Unidentified:	"Gentlemen, the tobacco industry has a very serious multi billion dollars problem. We need more cigarette smoker, pure and simple. Every day, two thousand Americans stop smoking and another eleven hundred also quit. Actually, technically, they die. That means that this business needs three thousand fresh new volunteers every day. So, forget about all that. Can the heart disease, emphysema, stroke stuff. Gentlemen, we're not in his business for our health."

	Leung:--------	That's just one of the powerful ads you can see on TV aimed at demonising the tobacco industry across North America. The anti smoking war is alive and well in this province. It's been a while since you were allowed to light up in your workplace. In a growing number of BC communities, you can no longer smoke in your favorite restaurant and our provincial government is the first in the country to file a law suit against tobacco companies. According to the BC health ministry, we spend $1.5 billion a year treating people with smoke related illnesses. The BC government wants cigarette makers to pay those costs. But is attacking the tobacco industry a way to stop the smoking epidemic?

	Unidentified:	"We have to sell cigarettes to your kids. We need half a million new smoker a year just to stay in business. So we advertise in you schools, at candy counters we lower our prices. We have to, nothing personal, you understand. The tobacco industry: how low will they go to make a profit?"

	Leung:--------	A very provocative ad, sensational some would say. I'm joined by four people today to debate our topic. Is attacking why tobacco industry a way to stop smoking epidemic. To my right professor Richard Pollay is with the faculty of commerce at U.B.C. Dr. Frederic Bass is with the B.C. doctors stop smoking program. John Luik is a public policy consultant, some of his clients include tobacco companies in Canada. Spider Robertson is a sci-fi author living in Vancouver and also a smoker. Welcome all of you. Spiker, let's go to you first. What do you think of ads like the ones you just saw? Spider Robertson: (author) I must say I'm impressed, they finally learned the user of satire. It's extremely effective when you haven't got any actual facts and they're making some good commercials now. I'II be even more impressed and more terrified if they start actually running them during the hours when anyone's actually watching T.V. As you know most anti-smoking commercials paid with your dollars tend to run at three a.m. between episodes of the James Bond movie.

	Pollay:--------	That's a good point. They should be aired more frequently and more in prime time. There are lots of facts in support of that kind of advertising. I mean the business about targeting kids is well documented by a large number of firms and a large number of legal cases now.

	Luik:-----------	I'd like to know what we mean by the targeting of kids. I mean I think the ad is amusing simply because it's so bad.

	Leung:--------	Are we taking about the first one or the second one.

	Luik:-----------	Let's talk about the first on that showed the cigarette executives sitting around. The important part about this and you don't have to look at the tobacco industry, look at the studies done all over the world in medical journals, if the tobacco industry never advertised another cigarette, a substantial number of people are going to smoke simply because they exist. I like people when they talk about this to simply think about marijuana which I is not advertised at all and yet in home province, the addiction research foundation which does quarterly surveys of kids on drugs finds that substantially more kids under the age of nineteen in the last ten years have been using marijuana than tobacco or alcohol. So when people show a commercial like that they you have to target kids or advertise, I say, I don't think so, I think marijuana use, it's interesting to me, the province of Saskatchewan, which has an interesting policy about advertising, for fifty eight years had no advertising of spirits, beer or wine and people drank. Advertising just doesn't have a connection.

	Pollay:--------	There is a very well established connection on many levels. You're point's valid that even without advertising there's still going to be some consumption but advertising increases the rate of consumption.

	Luik:-----------	There are no studies that show that.

	Pollay:--------	There are many studies that show that and there are many studies that show the industry's targeting of youth.

	Luik:-----------	I think professor Pollay that one of the things you argued in fact was rejected by the Supreme Court of Canada. The Supreme Court of Canada found that there was, in fact, no evidence, either internationally or in Canada that advertising led anyone to become a smoker or increased the consumption. I suggest that maybe you need to read that case.

	Leung:--------	Let's go to Fred who's hasn't had a chance to speak yet.

