MEMOS SHOW TEENS TARGETS FOR TOBACCO

Top officials involved, firm's records reveal

Internal records from one of the nation's largest cigarette companies, R.J.
Reynolds Tobacco, provide new evidence of the extent to which the company
for decades courted young smokers, including some as young as 14, regarding
them as the future of its business.

As recently as 1988, for example, R.J. Reynolds planned to saturate areas
where young people gathered, such as fast-food restaurants, video game
arcades and outdoor basketball courts, with billboards and posters
promoting its products, one memo shows. Other documents among the papers
written from the 1950s to the '80s emphasized that the company sought to
expand sales of its products among underage smokers to sustain brand
popularity and corporate earnings.

"To ensure increased and longer-term growth for Camel filter," one internal
1975 company memo stated, "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."

These are not the first documents to suggest that Reynolds and other
tobacco companies sought to court youthful smokers. But the documents made
public Wednesday are among the most explicit to have been released. And,
while company officials have attributed previous documents on youth
marketing to low-level or renegade employees, some of these documents show
the involvement of top company officials, including the board of directors
in the 1970s.

Officials of R.J. Reynolds, a unit of the RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp., have
repeatedly denied in public statements and sworn testimony that they sought
to sell cigarettes to those under 18. And Wednesday, Peggy Carter, a
company spokeswoman, reiterated that position, saying that the documents at
issue had been selectively released by plaintiffs' lawyers to appear out of
context.

Carter said that R.J. Reynolds officials did not have time to fully address
specific documents. But the company said in a statement: "Our documents
reflect the social attitudes of the times in which they were created. And
while attitudes toward smoking have changed over the past several decades,
the Reynolds Tobacco Co.'s position and policy has remained constant: that
smoking is a choice for adults and that marketing programs are directed at
those above the age to smoke."

Dr. David Kessler, former head of the Food and Drug Administration, who
began that agency's inquiry into tobacco advertising practices, said the
newly released documents were the strongest evidence of a major company's
effort to focus on youth.

"These are as close to smoking guns when it comes to targeting kids" as
have ever appeared, said Kessler, now dean of Yale University Medical
School.

Viewed together, the R.J. Reynolds documents indicate that top tobacco
industry executives long believed that people under 18 were its most
crucial customers because, by that age, minors who smoked had chosen the
brand that they would stick with and smoke even more as adults.

A marketing plan prepared in late 1974 by R.J. Reynolds noted that company
brands like Winston, Salem, and Camel were increasingly losing ground,
among 14- to 24-year old smokers, to Marlboro brand cigarettes made by the
Philip Morris Companies.

"This suggests slow market share erosion for us in years to come unless the
situation is corrected," the document stated. One company strategy to
combat that trend would be to "direct advertising appeal" to those younger
smokers, the document stated.