Editorial
Smoking's hideous toll on American women

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Smoking has taken a hideous toll on American women. In the past 50 years, the death rate from lung cancer in women has risen by an extraordinary 600 percent.

Despite widespread knowledge about the dangers of smoking, one of every four American women smokes. The rates are even higher for teenage girls. In 2001, almost one in three 12th-grade girls reported smoking in the past month. The number of girls who smoked in high school actually rose during the 1990s.

As a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association outlines, current anti-smoking efforts are not enough to slow this alarming epidemic.

Washington spends about $29 million a year in anti-tobacco efforts. The state's education, prevention and cessation programs are promising. In the past two years, the number of senior high-school girls who reported smoking declined from 29 to 22 percent. But money for the effort is only a fraction of the estimated $200 million tobacco companies spend in the state to advertise and promote cigarettes.

Successfully competing with the aggressive and relentless multibillion-dollar industry campaign that targets women by connecting smoking to thinness, glamour and independence is a colossal task. Fighting back will take a similarly aggressive and relentless nationwide effort.

Women should be leading the charge. Lung cancer is now the leading cancer killer of women. But it is largely preventable. About 90 percent of lung-cancer patients smoked at some time. Smoking is also a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, which is the top killer of women.

Ever since 1925, when Lucky Strike launched a campaign calling for women to reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet, tobacco companies have been selling cigarettes with images of vitality and slimness. Tobacco companies continue to use the cigarette as a symbol of women's freedom and choice, particularly in developing countries.

Exposing the industry's outrageous advertising and promotional tactics will take a concerted effort by individuals and women's organizations to make smoking socially unacceptable.

Women across the country have joined together previously in several large-scale campaigns to increase awareness of such issues as breast cancer and drunken driving. A similar effort could help underscore the connection between lung cancer and smoking.

Success here could prevent a similar epidemic from killing women around the world. In many poor nations, women have not typically smoked. But tobacco companies are successfully reversing societal norms through aggressive advertising strategies. They're using many of the same techniques they've employed here: assuming the language of the women's movement to promote independence and freedom; linking cigarettes to health and beauty; using celebrity women to carry promotional campaigns.

Without drastic changes, the astronomical jump in lung-cancer rates seen among U.S. women will be repeated among women in developing countries.

Anti-smoking laws, education programs and cessation efforts are all critical. But until women unite to expose the deadly truth about cigarettes, they will continue to die unnecessary deaths at an alarming rate.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company