Get Tobacco Out of Teen Magazines
GET TOBACCO OUT OF TEEN MAGAZINES!
Millions of teenagers see ads for tobacco products in magazines such as Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, People, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Marie Claire, Car and Driver and Jet. All of these magazines have more than 15% or 2 million readers under the age of 18, that is the standard the U.S. Food and Drug Administration uses to determine high youth readership. The tobacco companies are hitting their targets - more than twice as many kids as adults recall seeing tobacco advertising.
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I was shocked to see tobacco advertisements in your publication since I know that many of your readers are kids.
I am writing to you because I believe we all have an obligation to protect our kids from tobacco addiction. As publisher of a magazine with so many youth readers, you can play an important role by adopting a policy of not accepting tobacco advertising. Such a policy would deny the tobacco industry an opportunity to target kids with images that falsely portray smoking as glamorous and cool.
The tobacco industry knows that 90% of smokers start in their teens or early, so reaching potential customers while they are young is critical to the industrys future. Advertising in youth-oriented magazines such as yours helps the industry lure vulnerable teens to their deadly products.
Tobacco companies spend billions of dollars to produce and market products that kill at least 400,000 Americans every year. This year more than 750,000 of our kids will become regular smokers. That is 750,000 kids too many.
Please don't allow Big Tobacco to use your magazine to reach our children. I hope that you will act quickly to adopt a policy of not accepting any tobacco advertising.
Thank you for taking the time to consider my comments. I look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
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