NEW DOCUMENTS REVEAL OTHER COMPANIES ALSO TARGET TEENS [02/02-1]

RJR has been under fire recently due to documents released from the Magnini case exposing RJR's targeting of teens. Now documents unveiled at the House Commerce Committee hearing show Philip Morris and Lorillard also were targeting teenagers. Following are some of the newest revelations:

LOS ANGELES TIMES:

As they seem to be at every turn, tobacco officials again were ambushed by new documents showing past efforts to sell to underage smokers. Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) cited a memo from Lorillard, the tobacco subsidiary of Loews, on the popularity of its flagship Newport brand.

"The success of Newport has been fantastic during the past few years,"according to the memo, which had been cited earlier in the week in the Minnesota court case. "The base of our business is the high school student."

Brown and Reps. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) and John D. Dingell (D-Mich.)introduced a Philip Morris memo from 1975 that raised concern about the declining rate of sales growth among Marlboro smokers ages 15 to 19.

Questioned about a 20-year-old R.J. Reynolds memo about the need to"establish a successful new brand" in the 14-to-18-year-old market, Steven F. Goldstone, chief executive of RJR Nabisco, said he was troubled "as a chief executive and . . . as a father."

CHICAGO TRIBUNE:

Four Philip Morris documents from the 1970s and 1980s released Thursday by Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) reveal the strategic importance of teens to the company in those days.

"Today's teenager is tomorrow's potential regular customer," states a 1981 memo. A memo from 1975 attributes Marlboro's "phenomenal growth rate" to its popularity among teens 15 to 19 years old.

WASHINGTON POST:

Philip Morris, the nation's largest tobacco company, monitored the smoking habits of people as young as 12 because "today's teenager is tomorrow's potential regular customer," according to internal documents released yesterday.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) and Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) presented the four memos in a House Commerce Committee hearing on pending tobacco legislation,which could protect companies from some lawsuits in exchange for paying billions of dollars to reduce youth smoking.

The memos were cited Monday in opening statements of the lawsuit against the tobacco industry brought by the state of Minnesota and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota to recover the costs of treating sick smokers.

The documents echo a large number of internal R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.papers that Waxman made public several weeks ago that showed company officials recommended marketing efforts directed at teenagers dating back to the 1970s. Philip Morris's share of the underage market has long dwarfed RJR's despite the smaller company's advances with young smokers after it introduced the "Joe Camel" campaign.

Highlights of the documents:

A March 1981 memo to Robert B. Seligman, the company's vice president for research and development, described habits of smokers 12 to 18 years old and warned that smoking rates were on the decline since 1976-77, which meant the company would "no longer be able to rely on a rapidly increasing pool of teenagers from which to replace smokers lost through normal attrition." The decline in smoking among teenagers, wrote Myron Johnston of Philip Morris, was especially troubling: "Because we have our highest share index among the youngest smokers, we will suffer more than the other companies."

A memo dated February 1983 noted an "encouraging upward trend" in youth smoking rates, citing figures from the graduating class of 1982.

A May 1975 memo from Johnston to Seligman attributed the Marlboro brand's"phenomenal growth" to "our high market penetration among younger smokers,"described as "15-19-year-olds." Johnston wrote that publicly available studies were generally limited to teenagers 18 and older but "my own data, which includes younger teenagers, shows even higher Marlboro market penetration among 15-17-year-olds."

In a March 17, 1988, memo, Johnston discusses teenage spending. High school seniors from 1976 and 1979 had smoked roughly the same amount before the age of 16, he said, but the class of 1979 group, which had experienced a sharp hike in gasoline prices, smoked substantially less than 1976 seniors.

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