Original article
Avoiding “Truth”: Tobacco Industry Promotion of Life Skills Training

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2006.06.010Get rights and content

Abstract

Purpose

To understand why and how two tobacco companies have been promoting the Life Skills Training program (LST), a school-based drug prevention program recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to reduce youth smoking.

Methods

We analyzed internal tobacco industry documents available online as of October 2005. Initial searches were conducted using the keywords “life skills training,” “LST,” and “positive youth development.”

Results

Tobacco industry documents reveal that since 1999, Philip Morris (PM) and Brown and Williamson (B&W) have worked to promote LST and to disseminate the LST program into schools across the country. As part of their effort, the companies hired a public relations firm to promote LST and a separate firm to evaluate the program. The evaluation conducted for the two companies did not show that LST was effective at reducing smoking after the first or second year of implementing the program. Even so, the tobacco companies continued to award grants to schools for the program. PM and B&W’s role in promoting LST is part of a public relations strategy to shift the “youth smoking paradigm” away from programs that highlight the tobacco industry’s behavior and toward programs in which the industry can be a partner.

Conclusions

Individuals and organizations responsible for developing and implementing tobacco control and youth smoking prevention programs should be aware of PM and B&W’s role and motivations to encourage the wide-spread adoption of LST in schools.

Section snippets

Methods

We analyzed internal tobacco industry documents available online (legacy.library.ucsf.edu and ltdlftd.library.ucsf.edu) using standard techniques [26]. Exhaustive searches were conducted using the snowball method from May 2004 to October 2005, beginning with the keywords “life skills training,” “LST,” and “positive youth development,” followed by searches of key individuals (e.g., Botvin) and organizations (e.g., Princeton Health Press) identified in the initial searches. We also searched

Choosing Life Skills Training

A memorandum from Haney H. Bell (Lorillard Tobacco Associate General Counsel) on April 29, 1998 to Dr. A. W. Spears (Lorillard CEO) explains that because of the collapse of the global settlement, the tobacco industry had set up a Task Force on youth smoking [16] consisting of executives from the major U.S. tobacco companies. According to Bell, Mike McGraw, the chief legal officer for British American Tobacco (BAT) and its American subsidiary Brown and Williamson (B&W), began the initial Task

Discussion

PM and B&W’s promotion of the Life Skills Training program in the United States is a continuation of its longstanding strategy of promoting “youth smoking prevention” programs [1] to compete with tobacco control programs run by states and other public agencies. There are several reasons that the LST program may be acceptable to the tobacco industry. Relatively little of the LST program is focused on reducing tobacco use directly. In contrast to a program like TNT that focuses exclusively on

Acknowledgment

This research was supported in part by National Cancer Institute grants CA-61021 and CA-87472.

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