AMA Seeks Ban on Tobacco Ads : Proposal Would Also Outlaw All Promotions

The American Medical Assn. is circulating the final draft of proposed federal legislation to ban all forms of tobacco advertising and promotion--from newspaper ads to cigarette-sponsored tennis tournaments.

At the same time, the AMA’s journal has opened a scathing editorial attack on tobacco companies, calling them “vultures” seeking to create “addicts” hooked on their products.

Final wording of the proposed legislation to enact a total ban on advertising and promotion of tobacco products was approved late last week by the AMA board of trustees. Drafting of the bill had been authorized last December.

‘Making Love With Death’

The latest issue of the Journal of the American Medical Assn.--published today--is devoted entirely to tobacco research and commentary. It includes an editorial by deputy editor Dr. M. Therese Southgate warning: “The cigarette smoker is doing nothing less than making love with death.”

It is the journal’s third special anti-tobacco issue in 18 months.

Walker Merryman, a spokesman for the Tobacco Institute, the largest industry lobby, said he was not surprised by the new AMA attack, contending that the association was simply joining, opportunistically, a growing movement. “I don’t see any reason for groups like the AMA not to jump on the bandwagon at some point,” said Merryman, who predicted that the AMA’s proposed legislation would fail.

The legislation, for which the AMA has begun soliciting congressional sponsorship, includes a preamble asserting that a thousand people die of tobacco-related illnesses every day and that costs of treating smoking-related diseases amount to more than $22 billion annually, the federal share of which is $4.2 billion. Tobacco companies spend $2 billion annually on advertising.

$10,000 Fine Proposed

The proposed bill would make it illegal to publish or broadcast commercial messages for any tobacco product. Also banned would be billboards, posters, decals, matchbooks, most signs, coupons, cigarette or tobacco giveaways and the marketing of any other product that carried the trademark of a tobacco product. Violations would be subject to a fine of $10,000 for each occurrence. Tobacco companies would be precluded from sponsoring athletic and artistic events.

Both the Tobacco Institute and the American Civil Liberties Union have expressed reservations about the proposal’s constitutionality. Alan Reitman, the ACLU’s associate director, said the group believes the advertising prohibition goes unconstitutionally beyond the bounds of legitimate regulation. He predicted that the combination of opposition from tobacco state congressmen and an industry lobbying campaign would doom the advertising ban to defeat.

The AMA’s most recent anti-tobacco moves underscore the sometimes fragmented and contradictory approach that organized medicine has taken to the question of tobacco use. Most doctor groups have moved vigorously onto the offensive against tobacco only within the last five or 10 years.

The AMA itself owned tobacco stocks until as recently as 1981. Its president two years ago, Dr. Joseph F. Boyle of Los Angeles, was a confirmed smoker who puffed his way through his term, and the AMA’s current president, Dr. Harrison Rogers, suffered the embarrassment of public revelations that he owned land leased to a tobacco farmer, which he quickly sold.

Journal Editor Fired

One of four commentary articles in the new issue of the journal was written by Dr. Alan Blum, who was abruptly fired last month from his job as editor of the New York State Journal of Medicine, published by the AMA’s New York affiliate. Blum charged the firing occurred because of a dispute with top officials of the state society who were displeased with the activist anti-smoking stand he took in the journal there. A spokesman for the New York society denied that the firing was related to the journal’s content.

Blum said he welcomed the AMA’s new activist role against smoking but criticized the association for not moving decisively 10 or 20 years ago, when tobacco was first identified as the major cause of lung cancer.

Today’s AMA journal also includes an exchange of letters between former President Jimmy Carter and Dr. James H. Lutschg, of Baton Rouge, La., in which Lutschg accused Carter of hypocrisy for urging stronger strictures on tobacco in an earlier issue of the journal, even though Carter had defended tobacco interests while he was in office. Carter accepted the rebuke, noting that “times have changed. Should I have done more? We all should have: politicians, educators, physicians and patients.”

The significance of the unusually vocal positions of the AMA and its editorially independent journal, argues Dr. Michael Charney, co-director of the Boston-based Tobacco Product Liability Project, is that it signals the gathering of new anti-smoking momentum among the nation’s medical groups.

“The AMA is now waking up to this issue as it has never done before,” Charney said in a telephone interview. “That has to be applauded. On the other hand, they were asleep, so it seems, for 21 years since (U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry’s) report in 1964 (the first document to definitively link smoking and lung cancer).”