Parody Deadly Serious

A sickly “Joe Chemo” stares down at motorists from a billboard above the busy Alaskan Way viaduct here, daring them to think about Joe Camel’s chances.

The tobacco icon has turned cancer patient in a “counter-ad” placed by Tobacco Free Washington. With his shy grin turned to a forlorn frown, he holds his shades while sitting up in a hospital bed, contemplating his life as an intravenous machine drips chemotherapy into his veins.

“We’ve always said that cigarettes, when used as directed, will kill you,” said Nancy Sonju of Project Assist, which distributes funds to Tobacco Free Washington from the state Department of Health.

“And this is really such a perfect counter-ad,” she said.

The image is deadly serious, says Lisa LaFond of the Department of Health, who discovered the ad in the Vancouver, British Columbia-based Adbusters magazine.

She ordered 10,000 posters from Adbusters to be used in anti-tobacco education programs in schools around Washington state.

Joe Camel recently retired from Camel’s marketing roster after a proposed settlement of lawsuits against the tobacco companies that would ban cartoon images from cigarette ads.

But his image is still a well-known, potent lure to the glamour of smoking, LaFond said.

“They (tobacco advertisers) are such skilled marketers,” she said. “We just saw this really powerful image, and thought we could, in our small way, use it to counter some of that. It’s a counterpoint to the sexy portrayal of cigarettes by Joe Camel.”

Camel’s parent company, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, has no plans to fight back.

“It happens,” said R.J. Reynolds representative Richard Williams of the attack on Joe Camel. “Are we in favor of them doing it? Absolutely not. But at the end of the day, it’s not worth the effort and time to litigate it.”

The billboard image was placed on a privately owned board found through a local artists’ collective.