Tobacco companies continue to buy advertising space in youth-oriented magazines, marketing cigarettes to kids in the United States in violation of a 1998 agreement, according to a report published in the August 16 edition of The New England Journal of Medicine.

The study found cigarette makers have kept up a high level of spending for magazine ads aimed at school-age kids, with four companies spending a total of $127 million last year to promote brands popular with youth.

Researchers said the amount spent to advertise brands in youth-oriented magazines increased immediately after the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, the culmination of an attempt by 46 states to recover tobacco-related health-care costs.

Under the settlement, tobacco companies are prohibited from taking any action, directly or indirectly, to target youth in the advertising, promotion, or marketing of tobacco products.

Tobacco companies are not sticking with their commitment under the 1998 agreement, says James Standish, director of legislative affairs for the Seventh-day Adventist world church.

“This is another example of the tobacco industry circumventing the spirit of the settlement they made with the states,” says Standish.  “It brings into question whether an industry that survives by hooking children on a deadly product can ever be trusted.”

Top United States cigarette maker, Philip Morris Inc., pledged in June 2000 that it would not advertise in magazines whose 12 to 17-year-old readers numbered more than 2 million or made up more than 15 percent of a magazine’s readership.

Researchers, tracking the company’s compliance with this agreement, found advertising spending on cigarettes in youth-orientated magazines increased to $67.4 million in the year following the settlement.

The findings suggest the tobacco settlement was a total failure in terms of protecting kids from cigarette advertising, said one the study’s co-authors.

Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control show that some 3,000 children take up smoking every day. “That’s more than 1 million a year, and the vast majority—around 90 percent—are going to be lifetime smokers,” says Dr. Allan Handysides, director of health ministries for the Adventist Church.

For more than a century the Adventist Church has warned about the addictive and health-destroying nature of tobacco.

Cigarettes kill 430,000 people every year and as many as 50,000 die from passive smoking, says Dr. DeWitt Williams, health director for the church in North America. “That’s more deaths caused by all illegal drugs combined.”

“Smoking is the single most preventable cause of death in the United States,” says Williams. “It’s needless.”

“It’s bad news,” says Handysides about the results of the study. “But you can’t expect good news out of a tobacco company. The only good news would be if they stopped making cigarettes.”