Tobacco Influence on Drug Company Advertising Of Smoking Cessation Products

By Keith Mulvihill

NEW YORK Aug 15, 2002 (Reuters Health) - In the 1980s and early 1990s, tobacco companies successfully exerted pressure on pharmaceutical companies to tone down ad campaigns for products aimed to help people kick their smoking habits, according to documents examined by two researchers at the University of California, San Francisco.

In one example, Philip Morris was able to influence the marketing of the nicotine replacement gum, Nicorette, by threatening to withdraw millions of dollars worth of business from Dow Chemical.

Among other things, the tobacco company objected to a newsletter encouraging doctors to urge their patients to quit smoking, as well as Dow Chemical"s efforts to get factory workers to quit smoking at a plant producing chemicals sold to Philip Morris. Dow Chemical supplied $8 million worth of humectents, moisture-retaining chemicals, to Philip Morris in 1982.

Dow Chemical canceled the physician"s newsletter and in 1984, articles and educational materials for Nicorette were replaced with a single sentence, "If you want to quit smoking for good, see your doctor."

"Our findings suggest that financial ties between tobacco and pharmaceutical companies have resulted in the weakening of smoking cessation efforts and the sharing of technology to develop nicotine products that are profitable to both industries," write Bhavna Shamasunder and Lisa Bero in the August 14th issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Shamasunder and Bero searched thousands of tobacco industry internal documents made available as part of the1998 Master Settlement Agreement between 46 states and the tobacco industry. The agreement was the culmination of lawsuits in which states sought to recover tobacco-related healthcare costs.

The researchers identified another letter written by Philip Morris, criticizing a $25,000 donation made by Dow Chemical to the National Interagency Council on Smoking and Health--an anti-smoking group.

"Following this letter, Dow ceased all further donations to the (group) and also stopped donations to other tobacco-control organizations such as the Non-Smoking Generation," the authors write.

"The financial ties between Dow Chemical and Philip Morris gave Philip Morris the financial leverage it needed to transform Nicorette"s marketing from an informative newsletter to a simple advertisement, as well as to discourage other tobacco-control activities of Dow," the researchers add.

Shamasunder and Bero also detail two other cases, one involving Philip Morris influencing CIBA-Geigy"s marketing of its transdermal patch, Habitrol. CIBA-Geigy is a major supplier of pesticides to the tobacco industry. After objections by Philip Morris, the marketing of Habitrol was changed to aim at smokers "committed to quitting smoking" as opposed to "anti-smoking" in general, according to the report.

The third and last case describes how two subsidiaries--a tobacco company and a pharmaceutical company--of the Swedish parent company Procordia AB, "collaborated in the production of a nicotine-release gum."

"Procordia AB had the potential to benefit financially from creating an addiction through tobacco sales that could then be treated with its nicotine replacement therapies," the authors write.

In their report, the investigators point out that the documents that they evaluated date from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, and they write that "we cannot describe current ties between tobacco and pharmaceutical companies or the influence these ties have on current nicotine replacement therapy development and marketing or potential reduced risk products."

Commenting on the study, Philip Morris spokesperson Brendan McCormick said that "the actions described in the study do not describe the actions that we are taking today."

Currently, McCormick says that Philip Morris "acknowledges that cigarette smoking causes serious disease and it is addictive."

He added, "To reduce the health risk of smoking, the best thing to do is to quit."

Shamasunder and Bero conclude: "To facilitate monitoring the potential effect of financial ties between tobacco and pharmaceutical companies on public health, diverse corporate investments and interests should be clearly disclosed to the public."

SOURCE:

• The Journal of the American Medical Association 2002;288:738-744.