Tobacco Industry Promotional Strategies Targeting American Indians/Alaska Natives and Exploiting Tribal Sovereignty

Nicotine and Tobacco Research just published Lauren Lempert and my paper “Tobacco Industry Promotional Strategies Targeting American Indians/Alaska Natives and Exploiting Tribal Sovereignty” as an “editor’s choice,” which means it is freely available to everyone.  In this paper we detail how the tobacco companies exploited the fact that (a different form of) tobacco is used in some AI/AN ceremonies as well as the fact that tribal sovereignty created places that were not covered by state laws, particularly cigarette taxes and smokefree laws.

Here is the abstract:

Introduction:  American Indians/Alaska Natives have the highest commercial tobacco use in the United States, resulting in higher tobacco-caused deaths and diseases than the general population. Some American Indians/Alaska Natives use commercial tobacco for ceremonial as well as recreational uses. Because federally-recognized Tribal lands are sovereign, they are not subject to state cigarette taxes and smokefree laws. This study analyzes tobacco industry promotional efforts specifically targeting American Indians/Alaska Natives and exploiting Tribal lands to understand appropriate policy responses in light of American Indians’/Alaska Natives’ unique sovereign status and culture.

Methods: We analyzed previously secret tobacco industry documents available at the Truth Tobacco Documents Library (https://industrydocuments.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco/).

Results: Tobacco companies used promotional strategies targeting American Indians/Alaska Natives and exploiting Tribal lands that leveraged the federally-recognized Tribes’ unique sovereign status exempting them from state cigarette taxes and smokefree laws, and exploited some Tribes’ existing traditional uses of ceremonial tobacco and poverty. Tactics included price reductions, coupons, giveaways, gaming promotions, charitable contributions and sponsorships. Additionally, tobacco companies built alliances with Tribal leaders to help improve their corporate image, advance ineffective “youth smoking prevention” programs, and defeat tobacco control policies.

Conclusions:  The industry’s promotional tactics likely contribute to disparities in smoking prevalence and smoking-related diseases among American Indians/Alaska Natives. Proven policy interventions to address these disparities including tobacco price increases, cigarette taxes, comprehensive smokefree laws, and industry denormalization campaigns to reduce smoking prevalence and smoking-related disease could be considered by Tribal communities. The sovereign status of federally-recognized Tribes does not prevent them from adopting these measures.

Our paper is also a nice companion to the recent paper by D’Sliva and colleagues, “Tobacco industry misappropriation of American Indian culture and traditional tobacco,” published in Tobacco Control, which shows how the tobacco companies have expropriated traditional Indian symbols to sell tobacco to the general market.

Hopefully, increasing understanding of how the industry has targeted and exploited AI/AN communities will motivate their leaders to act to protect their people from the industry and enact more aggressive tobacco control policies.

The full citation for our paper is: Lauren K Lempert, Stanton A Glantz.  Tobacco Industry Promotional Strategies Targeting American Indians/Alaska Natives and Exploiting Tribal Sovereignty.  Nicotine & Tobacco Research, nty048, https://doi.org/10.1093/ntr/nty048 Published: 12 March 2018