HEALTH-PHILIPPINES: Tobacco Industry Zeroes in on Women

• by Diana Mendoza (manila)
• Wednesday, April 01, 2009
• Inter Press Service

Roa lost both her parents and her husband to lung cancer as a result of smoking. These days, she continues to tell people to avoid getting into the smoking habit. This was also her husband’s crusade during the last months of his life. She is happy to see that today, the ‘no smoking’ campaign has become more widely implemented in many cities in the Philippines. The ban is imposed not only in enclosed places but in public areas as well.

Still, anti-tobacco advocates like her continue to face an uphill battle because of aggressive advertising by the tobacco industry and marketing strategies that target excitable but vulnerable youth. 'Despite the campaign that it is unhealthy to smoke, there’s this twisted notion now being projected on the youth, especially young women, that smoking is cool and glamorous,' she said.

Given its burgeoning youth population, the Philippines is now one of the developing countries that are attracting the tobacco industry -- and women are its primary targets.

Isabel Santillan, executive vice president of BBDO Guerrero Ortega Philippines, an advertising agency, said the industry aims to change perceptions and behaviour in order to sell cigarettes to women. Through aggressive advertising, the industry is shifting to marketing tactics that appeal to young women.

In developed countries, she said, the trend started when advertising companies portrayed glammed up, liberated and empowered women in cigarette advertisements. This continues today, if a bit modified.

This started in Thailand, she said, where cigarette companies use such buzzwords as ‘Silk Cut’ when they launched perfume-shaped cigarette holders. There is a ‘Camel no 9’ that is a play on the perfume ‘Chanel no 5’ that came out in print advertisements in fashion magazines for young women.

Santillan said these ad schemes attract more women. 'They look at a cigarette stick as a fashion accessory, and that prompts them to aspire to smoke,' she said. 'The stereotypical sophisticated and glamorous image of women is that they smoke.' For many young women whose fathers and elder male relatives smoke, the smell of tobacco on men also becomes a form of attraction.

Dr Maricar Limpin, executive director of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control Alliance Philippines (FCAP), supported this observation, adding that women tend to seek equal rights with men in smoking. 'While men average 14 sticks a day, women smoke nine sticks a day,' she said.

Limpin said peer pressure is not all the main factor in why people pick up the smoking habit. Instead, it is the advertising ploy of cigarette companies that ‘empower’ women to smoke, projecting images that smoking is 'a woman thing’.

In the Philippines, she said, 34.8 percent of the country’s 85 million people smoke. Of these, 56 percent are males and 8.6 percent are females. For the 13-15 year old age bracket, the figure is 15 percent.

She said the industry tends to attract women who do not know the ill effects of smoking or if they do, tend to try it anyway. This should be addressed by anti-smoking advocates, as well as by schools and parents.

She said smoking affects women’s fertility rate because it lowers the ability to give birth. Women smokers suffer miscarriages, spontaneous abortions, constrictions to the placenta, stillbirths or poor fetal growth. It also worsens diseases like influenza, asthma, tuberculosis and ulcers, apart from causing teeth and oral damage, bad breath and dry skin. Blood flow is constricted so nutrients do not get to the skin. Wrinkles appear on the sides of the eyes.

There are 4,000 chemical compounds found in a cigarette stick. One is ammonia, which hastens the absorption of nicotine, the addictive substance that gives one a high. There is no difference between a nicotine and a heroin addict, Limpin maintained.

Other harmful chemicals in cigarettes are acetic acid, formaldehyde, carbon dioxide, which is formed once a stick is lighted, tar, which causes discoloration of the teeth, gums and nails (yellow nail syndrome), DDT, butane, and hydrogen cyanide. There are also 43 known cancer-causing agents in a cigarette.

Lawyer Josephine Buenaseda, a legal consultant of FCAP Philippines, said the government derives a yearly income of 26 billion pesos (559.48 million U.S. dollars) from tobacco, mainly through taxes. However, it spends 149 billion pesos (3.08 billion dollars) each year on health care and lost productivity due to tobacco-related diseases.

She said the Philippines has a very strong anti-smoking campaign. But as a developing country, it remains a battleground between this lobby and one of the biggest industries in the world.

According to Buenaseda, the global tobacco epidemic is being driven by three key players: Philip Morris, the producer of Philip Morris and Marlboro, British American Tobacco Inc that produces Dunhill and Pall Mall cigarettes and Japan Tobacco Inc that produces Camel, Winston, Mild 7, and Salem. In the Philippines, the companies are Fortune Tobacco and La Suerte.

'All these companies interfere in tobacco control by weakening policy, law and regulation, delaying or stopping the enactment and implementation of the law and circumventing and breaking the law,' she said.

Buenaseda added that they also publicise their activities reflecting corporate social responsibility, such as donating money to cooperatives and foundations, providing scholarships, and sponsoring sports and music events.

Currently pending in the Philippine Congress is a bill that seeks to put graphic health warnings in cigarette packs, as is being done now in Thailand and Vietnam. The images will be graphic pictures of mouth sores, cancers, deformed lungs due to smoking, and other images.

Senator Pia Cayetano, the bill’s proponent, has urged women to write their local legislators to lobby for its passage.

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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