Understanding and Combatting Evolving Tobacco Industry "Personal Responsibility" Messaging

Audience:

Tobacco control activists who support and employ public health interventions that are adversely affected by misleading tobacco industry messaging about personal responsibility.

Key Points:

• The tobacco industry continues to use strategic messaging about “personal responsibility” and “freedom of choice” to protect its interests in the marketplace, against litigation and regulation.
• The messaging is deceptive in that it ignores the role of addiction, marketing ploys and disinformation campaigns which undercut free choice.
• Used in litigation, “freedom of choice” means that those who smoked are to blame for their injuries (e.g., “assumption of the risk”). In the industry’s larger public relations (PR) messages, it means that smokers have a right to choose to smoke, free from regulation or interventions to reduce consumption.
• The industry’s litigation strategy has influenced its greater PR message, shifting responsibility for the harmful effects of tobacco products onto consumers. Comprehension of this strategy will furnish advocates with ammunition for counter-marketing strategies.

Educational Experience:

• Informs tobacco control advocates of the major themes and frames used to assert personal responsibility, and by showing evidence of industry corporate malfeasance, it provides ammunition for counter-marketing that shifts responsibility back to the tobacco industry.
• Reinforces the need for the denormalization of both the tobacco industry’s litigation and public relations strategies in order to strengthen and encourage public health interventions.

Benefits:

Tobacco control advocates will gain an understanding of how the tobacco industry’s use of personal responsibility rhetoric in litigation influences its larger PR message, and will comprehend the importance of industry denormalization.