Date: Mon, Jun 11, 2001 5:40 PM Subject: FW: Cigarette and Smokeless Tobacco Reports Office of the Secretary Re: Cigarette and Smokeless Tobacco Reports Dear Mr. Secretary: I am writing today on behalf of Multicultural Advocates for Social Change on Tobacco (MASCOT), a tobacco use prevention coalition in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Our organization strongly urges the Federal Trade Commission to continue to issue its reports on the sales, advertising and promotion of cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products. These reports are extremely valuable to our coalition as we work to help our community understand the impact of tobacco. Especially in this age where the tobacco industry is saying that *it is changing,* these reports clearly show that this is not true. These reports provide clear and objective data that we would not be able to get from any other source. In addition to educating our community on what the tobacco industry is doing, we are also educating policy makers. Our coalition is involved to help allocate tobacco settlement dollars for comprehensive tobacco use prevention and cessation programs in New Mexico. These reports enable us to provide our legislators with a factual understanding of exactly how much money the tobacco industry spends every year to addict the children of our state. We would also make the following suggestions to make your reports even more useful: 1. Include a state-by-state breakdown of the reported marketing expenditures. 2. Include company-specific or even brand-specific marketing expenditure data. 3. Provide subtotals for marketing expenditures for regular versus "reduced-risk" tobacco products. 4. Include a breakdown of the different types of expenditures the companies make within the existing promotional-allowance and retail-value-added expenditure categories (which account for the vast majority of all promotional spending by the companies). We cannot reiterate too many times how important these reports are for protecting the health of the public. Please continue them and provide a voice of truth on this very important issue. Sincerely yours, Cheryl Ferguson |