This report is a supplement to ASH's Tobacco Explained research project which is a survey of thousands of tobacco industry documents that have been revealed in the course of litigation in the United States. For this supplement we have examined the documents that describe the tobacco industry's approach to women. All in all, that makes women a prime target as far as any alert European marketing man is concerned. The trade journal Tobacco Reporter gives its vision of the future. Although still thought of by many as male diseases, rates of lung cancer and heart disease among women have risen to mirror their smoking rate.
Heart disease is Britain's biggest overall killer of women.
The causes of these trends are complex. Factors such as the changing position of women in society, their increasing social and economic independence and the past failures of the anti-smoking lobby and health promotion agencies to present smoking and its effects as a problem relevant to women need to be taken into account. The key cause, though, is without doubt the vast effort with which the tobacco industry has set out to target women with its products. A specific campaign has aimed to increase the market for cigarettes among women, partly in response to falling demand among men, but also simply to expand the market. The tobacco industry spends vast sums of money each year persuading people to take up or continue smoking.