Tobacco Documents Online

e ~ RADIO TV REPOR?S; INC. 4435 WISCONSIN AVENUE, N.W., WASHINGTON, O.C. 20016- 244-3540 FOR PROGA DATE SUBJECT THE TOBACCO INSTITUTE, INC. July 14, 1977 7:00 AM STATION CITY WRC TV NBC Network Washington, O.C. Interview With Or. Evans: Children and Smoking JANE PAULEY: Why do kids start to smoke -- start smoking cigarettes and when do they start, how early? Or. Richard Evans, a professor of psychology at the University of Houston, is director of a study aimed at finding out why. The entire seventh, eighth, and ninth grades in a Houston school district are Involved in this study, which is supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute through Dr. Michaeld Debakey's National Heart Institute at the Baylor College of Medicine. And some of the students are•already involved in the making of films to talk to their young peers of twelve and thirteen about why they start. Dr. Oebakey, first of all ..... OR. RiCHARO EVANS: Or. Evans. PAULEY: Dr. Debakey, excuse me. Or. Evans. OR. EVANS: I will say that I think Or. Debakey is Just a little, shall I say, less likely to be caught in a blackout. PAULEY: Umhum. Well, welcome to New York in any event under these rather trying circumstances for ali of us. But what is it that we're talking about? When do you now know that kids do tend to st•art? OR. EVANS: Well, of course, Jane, the important thing here is that we now know of course that they begin smoking ear- lier, and one of the most shocking new findings which appeared in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Asso- ciation shows that certain types of lung cancer that really we would ordinarily expect to find in people, say, in`their forties and fifties and over, is now beginning to appear In individuals OFFICES IN: NEW YORK • LOS ANGELES • CHICAGO . OETROIT • ANO OTHER PRINCIPAL CfT1E5 Nu.nal suopW.d by R.aa TV Rsaorta, Ina. m.y a* ua.a tor 1ts uid nUnne..aurms.a_Gny. u m;y not bW r.praauow. 3atl aa pubrCy a.mansvuw or .xh+bind. TIMN 0083570 rz87o7

2 perhaps in their middle and late thirties. This indicates of course that children are beginning to smoke eariier, and of course this means they're moving back to where they're beginning to smoke now at the age of nine, ten, eleven, or twelve, whereas In the past we began looking, for example, at maybe pre-teens as those who would be smoking. PAULEY: It's probably fair to say that it wouldn't do a whole lot of good teiting a nine-year-old chiid don't smoke even.though your friends want you to, because it may hurt you when you're thirty. DR. EVANS: Exactly. Exactly. Now this is one of the most Interesting things we've found. This gets Into the area of time perspectives. Now we've found for example that by the time they reach the seventh grade all children'beiieve that smoking -- or most all children -- beiieve that smoking Is dangerous. Yet certain infiuences begin to occur about the seventh grade which override this belief. We found by interviewing in depth a good number of these children that apparently what seems to override this beiief that smoking is dangerous is peer pre_s- ~ sure,_as you would guess, media pressure, the model of smoking p and the very point you mentioned, that the messagle-~i'as yet seem to say to them this will help you when you're very old, but nothing is helping to you right now. So in our study we have designed some strategies to train children how to cope with these pressures and also how to show through various types of instrumentation how smoking a cigarette will affect someone immediately. PAULEY: For example, you may show these children cig- arette advertisements and what? Instruct them as to how the ad agency is trying to manipulate them? OR. EVANS: R i ght. R i ght. Yes, we try_to,._show_, them how in~a.ct.fhey can cope with the se_uctiveness of these ads. Now to give you one Illustration of coursa fihe Fedre al Trade Commission later agreed with us, and we've just started doing this [unintei I igible], we feit that artls_Lc_a_L.Ly the_..~rarning sign o,~s.i^~~~.tte~packs is ~nr~tty-wel l hidden. People no ol`ng-er resporidedd to them. So we po i n-~ou"-i-o the ch i I dren, now iook, here's how this wiil fit together in a sense, you're being seduced by this. They're trying artistically to hide something,•they're trying to teach you how cigarettes are something that will make you sexually attractive and mature. PAULEY: What evidence do you have, if you have any con- d TIMN 0083571 --F28708

3 crete evidence, that the children are being manipulated by advert i s i ng? DR. EVANS: Yes the evidence of course comes from the children themselyes. As I said efore; Jane,-we did in fact~' talk to a number of these children in depth, and really probed rather deeply to try to determine just exactly how these things influence them, and as I mentioned, media is cne, peer pressure is another, and so on. ~ ~..~.._....~_- TOM BROKAW: How do you teach them to deal with peer pressure, which Is an enormous part of the problem? DR.. EVANS: If it weren't been [sic] for the power failure, I understood we were going to show a film clip which showed this much more dramatically than we could discussing it, but essentially what we do Is find [out] from the kids-how they say no. We first find from them what they consider the pressure to be. For example, we talked about very light pressure, medium pressure, heavy pressure. They wili say things like, "do you want a cigarette," would be light pressure', and [uninteliigibie] to say no. But heavier pressure, say, "Aw, you're chicken," "I'II tell your girifriend," etc., etc. These are things the kids actually say. We depict this in the fiirtr, so we're in fact training them how to cope, to recog- nize what tne pressures are and how to cope with them so they don't get caught up in this before they even realize that they're getting caught up in It. ' BROKAW: What's the best dodge for a kid who has a pal, for instance, who comes up to him and says look, Charlie, we're aii smoking, and you're not going to be very popular with the rest of us or certainly with the girls unless you take a puff? • DR. EVANS: Okay. Believe It or not, one of the most fre- quent ones that the children themselves use, true or not, and we show this in the film, because the kids actually do, I have an allergy. BROKAW: So you're encouraging them to tell a little white lie. DR. EVANS: That's right. But we never know -- to sup- port the efforts that we're doing, we're really reporting in this film what the kids tell us they do. So we're saying no here's what kids do.... PAULEY: And you're talking about children relating to children. TIMN 0083572 ?2~T~9

