking is delicious—nicotine addiction is insidious and persistent and wonderful all at once.

You might have heard about Kelly Clarkson’s run-in with tobacco marketing overseas—an Indonesian company was sponsoring her concert and put her face on a huge billboard with a pack of smokes; the U.S. outrage was profound and noisy. But it’s par for the course there, where advertising strategies are both audacious and cloying.

We perfected this kind of pandering in the U.S., and the greediest facets of our brand of capitalism have snaked their way into areas of the planet that don’t have the resources to dedicate to prevention.

Christine Mathias is a San Francisco-based writer and radio producer.