	Bass:-----------	Okay, the journal of the American medical association, February 18th, 1998, a study of adolescents who were not smoking and it concludes that thirty four percent of experimentation in California con be attributed to tobacco advertising. The influence in fact was more powerful that whether parents smoked.

	Luik:-----------	I'm quite aware of the Pierce study and if you look at it carefully you'll find that it is very flawed and probably doesn't prove anything. Let's just go back to the point Dr. Bass about Canada...

	Bass:-----------	You who don't know methodology can call Pierce flawed, but in fact...

	Luik:-----------	I know a fair bit about methodology.

	Leung:--------	We can't argue on the merits or not of one study or another but do you think these are as effective, these kinds of advertising.

	Bass:-----------	Well what I think is not as important as what you think. And when these ads were exposed to juveniles in a large number of focus groups in California, again the journal of the American medical association, this time at March 11th of this year, the highly effective ones according to kids, in focus groups was this one, the industry manipulation of kids ad.

	Robinson:--	You're part of an industry as well and for the last ten years your industry has spent increasing amounts of money on an ever growing ad campaign. Having to .....then years ago a smoker was allowed to finish a sentence by an anti smoker. During that time smoking has gone down in every segment of society except the ones you claim to be targeting the fifteen to nineteen year olds. You haven't got a clue why teenagers start smoking. You're doing more harm then good. The only segment of society that's smoking more is the teenagers. They know crap when they hear it.

	Leung:-----------	Let's let Fred answer.

	Bass:-----------	Smoking in the movies is one of the most powerful ads for kids. And if you look at the prevalence of smoking, in the mid 80s, you see it was very low. Now you see an incredibly inappropriate high presentation of smoking called product placement and so you have doctors, you have priests you have everybody and their cousin smoking who wouldn't be in real life. The prevalence in smoking in the movies is way out of proportion. I think that that is one of the most important things.

	Luik:-----------	So the epidemic in Canada since 1991, I think we need to get the facts on the table. Since we've had the ad ban in Canada, since all of this anti smoking rhetoric, all this increase in spending, the rate of smoking, of kids under 19 has gone up astonishingly. So the question is this targeting effective, the answer is no. So the only answer you have, Fred, to this is the ridiculous one that movies have led to this, placement in movies have led to this huge. The answer is the anti smoking movement, the medical movement and in fact the government of Canada don't have any concrete ideas how to get control of this. If in fact they looked at the literature from you own people which I think is wonderful about why in fact kids began to smoke and took some of that to heart, they might begin to solve the problem. All this rhetoric and all these ads don't do anything.

	Leung:--------	We're not hearing anything when we're all talking. Let Fred respond and then I want to throw a question out on the floor.

	Bass:-----------	We do know something that controls smoking in kids. Number one is price, and thanks to smuggling which undercut price, we have five provinces in eastern Canada where the rate of increase in fifteen to nineteen year olds is much higher than it is in the five other provinces that did not do that. Price is number one, number two is controlling the sale to minors. We have a product that's treated like a product. It's an addictive, lethal substance that is treated like candy. If we treated tobacco like we treated alcohol we would not have the epidemic of smoking in kids. But we don't treat it that way, we treat it like it was just another consumer product, which hit isn't.

	Luik:-----------	I think it's interesting because I agree with you about access and I think that's something to be looked at but I think you're wrong when you talk about price. An interesting study that was published last week funded by the national cancer institute in the United States. Two professors at Cornell in fact did a twenty five year study of the correlation of price and kids smoking in the United States found that there was no connection. So I don't think you can say lowering the tax burden in Canada. We had some of the highest taxes in the industrialized world up until 1994 and yet the smoking peak began in 1991 if not in 1990. So you can't say it's price.

	Bass:-----------	That's not true. In Canada in 1979, smoking in age fifteen to nineteen was 44%. In 1979 there was a remarkable increase in the real price of tobacco and in 1991, just before the smuggling began, the prevalence of smoking in that age group went from 44% to 21%.

