The Right to Addict Kids

What should we do when a wealthy, suit-clad drug pusher sidles up to children and uses cartoon images and tricks to exploit teen insecurities and risk-taking to get kids hooked on a fatal drug? What kind of person would hang around a school yard trying to get teens and preteens hooked on an addictive drug known to kill hundreds of thousands of people a year? That’s exactly what Philip Morris and the other cigarette corporations did for decades. When parents, lawmakers, prosecutors, and judges tried to stop them, the cigarette corporations self-righteously insisted on the corporate “free speech right” to say, well, to say what Bad Frog Brewery likes to say.

In the late 1990s, the people of Massachusetts tried to protect school kids from the cigarette companies’ “youth-targeting” campaigns, banning cigarette ads within 1,000 feet of a school or playground. The US Supreme Court struck down the law in 2001, calling it a violation of the speech rights of the cigarette corporations. In many ways, this case shows how much our courts and our Constitution have shifted away from the people and to corporations in the years since the 1970s, before the Powell-Chamber of Commerce campaign began.

Back in 1971, Lewis Powell, as a private lawyer for the cigarette companies, argued that the corporations had a First Amendment right to spread corporate lies in response to what the corporations called propaganda about smoking and health. He and the cigarette industry were laughed out of court. Back then (and in the two hundred years before that), the corporate legal foundations and the Supreme Court had not grafted the new concept of corporate speech into the Bill of Rights. Thirty years later, though, everything had changed. In 2001, the Supreme Court did exactly what the cigarette corporations asked, striking down the Massachusetts law that required cigarette advertisements to stay 1,000 feet away from schools and playgrounds.