Cigarette Promotion in Korean Center Assailed

On the eve of a national “smokeout,” a Korean tobacco company was handing out cigarettes Wednesday at a Korean community center in Orange County, promising that a portion of any donations would go toward building elderly housing in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

An Orange County health official immediately assailed the promotional tactic Wednesday, accusing the government-run Korea Tobacco and Ginseng Corp. of playing upon the national sentiments of Korean immigrants to increase cigarette sales.

“It’s obscene to me,” said Nampet Panichpant-Michelsen, program manager for the International Immigrant and Refugee Health Assistance program, an arm of the Orange County Health Care Agency.

A spokesman for the tobacco firm said Wednesday that it was unaware of the no-smoking effort, but said the promotional campaign for Korean-made cigarettes was intended to benefit Korean communities in the United States, not to build a market for the company’s products.

“We didn’t know about the” Great American Smokeout being held today, Lee Hyung Sub, managing director of Overseas Affairs for the privately owned cigarette corporation, said in a telephone interview Wednesday from his office in Taejon, South Korea.

Proceeds for the cigarettes will go to a Korean senior citizens group and to sponsor a community anti-crime committee, Lee said. He added that his company does not plan to sell cigarettes in the United States until late December.

But Panichpant-Michelsen accused the tobacco company of “dumping” its product on new Asian immigrants who may not be aware of the health hazards of smoking.

“It’s one thing if you’re educated and you make a conscious effort to kill yourself,” she said. “But it’s another if you are doing it because you are not sophisticated enough to know you are being manipulated by aggressive advertising tactics.”

On Wednesday, several promotional posters advertising the cigarettes were hanging in the Korean Community Center in Garden Grove. The posters, written in Korean, said the company was proud to announce that the cigarettes from the “motherland” had arrived, according to a Korean translator who works for the county. The posters said the company had donated $30,000 worth of cigarettes and the proceeds would be used to build elderly housing. Among the name brands advertised were “Eighty-Eights,” and “Lilac Slims.”

Officials at the Korean Community Center on Garden Grove Boulevard could not be reached for comment on the cigarette promotion. However, county health officials said center representatives had been handing out boxes of the cigarettes at the senior center for at least a month.

Panichpant-Michelson said she learned of the promotion earlier this week when she visited the center to ask an official there if he would stop smoking for a day during national smokeout week.

“I approached him to see if he would stop smoking for 24 hours and learned that (the tobacco company) had dumped $30,000 worth of cigarettes claiming to be low tar,” she said. “They have been very clever in that they have been able to identify the needs of the people. It’s so obvious and blatant in terms of the aggressive advertising tactics.”

She said although the advertisement for the cigarettes is in Korean, the Surgeon General’s warning is written in English.