TOBACCO ADS TARGETED KIDS: HARDLY A SHOCK

ASIDE FROM the fact that the tobacco industry has adamantly and repeatedly
denied that it targets kids with its products -- and on occasion has made
those assertions under oath -- there should be no real surprise in the
newly released documents that affirm in explicit English that just the
opposite is true.

These are the same folks, after all, who have always insisted that nicotine
isn't addictive and who have long suggested that a good smoke does
everything from aid digestion to improve one's tennis stroke.

Only among consenting adults, that is. The tobacco brass has always denied
that the industry would attempt to profit off children. However, that would
now appear to be just another case of their lying through their teeth.

Internal memorandums released Wednesday from a court case involving R.J.
Reynolds Co., the nation's second-largest cigarette producer, state without
ambiguity that company officials worried about losing smokers as young as
14 to competing brands and deliberately set about a strategy to win them
back.

IN A REFERENCE to its Camel filter cigarette, a 1975 RJR memo stated that
``the brand must increase its share penetration among the 14-24 age group,
which have a new set of more liberal values and which represent tomorrow's
cigarette business.'' As recently as 1988, the company was designing entire
campaigns aimed at underage smokers, the documents show.

As early as 1973, a marketing memo suggested using cartoons -- much like
old Joe Camel himself, who came along in 1988 -- to help win young smokers
away from the Marlboro man.

As might be expected, RJR responded to the release of these documents by
claiming they were being taken out of their historical context, that they
had been ``cherry-picked'' to make the company look bad. Never, the company
again asserted, would it target kids.

Baloney, but what else is new?

There is, of course, a cultural and historical context to tobacco in the
United States. But much of that record has been shifting since 1964, when
the surgeon general issued the landmark report that smoking caused lung
cancer in men and was a probable cause of lung cancer in women. Since that
time, the news about tobacco has gotten much, much worse.

THAT ABOUT 48 million U.S. adults continue to smoke speaks to the
tremendous economic, political and social staying power of the tobacco
industry. As these new documents reflect, at least some of that ongoing
success can be attributed to the recruitment of children.

Personally, I find that vexing as hell.

I haven't always set the best example at things, but I have gone to great
lengths in attempting to dissuade my 21-year-old son from his tobacco
habit. That would include providing the crystal detail of the morning of
his grandfather's death, from a massive heart attack at 63, the first
cigarette of the day still smoking on the counter. I have talked to him
about people he might have known but didn't -- my uncle and two aunts, all
dead of lung cancer in their 40s.

We have discussed health consequences, the importance of allowing oneself
to stretch out to full potential. He says he will quit. He hasn't.

He smokes, in part, because that's what young people do where he lives.
It's cool. It's out there on the edge. Time is on their side.

The tobacco companies tell them so.