Joe Camel’s Tracks

The FDA can prove tobacco companies put cigarettes where kids are likely to be.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Why is the tobacco industry resisting the Food and Drug Administration’s efforts to crack down on tobacco sales to minors?

Because the tobacco industry needs kids. Each year, about 1.3 million smokers kick the habit. Another 420,000 die. To replace these ex-smokers, the tobacco industry works hard to recruit young people. “Each and every day, another 3,000 teenagers become smokers,” says FDA Commissioner David Kessler. “Young people are the tobacco industry’s primary source of new customers in this country.”

The average smoker begins by age 15, and is a daily smoker by age 18. Though smoking levels are declining among adults, smoking is on the rise among those under 19. Michele Bloch of the American Medical Women’s Association warns that kids who start smoking every day end up as statistics a few decades later. “Fully half of all long-term smokers, especially those who begin in their teenage years, will be killed by tobacco,” Bloch says. “Of those, half will die early, in middle age.”

The FDA has amassed enormous quantities of evidence that prove tobacco companies deliberately target kids. An R.J. Reynolds subsidiary in Canada, in a report titled “Youth 1987,” studied the attitudes of “young men and women in the 15 to 24 age range,” noting that the research could be “applied to better decision-making in regard to products and programs directed at youth.” An earlier Philip Morris report stated, “The 16- to 20-year-old begins smoking for psychosocial reasons. The act of smoking is symbolic: It signifies adulthood. He smokes to enhance his image in the eyes of his peers.”

Similarly, in a memo from 1990, R.G. Warlick, an RJR division manager in Oklahoma, urges his tobacco sales representatives to emphasize sales calls to stores “located across from, adjacent to, [or] in the vicinity of the High Schools.” And no wonder: RJR’s Joe Camel campaign, backed by a company research program called FUBYAS (First Usual Brand Young Adult Smokers), pushed Camel’s share of the youth market from roughly 3 percent in 1988 to 13 percent in 1993. A 1991 survey in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that Joe Camel is as recognizable to 6-year-olds as Mickey Mouse.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate