Source: Houston Chronicle Contact: Thu, 15 Jan 1998 Website: http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/ Author: Barry Meier of the NYTimes MEMOS SHOW TEENS TARGETS FOR TOBACCO Top officials involved, firm's records reveal Internal records from one of the nation's largest cigarette companies, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, provide new evidence of the extent to which the company for decades courted young smokers, including some as young as 14, regarding them as the future of its business. As recently as 1988, for example, R.J. Reynolds planned to saturate areas where young people gathered, such as fast-food restaurants, video game arcades and outdoor basketball courts, with billboards and posters promoting its products, one memo shows. Other documents among the papers written from the 1950s to the '80s emphasized that the company sought to expand sales of its products among underage smokers to sustain brand popularity and corporate earnings. "To ensure increased and longer-term growth for Camel filter," one internal 1975 company memo stated, "the brand must increase its share penetration among the 14-24 age group, which have a new set of more liberal values and which represent tomorrow's cigarette business." These are not the first documents to suggest that Reynolds and other tobacco companies sought to court youthful smokers. But the documents made public Wednesday are among the most explicit to have been released. And, while company officials have attributed previous documents on youth marketing to low-level or renegade employees, some of these documents show the involvement of top company officials, including the board of directors in the 1970s. Officials of R.J. Reynolds, a unit of the RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp., have repeatedly denied in public statements and sworn testimony that they sought to sell cigarettes to those under 18. And Wednesday, Peggy Carter, a company spokeswoman, reiterated that position, saying that the documents at issue had been selectively released by plaintiffs' lawyers to appear out of context. Carter said that R.J. Reynolds officials did not have time to fully address specific documents. But the company said in a statement: "Our documents reflect the social attitudes of the times in which they were created. And while attitudes toward smoking have changed over the past several decades, the Reynolds Tobacco Co.'s position and policy has remained constant: that smoking is a choice for adults and that marketing programs are directed at those above the age to smoke." Dr. David Kessler, former head of the Food and Drug Administration, who began that agency's inquiry into tobacco advertising practices, said the newly released documents were the strongest evidence of a major company's effort to focus on youth. "These are as close to smoking guns when it comes to targeting kids" as have ever appeared, said Kessler, now dean of Yale University Medical School. Viewed together, the R.J. Reynolds documents indicate that top tobacco industry executives long believed that people under 18 were its most crucial customers because, by that age, minors who smoked had chosen the brand that they would stick with and smoke even more as adults. A marketing plan prepared in late 1974 by R.J. Reynolds noted that company brands like Winston, Salem, and Camel were increasingly losing ground, among 14- to 24-year old smokers, to Marlboro brand cigarettes made by the Philip Morris Companies. "This suggests slow market share erosion for us in years to come unless the situation is corrected," the document stated. One company strategy to combat that trend would be to "direct advertising appeal" to those younger smokers, the document stated.