Magazine ads anger opponents of smoking

NEW YORK — Not long ago, fax machines and e-mail inboxes at Vogue, the world's premier fashion magazine, were briefly assaulted with thousands of angry letters. Not about the latest gorgeously photographed fashion trends or beauty products in its influential pages, but about a single, colorful ad: for Camel No. 9 cigarettes.

"If you draw income from the advertisement of tobacco," Heidi Thompson of Freeport, Ill., wrote in one letter, "you are as guilty as big tobacco companies in selling the health and future of so many of our youth in order to pad your bank accounts."

The letters were part of a grass-roots campaign by an anti-smoking group to get Vogue to drop ads for the new, prettily packaged Camels, which they and others feel are targeted to younger women and teenagers.

But it isn't just Vogue. Pick up nearly any fashion magazine this month — Glamour, Harper's Bazaar, Lucky — and you'll see a colorful cigarette ad mixed in with articles on beauty, fitness, nutrition and glowing skin.

You won't find them in a number of other countries. A European Union law, for example, bans tobacco print ads on grounds they glamorize smoking and promote it among young people.

But in the United States, where TV and radio ads were banned long ago and billboards more recently, print ads are the final frontier in tobacco advertising, aside from store displays and the like. And to anti-smoking groups, their presence, though waning, is especially tasteless in fashion magazines and others aimed at young women — at a time when lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in women.

"Research out there shows that young people are susceptible to advertising," says Ellen Vargyas, counsel for the American Legacy Foundation, established in the wake of the 1998 settlement between the states and the tobacco industry. "I wish the publications themselves would look hard at what they're doing. Readers look to them to see what's cool and what's trendy — and they see cigarettes."

Her organization sponsored a major tobacco report issued last week by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences. The report, which called on Congress and the president to give the Food and Drug Administration power to regulate tobacco, also had a recommendation for print ads: that they be restricted to black and white text only — no images.