Anne Landman's blog

An earlier PRWatch blog exposed an unseemly partnership between the American Heart Association and Rite Aid Drug Stores after AHA teamed with Rite Aid to promote the "Go Red for Women" campaign to increase awareness of heart disease in women. AHA selected Rite Aid as its partner for "Go Red" even though Rite Aid sells cigarettes, a leading cause of heart disease. This bizarre alliance gave Rite Aid the ability to brag publicly that it was "taking a stand against heart disease in women" while simultaneously displaying "healthy heart" posters alongside cigarette displays in its stores across the country. In another unseemly alliance, it was revealed that Eugene Trani, the President of Virginia Commonwealth University, which operates a medical center, school of public health and medical school, was found to be accepting a $40,000 annual retainer, plus fees totaling $3,500 and stock options, for serving on the board of the Universal Corporation, a leading global supplier of tobacco leaf.

The public is often unaware of such unethical relationships among high-profile public health groups and figures, which only helps perpetuate them.

Now another prominent public health figure has been found to be profiting personally by both causing and treating tobacco-related diseases. Michael A. Friedman, M.D., the Chief Executive Officer of the prestigious City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, California serves on the Board of Directors of the Rite Aid Corporation, the same cigarette purveyor that allied with the American Heart Association to "fight heart disease in women."

November 23, 2008 marks ten years since 46 state Attorneys General and the major American tobacco companies signed the big tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA). Besides being the largest legal settlement in history and resolving an unprecedented onslaught of litigation against the industry, the MSA required tobacco companies to pay approximately $200 billion to the states over 25 years (subject to tweaks for inflation and market share).

The devil, however, was in the details. Heralded at the time as a defeat for the tobacco industry and a victory for public health, the MSA has actually done little to change the status quo. It ended some forms of tobacco advertising, for example, but the restrictions adopted were in reality less important to the industry than to public health authorities. The industry abandoned billboards and transit ads, ads in magazines with a high youth readership, and ads within a certain distance of schools. However, it continued marketing through high levels of advertising, bar nights, event sponsorships, direct mail, and retail placements.

Statins Cholesterol-reducing drugs called statins have been in the news lately following the release of a major medical study that found that statins can prevent heart disease and stroke in people with no previous history of heart disease.

Statins are among the biggest-selling family of drugs of all time. Many articles about the study mentioned above, including one on the credible web site WebMD, also mention the specific drug used in the study: Crestor.

The study has generated hundreds of articles, most of which repeat the same basic framing of the issue: if heart disease is the problem, a drug is the answer.

On October 1, 2008, the city of San Francisco put a law into effect that prohibits the sale of cigarettes in pharmacies. Walgreens drug store chain and Altria/Philip Morris have filed lawsuits against the city over the measure. In a September 30, 2008 statement about the new law, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom related the city's simple rationale: "Pharmacies should be places where people go to get better, not where people go to get cancer."

Familiar corner drug store chains like Rite Aid and Walgreens have long cultivated an image of being all about health. Their web sites feature photos of friendly-looking pharmacists in white coats ready to help us with our health care needs. The Rite Aid company Web site tells us they are "committed to the healthcare needs of our customers." CVS says its vision is to "strive to improve the quality of human life" by making "high-quality health and pharmacy services safe" and easy to access. Walgreens says it stands ready to help people by supplying "health and wellness products" and health information. If all this makes you feel that these drugstore chains have your best interests at heart, it's certainly by design. But don't be taken in too easily.

"We do not want children to smoke," British American Tobacco (BAT) declares on its website. But the company that describes itself as the "world's most international tobacco group" routinely violates its own voluntary international marketing and advertising standards, according to a July 1, 2008 BBC-TV This World investigation. BAT was caught in Malawi, Mauritius and Nigeria using marketing tactics that are well-known to appeal to youth: advertising and selling single cigarettes, and sponsoring non-age-restricted, product-branded musical entertainment. (See also "Playing with Children's Lives: Big Tobacco in Malawi.")

When a company adopts and prominently touts its voluntary behavior codes, only to end up violating them, people start asking questions: What are the real reasons for these codes? Are they just for public relations (PR) purposes? To, as they say, 'cover your a*s' (CYA)? How did they arise? What, if any, value do they have?

A recent investigation by BBC Television showed British American Tobacco (BAT) violating its own voluntary marketing and advertising codes in Malawi, Mauritius and Nigeria. Contrary to BAT's public pronouncements that it doesn't want children to smoke, the company was caught using marketing tactics in these countries that are known to appeal to young people, like advertising and selling single cigarettes, and sponsoring non-age-restricted, product branded musical entertainment.

As trading has become more global and corporations have become more multinational, countries started discovering that they have little recourse to rein in the harmful behavior of corporations. As public clamor to regulate multinationals has grown, companies have increasingly responded by adopting "voluntary codes of conduct." But what are the real purposes for these codes? Are they just window dressing, or worse?

You've heard the term "greenwashing." It refers to corporations that try to appear "green" without reducing their negative impact on the environment.

Since 2002, the group Breast Cancer Action has promoted its "Think Before You Pink" campaign. It's fighting "pinkwashing," which is when corporations try to boost sales by associating their products with the fight against breast cancer. Pinkwashing is a form of slacktivism -- a campaign that makes people feel like they're helping solve a problem, while they're actually doing more to boost corporate profits. Pinkwashing has been around for a while, but is now reaching almost unbelievable levels.

Recently while browsing the Web I came across UrbanDictionary.com, which is sort of a wiki of contemporary slang. I found some of the newer words listed there amusing, like "hobosexual" (the opposite of metrosexual; someone who cares little about their looks), "consumerican," ("a particularly American brand of consumerism"), and "wikidemia" ("an academic work passed off as scholarly yet researched entirely on Wikipedia").

Then I came across a word that put me into a more thoughtful zone: "slacktivism."

"Slacktivism" (alternative spelling "slactivism") is a fusion of the words "slacker" and "activism," and UrbanDicationary.com defines it as "the act of participating in obviously pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to fix a problem." It refers to ersatz acts that people perform that they have somehow come to believe are full of meaning, like slapping a magnetic ribbon on your car to "support the troops," wearing a colored rubber wristband to "fight cancer," or refusing to buy gasoline on a certain day to protest high gas prices, instead of, say, actually changing your lifestyle to use less gas.

Buried in junk mail...what to do?A recent blog about the pro-junk mail lobby and its front group, Mail Moves America, drew many comments. Mail Moves America is a coalition of businesses that oppose efforts to create a legislated "Do Not Mail" list to protect citizens from being showered with unwanted junk mail,Junk mail is clearly a hot topic that arouses strong emotions on all sides. As electronic mail moves closer to overtaking paper mail as the medium of choice for written communication, it is clear that the Post Office remains an essential way to communicate and transfer goods. Still, many people are overwhelmed with junk mail and have little idea how to stop it.

Junk mail: Bane or boon?Junk mail kills trees, clogs mailboxes, packs landfills, wastes natural resources, and everyone would be glad to be rid of it. Right?

Well, maybe not.

Whether out of environmental concern or sheer annoyance, legislated efforts to reduce junk mail are on the rise, but companies that have vested interests in its continuance have started organizing to save it--in a big way. Of course, they don't call it junk mail. Their preferred euphemisms are "advertising mail," "direct mail" or even "standard mail."