A grandfather gives his grandson Camel playing cards, and a mother and daughter save Marlboro coupons for a leather jacket. Such cigarette continuity programs, which often involve teams of people collecting coupons for a prize, have become a popular way to reinforce smoking. And they often involve numerous generations in families, said Walton Sumner, M.D., assistant professor of medicine.
Sumner and his colleagues interviewed 176 smokers at the University of Kentucky Chandler Medical Center in Lexington to determine how coupon-collecting teams in continuity programs are structured, if they include multiple generations and their level of popularity.
|
"We found that there was a lot of team building and intergenerational smoking," Sumner said. "These programs help companies maintain a presence in families when other people have no idea this form of advertising is going on."
Although the data were collected in 1995, the findings are still relevant, Sumner said, because in 1997 a federal judge blocked the Food and Drug Administration's attempts to ban cigarette continuity programs in the United States.
Sumner's study appeared in a recent issue of the Archives of Family Medicine. It was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Health and Human Services.
In 1995, interviewers used an open-ended questionnaire to survey adult inpatients, outpatients and staff who smoke. They asked the smokers about their current and past smoking habits, current and past cigarette brands, current coupon-collecting habits and basic demographic information.
One of every three smokers surveyed was participating in a continuity program. Such programs encourage smokers to save coupons from cigarette packages and then to redeem them for merchandise such as sporting goods, clothing and electronics. These items often display cigarette brand emblems to the smoker and his family for years to come.
Three-fourths of the coupon collectors were redeeming their own coupons, and the remaining fourth were giving their coupons to others.
One-fifth of those collecting coupons were teammates with another generation of family members, and one-fourth of those between ages 24 and 35 were teammates with their children. Other teams involved groups of friends or employees. Team size varied from one to eight people, with a mean of 2.4 members.
The researchers concluded that cigarette continuity programs are a popular form of advertising and that the coupon-collecting teams bridge generations within families and draw friends into long-term cooperative smoking activities.
Sumner said there are many health messages to be gleaned from this study. He would like smokers who participate in these programs to consider seriously whether they and their friends really are benefiting from the programs and whether these programs make it easier for them to continue smoking.
Also, he hopes parents will think twice about giving the merchandise to their children and think even harder about involving their children in coupon collecting. "If parents don't want their children to smoke -- and parents usually say they don't -- collecting coupons with their children and giving them this merchandise is inconsistent," Sumner said. "Such activities are almost certain to encourage children to smoke." He added that parents who want to keep such merchandise should at least consider removing the brand emblems.
"Health care providers also should be reminded that when you're advising someone to stop smoking, you're asking them to make sacrifices that you might not have guessed," Sumner said. If 10 officemates are collecting coupons toward a prize, he believes there is going to be a social price for dropping out of the collecting group.
Taking a more optimistic view, Sumner said that if social networks can support smoking, they might also be used to discourage smoking. "We could make it easy for people to work together to quit smoking and advance their own health agendas," he said.
