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Date Posted: 18:02:42 04/02/07 Mon
Author: fan
Subject: Miss America and Tobacco Shouldn't Mix

Editorial

Concord Monitor staff

April 02. 2007 8:00AM

Emily Hughes, Miss New Hampshire, has the skills and training to use materials provided by a tobacco company in the character education program she presents in schools. Hughes has bachelor's and master's degrees in education, teaching experience, and a dynamic personality.

But not all the winners of their states' pageants have her qualifications, something we believe the R.J. Reynolds company counts on when paying young women $250 per appearance to present tobacco prevention programs in schools.

The Miss America program and its New Hampshire chapter are wrong to participate in the tobacco company's program. The program and its contestants are role models for some girls. They should not be associated with a product dangerous to their young fans.

Miss Massachusetts, Michaela Gagne, has a rare heart condition, and the American Heart Association signed her up as a spokeswoman. When the association learned of her affiliation with R.J. Reynolds, it initially dropped her. But Gagne gave up the $5,000 tobacco company stipend and stuck with the heart association.

Despite plaudits for the program Hughes presented at 11 New Hampshire schools, she should sever her relationship with Reynolds as well.

Congratulations are in order to Dana Mitchell, the savvy Dover school prevention coordinator who canceled Hughes's planned visit last month but said she could give her presentation if she dropped her affiliation with the tobacco company.

Hughes and the program she represents are unwittingly being used by the tobacco industry. Public health experts, the heart association and the American Cancer Society have all said that the industry's smoking prevention programs are a public relations ploy. They do little if any good. They are also an attempt to supplant prevention programs that studies have found far more effective.

The programs that do influence youth smoking are "campaigns that denormalize tobacco use and stress the industry's dishonesty," wrote the authors of an article in the American Journal of Public Health. The pageant operators, however, failed to get the message.

Tobacco prevention programs help when they are brutally honest with children and teens about the immediate and long-term health effects of tobacco use. Kids need the cold facts about how addictive nicotine is and how costly the smoking habit will become.

The 12-page pamphlet Reynolds provides pageant winners omits nicotine and addiction. Instead, it stresses that smoking is illegal, Mitchell said. But telling teens in their rebellious years that something is illegal can make engaging in the behavior more, not less, appealing, something the tobacco industry no doubt knows full well.

It's hard for the state's cash-strapped schools to pass up free programs that appear to be beneficial. But the schools that agreed to host the presentations after learning they are sponsored by the tobacco industry were naïve. Tobacco companies rely for their continued existence on recruiting new smokers to replace those their products kill.

Hughes was free to create her own program, and she used little of the Reynolds material. Again, not all presenters may have been willing or able to do that. If the tobacco company program is offered in place of another, more effective program, it may actually set back prevention efforts.

New Hampshire schools should not host the presentations, and the Miss America program should not affiliate itself with them.


http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070402/REPOSITORY/704020308/1266/BUSINESS

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Replies:

[> It says Hughes was free to create her own program. As long as you can do that, there shouldn't be a problem. -- Advocate Site Meter, 21:29:57 04/02/07 Mon [1]


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