Tobacco Documents Online

JLindheim & Company St Qi13i6J96 m6:16 PM 01i2 JLINDHEIM & COMPANY 832 Broadway New York, New York 10003 PHONE: (212) 539-1262 FAX: (212) 539-1252 PLEASE NOTE OUR NEW ADDRESS, PHONE, AND FAX NUMBERS March 3, 1996 TO: David Greenberg FROM: J. Lindheim RE: Youth Smoking ~ ~u- ~,-- ~ I've looked over the Youth plans presented at Megeve and agree with you that there are a number of good ideas there which deserve further development. It was, as I had suspected, very useful to me to see this stuff before talking to Linehan about the issue. I was surprised how few of them put much emphasis on "working with others to develop communications programs aimed at youth to discourage them from smoking". This is, it seems, the heart of the Dutch program, and it is sort of hinted at in the Belgian, Italian, and Spanish programs. (I suppose you could include the German industry's ad campaign, but I wouldn't). This area is to me the untapped possibility on this issue since it should be an approach that a) "everyone can agree on" including the trade, the government, the industry, b) makes a visible and tangible effort which the public could feel and touch; and c) is in no way incompatible with all of our positions on "why kids smoke" and how to effectively deal with the problem. By focusing on this approach, one can draw attention to the real reasons why N CA 0 ~ 0 v job w 0 w

JLindheim & Gompany ? Qi1316i96 06:17 PM p 212 kids want to smoke, thereby robbing the other side of the ability to focus this issue on the wrong solutions, eg. fiscality. Look, for instance, at the French presentation. It does a superb job of analyzing the tricky aspects of all the usual options. But, rather than do a "voluntary AAA program with retailers" which is somehow supposed to convince them not to sell to kids under 16 when there is no law to that effect, why not take a Dutch approach and put together a panel of wisemen to discover what kinds of messages and programs would really work to achieve a reduction in teenage smoking in France? As for AAA / access programs, I do find it hard to imagine them without a legal age on the books. If I read the presentations correctly, that condition only exists in Spain, and Holland is the only market suggesting it as an option. My own view is that AAA is a uniquely US approach which is based on the existence of minimum age laws and the need to enforce them. (It is also an effort, as you know, to focus attention/regulation away from marketing restrictions as the answer). I don't see why, in all the European markets where you don't have such minimum age laws but you do already have some fairly restrictive marketing restrictions (by code or by law), you would put the emphasis on access when it is such a divisive issue with the trade and, as is pointed out in one presentation, runs the risk of adding to contraband and other problems. Why not attack where we have consistently said the problem is --- on the demand side. My understanding is that in both Italy and Spain there have been fairly substantial declines in youth smoking -- why not give a grant to someone to find out how this was achieved? Final thought: the real objective here, as nearly all the presentations point out, is to rob the other side of their ability to use this issue as a generalized club which would hurt us. These presentations show that there is no one right answer to how to do that -- each country is truly different and requires a somewhat different approach. AAA is the U.S.'s.