Smoked

[July 10th, 2002] Six Portland hoopsters were elbowed off the court and out of a local basketball tournament last week by tobacco titan Lorillard--because of their T-shirts.

The amateur team, dubbed the "Lori Lard Butts," stepped up to face the No. 1 team in the co-ed division of the NBA Hoop-It-Up tournament at the Portland Expo Center on June 30. Just as the referee raised the ball to start the playoff game, however, Hoop It Up officials broke in and hauled the team off the court.

While police officers escorted the downtrodden team off the premises, tournament officials said the group had been "causing a disturbance." Unfair play? Shouting vulgarities? No, the team sported T-shirts proclaiming "Lorillard Tobacco Lies" and handed out leaflets condemning Big Tobacco's latest marketing strategy--"prevention programs" that don't prevent.

Hoop It Up is an NBA-sponsors three-on-three basketball tournament that visits cities across the country each summer. It is also a venue for sponsors to set up booths and promotional gigs. Courtside are big names like Gatorade, Jeep, Verizon Wireless--and the Lorillard Tobacco Company.

Purveyors of Newports, Kents and Old Golds, the Greensboro, N.C.-based Lorillard is the country's fourth largest tobacco company and a subsidiary of the Loews Corporation, which boasts annual revenues of $19.4 billion.

Four years ago, Lorillard launched a youth smoking-prevention campaign under the slogan, "Tobacco is Whacko If You're a Teen." The campaign has gained Lorillard television advertising and major sponsorship of the World Wrestling Federation and 98 Degrees' nationwide concert tour. But, according to health experts, this is a calculated advertising scheme. "They are always coming up with ways to get their foot in the door," says county health educator Erik Vidstrand, who helped the basketball team organize a plan of attack.

Industry-sponsored prevention programs allow tobacco companies to get their brand names into markets where legislation has blocked cigarette advertising, critics say. Break down what seems to be an anti-smoking slogan, the argument goes, and you have an ad aimed at thrill-seeking teenagers. Instead of describing tobacco as addictive or fatal, for example, the slogan uses the conveniently ambiguous adjective "whacko."

Kylie Meiner, another county health educator, says the message conveys smoking as a rite of passage. "It really means you'll look grown up if you smoke."

Team captain Luci Longoria first realized Lorillard was a sponsor when she picked up a brochure to register for the tournament. She and the five other team members, who all work in tobacco prevention, were upset by Big Tobacco's omnipresence and found a sponsor of their own: the Multnomah County Health Department. The county Tobacco Prevention program paid the team's $141 registration fee, paid for the T-shirts and helped to design the fliers. The mission: draw attention to Lorillard's ploy.

Between games, the team members took up post near Lorillard's flashy booth and handed out their own fliers, asking "What's wrong with this picture?" They also entered Lorillard competitions and won merchandise Lorillard was handing out to children and adults.

On the court, the group won two games and was poised to challenge for the co-ed title before they were thrown out.

Steve Watson of Lorillard couldn't comment on the Lori Lard Butts, but he insisted that the company's program is successful.

In fact, there is no evidence that industry programs discourage teenage smokers, according to a study published last month in the American Journal of Public Health. Researchers at the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California say manufacturers have avoided strategies that actually reduce youth smoking and instead have used the programs to improve credibility. "The industry has used these programs to fight taxes, clean-indoor-air laws, and marketing restrictions worldwide," the study's authors wrote.

Meiner says programs that teach critical-thinking skills can be effective. State programs in Oregon, which are not run by the industry, have reduced teenage smoking in a remarkably short amount of time: a 44-percent drop among eighth graders and a 30-percent drop among 11th graders between 1996 and 2001.

The state can only muster so much ammunition against $50 million campaigns like Lorillard's--especially when it teams up with the NBA. "We have really got to work on the partner, the allies who enable the tobacco industry," says Vidstrand.

But for now, Lorillard is still holding the cards, and Hoop It Up can organize its tournaments by its own rules. Asked why the Lori Lard Butts had been excused from their game, Hoop-It-Up Vice President Chaney Muench said, "They were distributing unauthorized material."