Marlboro Man Research Articles

Statutes Aiding States' Recovery of Medicaid Costs from Tobacco Companies: A Better Strategy for Redressing an Identifiable Harm?

“We ‘re going to take the Marlboro Man to court. “— Florida Governor Lawton ChilesDespite overwhelming epidemiological evidence that cigarette smoking causes cancer, and that addictive nicotine in tobacco keeps smokers smoking, our legal system has yet to allow a recovery against the tobacco industry for the massive harms it knowingly causes. Plaintiff smokers have sought recovery, only to be thwarted by affirmative defenses of assumption of the risk and contributory negligence, preemption of their claims by federal cigarette labeling laws, the difficulty of proving that cigarette smoking causes cancer, and the enormous resources of the $45 billion per year tobacco industry.After forty years of unsuccessful lawsuits against the tobacco industry, a new plaintiff has come forward. In 1994, Florida and Massachusetts passed legislation enabling the states to bring suit against the tobacco industry to recover Medicaid costs of treating smoking-related illnesses.

Correction: Slowing the march of the Marlboro man

Correction: Slowing the march of the Marlboro man

Slowing the march of the Marlboro man

This week the journal reports the 40 year results from the world's longest running study of smoking and death, which finds that in Britain about half of all regular cigarette smokers will eventually be killed by their habit (p 901,1 p 9112). Next week more than 1000 delegates will attend the ninth world conference on tobacco and health in Paris. These provide an opportunity to take stock of the current status of tobacco and health worldwide. The World Bank estimates that the annual tobacco consumption will remain stable between 1990 and 2000 at 1.9 kg per person aged 15 and over.3 That apparent stability masks two divergent trends: falls in tobacco use in the industrialised world and increases in developing regions. Per capita tobacco consumption is expected to fall by 17% during this decade (from 2.4 kg to 2.0 kg a year) among the 35 “established market economies” of the world. At the same time per capita consumption is predicted to rise by 12% (from 1.7 kg to 1.9 kg a year) in the 180 “demographically developing economies.” Increases in con-sumption are also expected in five of the six formerly socialist economies of Europe for which the World Bank made projections.3 Smoking is responsible for three million deaths a year worldwide. If current smoking patterns continue that toll will have risen to 10 million deaths a year by 2025.*RF 4-6* Following trends in consumption, deaths attributable to tobacco will …

Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History.

The vast majority of Americans have, at one point or another gotten drunk, smoked, dabbled with drugs, gambled, sworn or engaged in adultery. During the 1800s, respectable people struggled to control these behaviors, labeling them bad and the people who indulged in them unrespectable. In the twentieth century, however, these minor vices were transformed into a societal complex of enormous and pervasive influence. Yet the general belief persists that these activities remain merely harmless bad habits, individual transgressions more than social problems. Not so, argues distinguished historian John C. Burnham, in this pioneering study. In Bad Habits, Burnham traces the growth of a veritable minor vice-industrial complex. As it grew, activities that might have been harmless, natural, and sociable fun resulted in fundamental social change. When Burnham set out to explore the influence of these bad habits on American society, he sought to discover why so many good people engaged in activities that many, including they themselves, considered bad. What he found, however, was a coalition of economic and social interests in which the single-minded quest for profit allied with the values of the Victorian saloon underworld and bohemian rebelliousness. This combination radically inverted common American standards of personal conduct. Bad Habits, then, describes, in words and pictures, how more and more Americans learned to value hedonism and self-gratification--to smoke and swear during World War I, to admire cabaret night life, and to reject schoolmarmish standards in the age of Prohibition. Tracing the evolution of each of the bad habits, Burnham tells how liquor control boards encouraged the consumption of alcohol; how alcoholic beverage producers got their workers deferred from the draft during World War II; how convenience stores and accounting firms pursued profits by pushing legalized gambling; how swinging Playboy bankrolled a drug advocacy group; how advertising and television made the Marlboro Man a national hero; how drug paraphernalia was promoted by national advertisers; how a practical joker/drug addict caused a shortage of kitty litter on Long Island; and how the evolution of an entire sex therapy industry helped turn sexual experience into a new kind of commodity. Altogether, a lot of people made a lot of money. But what, the author asks, did these changes cost American society? This illustrated tour de force by one of the most distinctive and important voices in social history reveals John C. Burnham at his provocative and controversial best.

