Making it Uncool.

• Author: WORTH, ROBERT
• Position: Ways to prevent teenage smoking

Laughter is our best weapon in the war on teen smoking

On the surface, last November's $206 billion settlement agreement between the tobacco companies and 46 states looks like a serious blow for Big Tobacco. In addition to the money, it contains some important concessions: a ban on outdoor advertising, limits on sports sponsorships and merchandising, no more "product placement" in movies, and they have to close The Tobacco Institute and other junk-science instruments. And Joe Camel--along with all other cartoon characters--is gone for good.

Yet how much did all this hurt the tobacco industry's ability to sell cigarettes? On November 20, the day the attorneys general announced the settlement, the stock of the leading tobacco companies soared. After all, the Big Four tobacco makers will pay only 1 percent of the damages (at most) directly; the rest will be passed on to smokers through higher prices. Since many states are already figuring the settlement money into their budgets, this puts them in the odd position of depending on the continued health of the tobacco industry for their roads, schools, and hospitals.

Punishing the industry, in other words, doesn't necessarily address the root of the problem--reducing demand for cigarettes. And that won't go down until we all face the fact that smoking is once again cool. When I went to high school, in the 1980s, scarcely any of my classmates smoked. My two teenage cousins claim that at least half of their friends smoke, despite a heavy barrage of anti-smoking publicity. They're not unusual: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, teen smoking rose 73 percent from 1988 to 1996.

Anti-smoking activists often behave as though the tobacco companies were entirely to blame for this fact--as though charisma were a substance like nicotine that could be injected and removed from a product at will. Sadly, that's not true. As long as movie stars like John Travolta and Uma Thurman flirt gorgeously through a haze of cigarette smoke, as long as it drifts through all the right nightclubs and bars and hang-outs--not to mention the magazines and posters and billboards--teenagers will find ways to smoke, no matter how many public service announcements or laws are written to stop them. Most of these kids know that smoking fills their lungs with toxins like arsenic, cyanide, and formaldehyde. They'll even recite the statistics to you: Smoking kills over 1,000 people a day in this country alone, and is far deadlier, in terms of mortality rates, than any hard drug. And then they'll blow their smoke into your face. "Kids can't imagine themselves old," says Stanton Glantz, an anti-smoking activist and professor at the University of California at San Francisco. "Health effects mean almost nothing to them"

The only way to get any leverage with teenagers is to return fire with fire, taking on the various influences that make smoking seem attractive. We need, in other words, to find new ways to make smoking look ridiculous.

As it happens, we have some clues about how to do that. Flash back to the 1960s, when cigarette ads were as common on television as they are now on billboards or bus-stops. If you ask any man in his 40s or older about the tobacco ads of that day, he'll almost certainly remember one series in particular: the Marlboro Man ads. Set to the music from the great Western "The Magnificent Seven," they brought the celebrated smoking cowboy to life as he roped calves in a gold and red-hued western sunset. They conjured up the untrammeled masculinity of the cowboy myth so masterfully that few who ever saw them have forgotten them. And their message was unmistakable: Real men smoke.

Then, in 1968, another ad appeared on television. This one began with a cowboy standing in a darkened saloon, watched by a low-life villain with a gun (and a cigarette in his mouth). Another gunslinger enters, a cigarette hanging from his lips. "We figured you'd be here," he tells the hero. The bad men are on the verge of gunning the hero down, when one of them begins to wheeze. Soon both of them are doubling over in coughing fits, and the hero strolls past them, unharmed, out of the saloon. The words "American Cancer Society" appear on the screen, and the announcer intones "Cigarettes--they're killers."

This ad may seem laughably unsophisticated to the current generation of media-soaked teenagers, but in its day it managed to make the Marlboro Man ads look utterly ridiculous...