	Leung:--------	Let's move on from that. I want to look at the health effects. There are new stats out that show that lung cancer is still the leading cause of death for men and women and eighty percent of lung cancers can be attributed somehow to cigarettes. John, what do you think the industry's responsibility is for that?

	Luik:-----------	I think that the industry's responsibility is clearly defined in the terms of what I would call the smoking contract. And what I mean by the smoking contract is that for the last twenty five or thirty years, there's not been a person in Canada who doesn't know about the lethal risks that can be run by being a user of tobacco products. We have some of the world's largest tobacco warnings in terms of packaging. People suggest we have plain packaging of cigarettes in this country. So clearly, anyone who begins smoking is cognizant of the fact that it runs a risk. Therefore they can hardly turn around at a later date and say I began using this product in ignorance. So in fact you want to talk about smoking risks and in fact a couple of those ads do, the other thing about that ad, it's interesting, it fails to point out, you said earlier in you lead in they were from California and Massachusetts. Massachusetts which has had an extremely aggressive campaign of using these sorts of things has had one of the highest increases, last year, according to the state commissioner on youth problems in smoking amongst under 19 year olds of any state in the United States. I'd hardly like Canada or B.C. to start using Massachusetts as a model of how to deal with the problem.

	Leung:--------	Let's go to a user here.

	Robinson:--	The relative effectiveness of various strategies for controlling the behavior of the citizenry, I reject the notion that anyone who has not been appointed by the citizenry to do so has any God damn business controlling their behavior. I think one of the cogent statement on this issue was made to me in the O'Hare airport about a week ago from tourist woman who was stunned to discover that at O'Hare airport you're now not allowed to smoke outdoors. She was dumbfounded and she said to me I do not understand why not you North Americans, the ones who fought fascism and fought nazism, did you not hold the whole world hostage in a nuclear standoff for forty five years because you did not believe that state owns the bodies of its workers. And now you are the fascists, you are the socialists. You are the communists. What happened? I had no explanation to give her. Somewhere deep in human nature there is an urge to tell those guys over there to do what I think is best for them whether they agree with me or not, and if they don't agree with me, even after I've marshaled by superior education and my superior grasp of jargon and terminology, I'II get guys with guns to enforce my wishes. I resent this. I dislike walking into a Safeway and seeing terrorist lies on every cash register saying smoking will kill one of every two smokers which no rational person believes. And knowing that those lies, terrorizing the citizenry are being paid for with my tax dollars.

	Leung:--------	Okay, Rick how do you respond?

	Pollay:--------	Well those lies as you call them are actually backed up with a lot of hard data. No one is pointing guns at you in the fascist model you dictate. All that's really gong on is we're trying to stop the pushing of deadly and addictive drugs on successive generations of kids.

	Robinson:--	If I had attempted to exercise my right to smoke outdoors in a public place in the land of the free and home of the brave, a man with a gun would have come and made me stop sir. That is fascism. I don't care what justifications you come up with for it. The fact is people who are misusing statistics are inhibiting my freedom to walk through the land in comfort. I can't fly in an airplane in safety and health. Do you folks out there know airplanes are more unhealthy since they banned smoking on flights. Do you know that the federal department of transportation did a study and found that the nicotine rate, the suspended particulate rate and the carbon monoxide rate are all higher on a non smoking flight than in a non smoking section of a smoking flight?

	Leung:--------	I want to go back to Rick. Now Rick this whole idea, and I think this is what Spider is trying to say, is that we don't want to be cared for by the government in this way and we don't want to be told what is good for us and what is bad for us.

	Pollay:--------	Consumes have a right to full and complete information about the products they consume and the advertising of this industry has been notoriously uninformative. In fact....

	Bass:-----------	Number one, there is no epidemic that matches the tobacco epidemic. You're talking about cancer in women. If you look at deaths from cancer in Canadian women, what you see if the under breast cancer, you see breast cancer slowly going down like this and in 1993, lung cancer crosses like that and this rise in lung cancer, which is just a fraction of the deaths that are caused by smoking in women, that is a direct function of the marketing of cigarettes by the tobacco industry twenty five years earlier. And that is going to keep going until it levels off in the year 2010 when there'll be more women dying of lung cancer then men.

