Did you know that Big Tobacco is continuing to target kids by advertising in magazines that lots of kids read?

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, which is the standard that 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.

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.

With your help, we can eliminate tobacco advertisements from magazines and protect our children from tobacco.

To read more of Anne’s story or to send it to a friend, click the link below or paste it into your browser's address bar.

http://tfk.grassroots.com/newsletter/EChampAug03/

The U.S. Senate is currently considering a tobacco-friendly bill that would put an end to state class action lawsuits against Big Tobacco companies. Instead of changing their deceptive and illegal practices, the tobacco industry is trying to change the rules in the middle of the game by taking away the rights of state courts to hear class action cases!
Read More at:

With a combined cigarette tax of less than 19 cents, seven southern tobacco-producing states are working together as the "Southern Neighbors Collaborative" to resolve the tax disparity between themselves and the rest of the country. Together, public health organizations in Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia are working to bring the benefits of higher cigarette taxes to their region, one state at a time.

According to New York City's Department of Health, more restaurant and bar jobs have been added since the city's new smoke-free workplace law took effect than in the same period a year ago. This evidence shows that once again smoke-free laws may actually help, not hurt business.

Read more at:

Some fat-cat Washington DC lobbyists have hit the jackpot and they didn’t even have to buy a lottery ticket. Why? They work for Big Tobacco.

The Tobacco-Free Kids Action Fund has teamed up with the folks at Common Cause to release our quarterly report on what Big Tobacco is spending to influence Congress. The numbers are almost too big to believe. Big Tobacco spent over 20 million dollars lobbying Congress in 2002. Broken down, that amounts to nearly 140,000 dollars every day!

This is on top of the over 9 million dollars that Big Tobacco gave in political contributions during the 2002 election cycle.

This stunning report comes as Congress prepares to take up the issue of tobacco regulation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). While some tobacco companies have outright opposed FDA legislation, Philip Morris, which spent over 4,000 dollars an hour to lobby Congress in 2002, has advocated for a weak, loophole-filled legislation opposed by the public health community. This would create the illusion of regulation while making the FDA nothing more than a rubber stamp for a new generation of tobacco products.