Call it our sense of social responsibility or that i’ve got my own kids i care about that i post this article. Granted, it’s not “industry specific” to motorcycles, but our industry, and Guilty specifically as a responsible party within that industry, has to speak up on matters such as this. So read on. The kids just love it when cigarette companies cut their prices — it helps them become regular smokers, according to a new study reported by Nicholas Bakalar in The New York Times (5/22/07). Bill Phelps of Philip Morris USA denies it: “We have a contract with retailers that governs how our products are displayed at retail and assures that they are merchandised in a responsible way,” he says. The study, published in The Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, is based on “a nationwide survey of 26,000 students in 8th, 10th and 12th grades from 1999 to 2003.” According to the study’s authors, it’s the one-two punch of in-store ads and price promotions that does the trick.

The ads basically get kids to try smoking and the price promotions enable them to repeat their purchases. The old trial-and-repeat. The study concludes that “if stores had no advertising, there would be a decrease of 11 percent in children who try smoking. If promotions were eliminated, there would be a decrease of 13 percent in the number who become habitual smokers.” Frank J. Chaloupka, one of the study’s authors, says a cigarette tax would help reduce the price incentive to smoke and also endorses “strong smoke-free policies” that other research finds help change “social norms” and discourage kids from smoking.

Another study, this one on kids and alcohol, found that sixth-graders exposed to alcohol ads were “strongly predicted” to start drinking in seventh grade. “The most consistent predictor of drinking was ownership of a hat, poster or T-shirt that advertised alcohol, they said, and one-fifth of sixth-graders who owned such items were almost twice as likely to take up drinking as those that did not.” Jeff Becker of the Beer Institute says the study, is just “the latest in a long line of studies that try to make advertising the scapegoat for underage adults and adolescents who drink illegally. ” He said the solution is “clearly restricting youth access to alcohol, not censoring advertising.” The study, of 1,786 sixth-graders in South Dakota, is published by The Journal of Adolescent Health.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 9:47 am and is filed under Guilty Opinion/Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.