The Globe and Mail

Ottawa exposes cigarette companies Imperial Tobacco was obsessed with luring Canadian teens into smoking, documents reveal

Get them while they're young seems to have been a key marketing strategy for Imperial Tobacco Ltd., Canada's largest cigarette manufacturer, according to company documents released yesterday by the federal government.

"ITL has always focused its efforts on new smokers, believing that early perceptions tend to stay with them throughout their lives," according to the text of a 1989 slide presentation. "ITL clearly dominates the young adult market today and stands to prosper as these smokers age and as it maintains its highly favorable youth presence."

The federal government released 10,000 pages of tobacco-industry documents yesterday as Health Minister Allan Rock ramped up his publicity campaign against the industry.

"I think the documents demonstrate that although the Canadian tobacco industry has been saying they are different from their American cousins, they're not," Mr. Rock said. "We see the same pattern of focusing on kids, focusing on people trying to quit, trying to keep and build the market."

Imperial Tobacco rejected the accusation, saying it "has never engaged in activities for the purpose of increasing the total size of the cigarette market, that is attracting more people to smoking than would have been the case otherwise, or to 'target' young non-smokers, or young smokers who were not of adult age."

The documents released by the Health Department are drawn from a huge cache of industry papers held at a repository in Guildford, England. They have been made public as part of the legal settlement in a case against the tobacco industry in the United States.

They focus mainly on Imperial Tobacco, whose products -- which include the Player's and du Maurier brands -- dominate the Canadian cigarette market. They reveal a portrait of a company preoccupied with the gradual decline of smoking rates in Canada. The documents repeatedly identify young smokers as the key to keeping the market for cigarettes strong.

One document from 1979 describes a research study called Project Plus/Minus, which looked at smokers between the ages of 15 and 19. "As [the number of young people] from the baby boom diminishes and market potential matures, we should better understand what their smoking and quitting behaviors are today."

Later on, it describes Plus/Minus as a plan to "update our portraits of starters and quitters, explore starters' smoking history, attitudes and behaviors, explore causal factors leading to quitting and ultimately provide better predictors."

Six years later, the company continued to undertake major research in this area. There are transcripts of "focus groups" conducted for Imperial Tobacco in 1985. The idea was apparently to illuminate the psychology that motivates young people either to smoke or not.

One surprising letter discusses a research proposal from a Dr. V. Knott at the Royal Ottawa Hospital suggesting a long-term study that would involve electroencephalogram (EEG) readings -- which measure the brain's electrical activity -- of 11-year-old children. The youngsters would be studied until age 16 when some of them, presumably, would have begun smoking. Imperial Tobacco apparently hoped this research would help identify the physiological basis for smoking.

Royal Ottawa Hospital, which is a psychiatric facility, said yesterday that Dr. Knott has conducted research there involving nicotine and its possible use in relation to Tourette's syndrome, a condition that manifests itself in nervous tics.

Dr. Knott could not be reached for comment and the hospital was unable to confirm whether the research proposal discussed in the documents was ever carried out. Using its knowledge of the psychology of young smokers, Imperial Tobacco tried to tailor its marketing strategies for its leading brands. One document, based on a survey of teenagers and young adults, says it is important for the company's advertisers to be "mindful" of young people's attitudes: "It gives them considerable creative latitude if they wish to penetrate the younger generation's realm of concerns."

In its statement yesterday, Imperial Tobacco said there was "nothing new" in the documents and maintained they were taken out of context. It pointed out, for example, that the legal age for smoking was still 16 at the time this age group was studied.

Mr. Rock will continue his antismoking campaign today when he meets with Jeffrey Wigand, the former U.S. tobacco company executive who is portrayed as the hero in the current Hollywood movie The Insider.