JOINING THE ANTI-TOBACCO CRUSADE

VIETNAMESE welcomed the Tet ``Mau Dan'' Lunar New Year by wishing each
other ``Phuoc, Loc, Tho'' (``Happiness, Prosperity, Longevity''). At the
Tet Festival in San Jose, Vietnamese-Americans also celebrated the ``Great
Vietnamese Smoke Out Day,'' proclaimed by San Jose Mayor Susan Hammer and
the San Jose City Council to urge smokers in the Vietnamese community to
quit smoking.

The Smoke Out will be an annual celebration at the Tet Festival, reflecting
the great strides that the Vietnamese community has made in confronting
this problem.

Smoking is a major health problem among Vietnamese-Americans. In
California, about 35 percent of Vietnamese men smoke, a rate almost one and
one-half times that of the general population. According to the Northern
California Cancer Center, lung cancer is the leading type of cancer among
Vietnamese-American men.

Among the estimated 14,000 Vietnamese adult male smokers in the San
Francisco Bay Area in 1997, half will probably die from diseases caused by
smoking. If the estimated 21,000 Vietnamese boys in the Bay Area under the
age of 18 in 1997 start to smoke at the rate their fathers smoke, 3,600
will die from smoking. Adult male Vietnamese smokers in the Bay Area
consume an estimated 51 million cigarettes a year at an annual cost of $5
million.

Cigarette smoking not only kills Vietnamese smokers, it sickens children
and family members who breathe second-hand smoke. In children, it can cause
asthma, bronchitis, pneumonia, ear infections and Sudden Infant Death
Syndrome. In adults, it can cause lung cancer and heart disease. For women,
it can lead to cervical cancer.

Other recent developments will help the Vietnamese community breathe
cleaner air. The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors unanimously
adopted an ordinance banning all tobacco-related advertising on the County
Fairgrounds, the site of the Tet Festival, as well as distribution of
tobacco products there. The board's legislative action adds teeth to a
policy adopted by the Vietnamese Tet Festival Organizing Committee of
Northern California in 1996 which banned all tobacco advertising and
promotions at the annual festival.

The Vietnamese Tobacco-Free Community Task Force last year issued an ``Open
Letter to the Vietnamese Community.'' Appearing in Vietnamese-language
newspapers and magazines, television and radio, ``Smoking and our
community: Will we protect the health of our children and families?'' urged
the Vietnamese community to join hands in eradicating the No. 1 killer in
our community.

A complaint was filed in 1996 with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission asking
it to require that tobacco advertisements and promotional materials which
appear in Vietnamese, Chinese and other ethnic communities carry the U.S.
Surgeon General's warnings on smoking in the language of that community.
Currently, tobacco ads that appear in publication reaching non-English
speaking readers are translated into the language of the publication, but
the warnings are printed in English. This double standard also exists on
window ads, tobacco sweepstakes entry forms and other promotional items
distributed in the Vietnamtowns and Chinatowns of California. We hope that
positive action by the FTC on this issue will help to save millions of
Vietnamese, Chinese, and other lives from premature deaths.

We came to the United States to seek freedom, liberty and opportunity for
ourselves and our children. Let's make sure we keep this dream. We say to
the merchants of death, the tobacco drug pushers, ``Don't peddle your
lethal products in the Vietnamese community.'' And now that the American
people have awakened to the tactics of the tobacco companies, and the
industry is looking for other markets to recruit new smokers, we say to the
tobacco industry, ``Don't kill our brothers and sisters in Vietnam, China,
and other Asian countries by peddling your nicotine cancer sticks
overseas.''

Anh Le and Dr. Ky Quoc Lai are staff members at ``Suc Khoe La Vang''
(Health is gold), Vietnamese Community Health Promotion Project, University
of California, San Francisco. Dr. Kim Phung Nguyen is with the UCSF
Department of Pediatrics. She serves on the Vietnamese Tobacco-Free
Community Task Force of the Bay Area.