	Robinson:--	Growth of smoking in women has exactly paralleled the growth of independence in women. As they got tired of men in suits telling them what to do, they got tired of....

	Bass:-----------	That's because the male dominated tobacco industry has manipulated feminism towards their ends.

	Leung:--------	John, go ahead.

	Luik:-----------	I think there are a couple of questions that we really ought to get back to because professor Pollay was talking about the fact of advertising. First of all we need to realize that for about the last eight years there haven't been any tobacco advertising in Canada. We've dealt with that sort of issue. There is no tobacco advertising. So we come back to the actual issue here which is how can we most effectively stop young people from in fact beginning to smoke, which is what you talked about in terms of this. I want to go back to the fact that the scientific literature as opposed to these sort of senseless polemics from the anti-smoking people who never read their own scientific studies. There are a whole host of reasons in fact why children begin to smoke. Top of the list, interestingly, by a study done by the national forum of health in Canada for the Liberal government is the fact that kids do poorly at school. They have poor academic performance, they're illiterate, they drop out of school or in fact they have low self esteem. In fact, the government's own study recommended if we wanted to do more about dealing with the tobacco epidemic, we should invest heavily in keeping kids in school because there was a direct correlation between kids doing poorly at school, dropping out and becoming life long smokers. So I guess my suggestion would be could we quit exchanging attacks and talk about some public policy issues like education in term so f keeping kids in school and preventing them from going on. Instead of focusing our attention on the big enemy out there called the tobacco industry.

	Leung:--------	Okay Rick, go ahead.

	Pollay:--------	Well I absolutely agree that you identified the most vulnerable group just as the tobacco industry identifies the same group for its marketing campaigns. Those groups that need a sense of identity because they're not doing well in school, their prospects are poor are exactly he ones that are most responsive to the cigarette advertising, particularly because that's the way the cigarette advertising is positioned.

	Luik:-----------	Which advertising campaign are you talking about that's going on right now.

	Pollay:--------	There's a Player's campaign all about the independence of the heroes of automobile racing. I passed the billboard on the way in tonight.

	Luik:-----------	It has cigarettes on it, is that correct?

	Leung:--------	John, let's drop this discussion because nobody's hearing anything. Give a brief point.

	Bass:-----------	Because his is such a major epidemic, it is very important for public health to take action and it is very misappropriating political science for you to call strong public health fascism.

	Robinson:--	No, I'm afraid it isn't.

	Bass:-----------	It is the number one cause of premature deaths. There is nothing that matches it. Every three years enough people die in the world that exceeds the number of soldiers killed an all wars this century.

	Leung:--------	We have to wrap this up soon.

	Robinson:--	Let me just say one thing. How about safe cigarettes? Why don't you guys sped your attention, instead of correcting our vicious behavior, making it safe for us. You don't care.

	Bass:-----------	Sixty three percent of the smokers in this province want to stop smoking!

	Leung:--------	We have to go now and I want to ask Rich a question and it has to do again, going back to our original focus question whether or not targeting industry is going to stop. Rick, do you think tobacco will become a political issue as it has in the U.S. with president Clinton saying I want tobacco companies to be held accountable. Do you think that kind of political warfare, if I can call it that con happen here, and I have to, I'm sorry, I have to shut up everybody else. Rick gets the last say, and it's got to be a brief answer.

	Pollay:--------	Surely it can happen here. We often see things going on in Canada as sort of an aftermath of similar events in the U.S. Certainly the evidence coming out of the Canadian corporations is very similar to the evidence that's surfacing in the U.S. corporations so I don't see any reason why we as a public community shouldn't also address the issue.

	Leung:--------	Okay. I thank you all for taking part in this and you all did and we'll let the viewers decide.