• 10/7/2007
  • Athens, GA
  • staff
  • ScienceDaily.com

A 1998 settlement designed to limit the marketing of smokeless tobacco to U.S. youth hasn’t been effective, a University of Georgia study found.

The findings, published in the early online edition of the American Journal of Public Health, found that smokeless tobacco ads in magazines increased in the first year after the agreement went into effect, reaching 83 percent of adolescents. However, exposure dipped to 57 percent in 2000, but rates steadily increased in later years.

The Master Settlement Agreement in 1998 agreed to by 46 attorneys general and the major cigarette producers called for restrictions in: billboard advertising, cartoons in tobacco advertising and marketing toward youth. The same year, a similar agreement known as the Smokeless Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, was signed by the attorneys general and U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Company.

“Exposure rates are significant and have been very stable over the past 10 years,” study co-author Dean Krugman of the University of Gerogia, in Athens, said in a statement.

The researchers said that in 1993 smokeless tobacco advertising in magazines reached 66 percent of youth ages 12 to 17.