‘Tobacco ads lure teens by linking smoking with sports’

Tobacco manufacturers are using a variety of advertising methods to lure young schoolchildren and teenagers into taking up smoking, according to Dr. Abdullah Al-Rabeah, Minister of Health. This includes trying to associate smoking with sports and good times, he added.
Al-Rabeah said tobacco advertisers often resort to selling a lifestyle and image to market their products. He said advertisements geared toward young women focus on ideas of being liberated and in control, while at the same time taking advantage of insecurities over body image.
He said other advertisers have been known to use statistics and “pseudo-science” to create the impression that smoking is safe, and to enhance the credibility of their products. Also, tobacco advertisements feed the misconception that every smoker has lots of fun while doing it. Images of happy smokers in restaurants and in the “great outdoors” reinforce the connection between smoking and good times.
Al-Rabeah said most cigarette companies have long used pictures of healthy pursuits in cigarette advertisements to foster smoking as an acceptable, healthy lifestyle. These advertisements want consumers to associate smoking with outdoor sports and recreational activities such as tennis, bicycling and horseback riding.
He said all studies have proven that smoking causes a great deal of damage to women’s beauty. Studies on the effects of nicotine shows that smoking ages skin faster than anything else apart from the sun.
He said smoking affects women worse than men. The nicotine in cigarettes is more addictive for women and they have much greater difficulty quitting than men as a result. Moreover women smokers have twice the additional risk of heart attacks, strokes and lung cancer than men who smoke.
Al-Rabeah said smoking exerts such a noticeable effect on the skin that it is often possible to detect whether or not a person is a smoker simply by looking at his or her face. Smokers have more wrinkles and their skin tends to have a grayish pallor compared to non-smokers.
A questionnaire sent to 600 female university students in different parts of the Kingdom showed that half of them do not want to marry a smoker. A total of 20 percent said they would require their prospective husbands to quit before agreeing to marry.