WASHINGTON -- Cigarette manufacturers are enticing the nation's young to smoke with slick advertising campaigns that play on teenage insecurities, two basketball stars and a television actress told Congress Monday.
Basketball stars Wayne 'Tree' Rollins and Scott Wedman and actress Allison Smith appeared before the House Health and the Environment subcommittee to support two bills that would prohibit tobacco advertising.
Cigarette ads featuring young attractive models take advantage of youths' desire to look sophisticated and grown up, they said.
'Take a look at these ads,' said Rollins, center for the Atlanta Hawks, as he waved at advertising samples. ''More' encourages you to 'never settle for less;' 'You'll go a long way, baby' if you smoke Virginia Slims, and you'll be cool if you smoke Kools.'
Wedman, a guard for the Boston Celtics, said heavy cigarette advertising in sports magazines and arenas is aimed at associating an unhealthy habit with sports in young minds.
'The message is clear,' he said. 'Tobacco and sports go together.'
Smith, who stars on CBS-TV's 'Kate and Allie,' encouraged strong congressional action.
'Congress could send this nation's young people a powerful message by banning cigarette advertising and promotion altogether,' she said. 'That message would impress young would-be smokers.'
Subcommittee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said cigarette manufacturers not only recruit 60 percent of new smokers from children under age 14 but also scare away the news media from reporting on the health hazards of smoking by threatening to withdraw lucrative advertising.
Industry representatives strongly denied their advertising seeks to lure anyone, especially young people, to smoke.
The $2 billion spent yearly on cigarette advertising and promotion is aimed at getting existing smokers to switch brands, said Charles Whitley, a consultant to the the Tobacco Institute.
'Cigarette advertising does not cause smoking any more than soap advertising causes people to bathe,' Whitley said in a statement.
The legislation's opponents also said banning cigarette advertisements would be an unconstitional infringement on free speech.
Philip Kurland, a University of Chicago law professor, decried 'the patent hypocrisy of a legislature's attack on freedom of communication because of its unwillingness to make illegal the sale and distribution of the tobacco products themselves.'
David Starr, publisher of the Springfield (Mass.) Union News and Republican, denied Waxman's allegations that newspaper publishers refrain from running articles on the health hazards of smoking to keep advertisements.
Cigarette advertising accounts for only one half of one percent of newspaper advertising nationwide, Starr said.
The subcommittee is not expected to vote on the bills until the fall, said Rep. Mike Synar, D-Okla., one of the bills' sponsors.