Feminist Literary Criticism and the Deconstruction of Ads: A Postmodern View of Advertising and Consumer Responses

This article examines text and consumer responses from the perspective of postmodern feminist literary criticism. It uses a feminist framework to incorporate the issues of advertising as gendered text and consumer responses as gendered readings into consumer research. The article begins with a brief background discussion of feminist literary theory to introduce the concept of gendered text and to set forth the “reading” methodology developed to identify it. Next, this method is demonstrated in a feminist reading of two advertising figures—the Marlboro Man and the Dakota Woman. Then, the article presents a feminist perspective on gendered reading—different male and female reading styles relevant to consumers and ads. Last, ideas about gendered texts and readers are integrated into ongoing consumer research on attitude toward the ad, inferencing, and empathy.

The global metastasis of the Marlboro Man.

He is the quintessential symbol of rugged American individualism: the Marlboro Man. Astride his horse, he overlooks a wide open prairie with a seemingly infinite horizon that promises a subtle and seductive freedom. In point of fact, however, he offers only a killing enslavement. Americans have come to know this. Gradually, their increasing health sophistication has encroached on the Marlboro Man’s territory at home. Fenced in, the world’s most famous cowboy has pulled up on the reins and his horse has jumped the fence. The prairies he views today are no longer exclusively in America’s wild west. Rather, the Marlboro Man rides the range in Japan and Taiwan, Korea and China. He is in Poland and Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. Tomorrow he will settle around a soothing campfire on the plains of Africa. Marlboro, the Philip Morris Company boasts, is the world’s largest selling cigarette. It is the biggest, and it’s getting bigger. The World Health Organization recently estimated that, worldwide, 2.5 to three million people die annually as a result of using tobacco. In little more than a quarter century, that figure is projected to escalate to 10 million. Perhaps still more shocking is the estimate that of all the people now populating the globe, fully 500 million will be killed by tobacco. Most will come from the developing countries.’

The American West: a twentieth-century history

The mystique of the Wild West perpetuated by Buffalo Bill, Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour, John Wayne, and the Marlboro Man has hindered the serious study of the real region west of the ninety-eighth meridian. Michael P. Malone and Richard W. Etulain move beyond myth and beyond the influential frontier thesis advanced by Frederick Jackson Turner to write about the American West as it has actually developed in the twentieth century. In vivid detail they describe a region too richly varied and dynamic to be contained by the imagination. Extending into the 1980s, The American West: A Twentieth-Century History is the first comprehensive survey of the modern West to appear in many years. Malone and Etulain discuss economic, political, social, and cultural developments in the West from the turn of the century to the onset of the Great Depression, when the region was still in a colonial relationship to the urban, industrial Northeast and upper Midwest; from 1930 to the end of World War II, when the West was transformed by New Deal programs and by even greater federal spending in military installations; and from 1945 to the present, when the West experienced rapid changes in demographics and a series of trendsetting lifestyles. Unique to this history are chapters about the rich cultural heritage of the modern West and about the lives of men, women, and children of various ethnic groups. Detailed bibliographical essays are included.

Warnings in Tobacco Advertisements: Marlboro Man vs Surgeon General-Reply

In Reply.— Dr Alwitt fails to understand or has ignored the central issue in our research. The essential context for the warning must be the tobacco advertisement itself. Only 8% of the viewing time was devoted to the warning, while 92% was devoted to the advertisement. Comparisons with advertisements for products that carry no warnings are irrelevant. As we acknowledged in the article, the sample size is small. However, our study remains one of the largest ever reported in the literature using eye tracking techniques. Furthermore, it is the only published study to examine the effectiveness of the Surgeon General's warning for adolescents. Dr Alwitt is incorrect in her statement that the subjects should have been able to read the warning in three visual fixations. The reference 1 that she cites, in fact, states that only eight letters are seen in the average fixation. The warnings on cigarette advertisements average