Anti-Smoking Ads Target Vietnamese

Health officials announced a statewide advertising campaign Wednesday meant to combat the high smoking rate among Vietnamese Americans.

The state-funded campaign will use television and print ads featuring popular Vietnamese entertainers in an effort to rid smoking of its cultural cachet. Smoking is regarded as a social norm for men in the Vietnamese American community, according to UC San Francisco researchers leading the effort.

“We chose entertainers to deliver the message because they exert tremendous influence on the community in terms of what is current and up to date,” said Chris Jenkins, director of the Vietnamese Community Health Promotion Project. “With the help and support of these trend-setters, we hope to get [members of] the Vietnamese community to think about how tobacco negatively affects them.”

In California, 35% of Vietnamese men smoke--a rate 1.5 times higher than the proportion among all men.

Although recent studies have confirmed that Asian Americans, and Vietnamese Americans in particular, have higher smoking rates than the U.S. average, there has never been such a high-profile campaign to address what is a major public health threat to the Vietnamese American community, Jenkins said. California has the largest population of Vietnamese immigrants in the United States.

The ads feature singer and rap artist Henry Chuc; Dalena, an American singer who performs in Vietnamese; radio announcer and singer Viet Dzung; and singer Duc Huy and his wife, Thao My.

The spots will be shown on Vietnamese-language TV stations and appear in Vietnamese-language newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as Los Angeles and Orange counties on a rotating basis through 2001.

In the ads, the entertainers--in some cases playing roles of ordinary Vietnamese Americans--stress tobacco’s health effects not only on smokers but for their families.

“Entertainers have wide exposure in the community. They establish and reinforce social norms. They determine what’s cool,” Jenkins said.

Cultural acceptance of smoking is traced back to life in Vietnam, where the proportion of men who smoke is 73%, the highest in the world, according to researchers. Smokers in Vietnam, on average, spend more for cigarettes than education or health care.

“For the Asian community in general, and specifically for Vietnamese adults, smoking is a way of life,” said Mai Cong, chief executive and president of the Vietnamese Community of Orange County, a social service organization that has mounted an anti-smoking campaign targeting youths for the last three years.