0 4 DR. EVANS: Children relating to children, exactly. So we don't have the adult authority figures preaching to them about how horrible lungs will fall apart and so on, but we actually recognize that they already believe it's dangerous. So we now-have to pressure them to in turn not react to this pressure. PAULEY: Do you see results? Do you see a, decline In the percentage of youngsters who.... DR. EVANS: Right. Well, we're very, very delighted to have found that during our pilot study, which began at the beginning of the seventh grade into the seventh grade in our so-called control group about 20% began smoking at least some. " In our experiment group in which we had all these various types of coping strategies, only about 9% began smoking. So this is to us very encouraging, and now we're starting a three-year study and following ail the way through the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades to find out whether this effect Is maintained. Of course we feel that If you can even stop 5% of them from beginning to smoke you're going to avoid the addictiveness in adults which is very•difficult to deal with. BROKAW: Why do people smoke? Here we are, and you have exp.l.ained -to--us the subtl.efiy. of advert sing. We know~ that it's a health problem, we know that there's a kind of falseness of values about it in terms of social acceptability. What have you learned from this study about why people smoke? DR. EVANS: Yes, I think that's a perfectly reasonable question. Keep in mind that most everybody begins smoking, there are some exceptions, before they are 18 or 19. They're really beginning during these years we're doing this reserach. And in fact it's just exactly what we have found, that it seems to be that the messages seem to tell them something is going to happen in the future but now you think you'll be immune from It. They in fact are res onding to peer pressure. They're rea I I y smok ng not_ usua 1 l y because ttie yy ICi~ke the ta ts but be- cause it's how to be accepted. itrs a kind of a social en- trance ticket for groups of people. Of co•urse the minor types of reasons which.are not even the major ones we found, of course people are self-conscious, you know, maybe with their hands. These are things of course we all know. But really,more seriously, you.... PAULEY: I'd better put my pen down. BROKAW: What kind of reaction have you been getting ~F 28'7.1 U TIMN 0083573

J 0 c 5 from the tobacco companies, because you've been striking at the heart of what they're trying to do? DR. EVANS: Weil, this is just what would probably be the case. Now this is a very large government grant for the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute which Is one of the major heart Institutes. So everything that they sup- port is open, you know, to others to hear about, so the to- bacco arosin,s obv i ous l y have heard about th i s, and +h~.y w&Cg as I understand it some.w.h.a:# -cancerned about -- particularly i~he med-i~a~m`_a~l. we're Tus~i g, and we had e`f i~st-~ate "'" juror look at the material, in fact the dean of our law school. And decided in fact that we were not presenting anything here that would be in a sense not fair to the companies. I will say this however. Aside from that early re- action we've heard not too much more. But remember, this study Is just now beginning. We're using about 10,000 school children in Houston. But this will again be used In other parts of the country and probably In other countries, and I suspect we may here more as we move along with It. BROKAW: Briefly, Dr. Evans, you're a psychologist here In New York to appear on the Today program, and you're in the middle of what can only be described as an urban crisis. What is your reaction to how people are dealing with it in New York? ' DR. EVANS: Well, I'll tell you Tom. The thing [un- intelligible] this Is a candle-burned casualty. You have the first casualty right here. Actuaily, we were caught up in a very Interesting situation. First in two major hotels and I won't mention very near here, and also in a restaurant near here, and we were able to observe some rather Interesting things. But first of all I think that the fact that in 1965 there was a blackout. It became a frame of reference, and that probably had a tremendous amount to do with the fact that not as much happened as might have happened. I think -- I noticed in talking to people immediately they all began rem-inding -- I saw people looked to be about 20 remembering that, we were talking about this. Then another thi-ng I noticed that a lot of the predictable things that we talk about in"social psychology in fact do occur. I was in this one large-hotel -- again I won't mention -- which managed the thing badly, unbelievably badly -- we went in and talked to the bell captain and said to him, you know, tell me, when will this be over, because we have a family here and have to get to the 35th floor. And he said oh, I hear it will be in an hour. I said where did you hear this, and so this this spread around, you _ _ l ZS! .A...L, TIMN 0083574

` 6 could hear literally it's repeated. People -- you know, it's Iike that stock company commercial. You know, tt spread ali over the place, and I talked to someone leaving the place, and it will be over in an hour, and everybody wasn't prepared adequ.ately. BROKAW: You have to be careful of rumors and frame of reference [unintelligible]. DR. EVANS: Exactly, exactly. BROKAW: Thank you very much, Dr. Evans, for being here. Itts time now for a commercial. TIMN 0083575 T 28712