Graphic anti-tobacco messages lower intentions to smoke among youth: Research

Legacy strongly supports New York City's Fight to Preserve its Point of Sale Signage Requirement

Statement by Cheryl Healton, DrPH President and CEO of Legacy in Support of the Significant Step in Tobacco Prevention and Cessation

Straight from the longstanding tobacco industry playbook which calls for trying to litigate effective public education programs out of existence, three major tobacco companies – Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds and Lorillard – filed suit last week to block the New York City Board of Health's requirement that retail outlets post hard-hitting anti-tobacco posters where tobacco products are sold. The New York City program, based on successful campaigns in Canada, Australia and other nations, has the real potential to reduce tobacco consumption and save lives. Research indicates that graphic anti-tobacco messages lower intentions to smoke among youth, and promote intentions to quit among adults.  With this requirement, New York City has once again shown itself as a major and innovative public health leader in the United States.

Following overwhelming verdicts of fraud and racketeering in 2006, which were upheld on appeal just last year, Big Tobacco has been trying to rehabilitate its image. However, this lawsuit proves that tobacco companies are fighting as aggressively as ever against reasonable steps to prevent people from becoming addicted to their deadly products and to help smokers quit. Still, these efforts are, by no means, unstoppable. In fact, the industry's concerted, well-funded legal attacks on two of the most successful U.S. anti-tobacco public education programs failed. Legacy successfully fended off Lorillard's five-year effort to kill our proven-successful youth counter-market campaign, truth®, ultimately prevailing in a unanimous Delaware Supreme Court decision. Lorillard and Reynolds also failed in their effort to shutter California's effective tobacco control campaign.

At the same time, the industry's own "anti-tobacco efforts" have shown to be little more than ineffective window-dressing. In particular, their youth campaigns have been widely discredited by peer-reviewed literature with one shown to actually encourage the uptake of smoking by youth.

Tobacco continues to be the leading preventable cause of death in the United States, and effective, hard-hitting anti-tobacco campaigns like the graphic signage requirements in New York City are critical to saving lives. If public health and policy leaders are serious – and we are – about doing everything it takes to put an end to the hundreds of thousands of needless deaths from tobacco in this country every year, we have to implement the toughest warning signs like those being challenged in New York City and then never back down in our work to get them placed in every community from coast to coast. Simply put, public health must always trump tobacco sales. The battle lines have now been drawn in New York, and we commend public health leaders there for fighting the good fight in what will undoubtedly be precedent-setting litigation.