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Abstract
In 1983 and 1986, the International Advertising Association (IAA) published an original version and then a revision of a report entitled “Tobacco Advertising Bans and Consumption in 16 Countries,” which were edited by J J Boddewyn, a marketing professor. The reports concluded that tobacco advertising bans have not been accompanied by any significant reduction in tobacco consumption. Opponents of tobacco advertising restrictions trumpeted the IAA reports in print materials, media communications and legislative hearings during the 1980s and beyond. A new analysis of tobacco industry documents and transcripts of tobacco litigation testimony reveals that British American Tobacco ghost-wrote the IAA reports and that the Tobacco Institute (the trade association then representing the major US cigarette manufacturers) helped to arrange for Boddewyn to present the findings to the US Congress and the media. Further research on tobacco industry documents and tobacco litigation transcripts should assess whether tobacco industry sources were responsible for ghost-writing other studies favourable to the industry.
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Footnotes
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Funding: This work was supported by grants from the National Cancer Institute (#CA087486) and the American Legacy Foundation (#6211) to the Michigan Public Health Institute, Center for Tobacco Use Prevention and Research (Okemos, Michigan, USA). The views expressed in this paper do not necessarily represent those of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the American Legacy Foundation or the foundation’s staff or board of directors.
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Competing interests: The author has served as an expert witness in several tobacco-related lawsuits. He has derived no personal income from this work, but his employer (Henry Ford Health System) has charged a fee to secure compensation for his time lost from work because of his service as an expert witness.
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↵i The IAA’s 1989 report indicates that children aged 7–16 years were much more likely to attribute their smoking initiation to personal curiousity (“to see what it was like”) and family and peer influences than to cigarette advertising. In his “Editor’s introduction,” Boddewyn comments that this study “breaks new methodological ground [and] provides strong evidence that advertising plays a negligible role in the initiation of smoking by the young”.15 However, as noted in the US Surgeon General’s 1989 report on smoking and health, marketing experts question the validity of smokers’ assessments of the influence of advertising on their smoking behaviour because “conscious response to advertising is deemed to be a poor index of actual response”.16 Chapman points out additional flaws in the study, one of which was that the survey questions seemed designed so as to minimise the respondents’ likelihood of identifying cigarette advertising as a factor in their smoking: children in the study were asked to name “the most important reason” why they smoked their first cigarette.17