transcript: swat Recruitment Video
Text: Your mission if you choose to accept it. Is to empower and unite youth. To resist and expose big tobacco’s lies. While changing current attitudes about tobacco.
Music playing and pictures flashing.
Text: SWAT – Mission Possible
Male teenager – What SWAT is - is students working against tobacco. Tobacco industries are manipulating the advertisement and aiming towards younger kids 6 even to 4. You know we want to tell the people of the reality of this.
Female teenager – I want to tell big tobacco that we’re not their future customers. So they need to quit targeting us.
Female teenager – We are coming together as a generation of young people who are taking a stand against big tobacco. We are tired of their lies, we are tired of them targeting us and it is past time for us to do something about it. So we’re coming together, we’re learning information, and we’re having a great time meeting people from all around the state so that we can take a stand against big tobacco.
Text: The basis of our business is high school students. Young adult smokers are the only sources of replacement smokers.
Pictures flash of young adults smokers.
Male voice: What’s the youngest age for target? 14. As this 14 to 24 age group matures they will account for a share of the total cigarette volume for the next 25 years. Thus our strategy becomes clear for our established brands. Direct advertising appeal to the younger smokers. Direct advertising appeal. Meaning they are going to aim their message away from your parents, away from your grandparents and direct it to you.
Text: Agent – Dave Goerlitz former Winston Man. Helped advertise a brand of cigarettes now crusades against smoking. He condemns the tobacco industry for targeting advertisements at kids and for selling tobacco products to young people. Do the tobacco companies think young people are stupid?
Dave Goerlitz: By the number of kids who are starting to smoke everyday to replace those who quit or die everyday, they are pretty much right.
Male speaker: We take what we hear and we somehow want to believe that we don’t have a problem on tobacco. Oklahoma has a real big problem.
Camera shots of audience. Picture of poster for Camel Lights.
Male speaker: When big people like the tobacco industry go after you, it angers me. I want to hurt somebody.
Picture of female smoking.
Dave Goerlitz: For 7 years I was paid a lot of money to be the Winston Man and I was paid about $100,000 a year to make tobacco look good, macho, tough, rugged, robust, virile. And I did such a good job that Winston sales went from number 4 to number 2 in just 2 years of advertising it. And for that I am ashamed. So now what I have been trying to do is undo the damage that I did as the Winston Man. At the top of the mountains when I was on oxygen because I was a 3 pack a day smoker, I said to the guys from R.J. Reynolds, why don’t you smoke? And the guys said we don’t smoke this stuff, we just sell it and we reserve the right to smoke for the young, the poor, the black and the stupid. I don’t know how much more immoral you can get.
Text: Who have you lost to the tobacco industry?
Female teen: My mother smokes and my grandmother and my great-grandmother and my grandfather also died from cancer, so I didn’t want to go down the same road.
Female teen: Why I am here today is because tobacco took my grandmother away from me and you know she smoked until the day she died and she died of colon cancer and lung cancer combined.
Female teen: I am in SWAT because I want to help and make a difference in our community. Because I know a lot of my friends’ family and even my family has died from cigarettes so I want to change it.
Several shots of teens: Smoking kills people.
Text: In the 90’s, nine out of 10 Hollywood films showed tobacco use every 3 to 5 minutes. Tobacco products were found in 92% of the top money making PG films every week from July to October 2002.
Female Speaker: (shows video of female smoker) Smoking has been a staple in movies since the 1930’s. So the tobacco industry had a long relationship of supplying cigarettes to Hollywood celebrities and then paying for their product to be in their specific movies. We will bring this industry to its knees. We will. And it’s going to be because of the work that you have done. (Video of teens in formals walking down red carpet).
Text: The more smoking that young people see on the screen, the more likely they are to start smoking in real life.
Text: Agent Koorosh Zahrai – Chairman Y03-04 Status Board of Directors – SWAT
Led a sit-in to promote smoke free restaurants in 2003. Recipient of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids Youth Advocate of the Year Award in 2004.
Koorosh ZAhrai: We have to take a stand and fight back against the tobacco companies because they’re marketing to kids and we have to fight back and protect ourselves from being targets for the tobacco companies because tobacco in movies is the most influential pro tobacco messaging.
Female teen: The tobacco companies are targeting us.
Male teen: You.
Male teen: Me.
Female teen: Me.
Female teen: Me.
Female teen: All of us.
Male teen: They want us to start smoking.
Male teen: Dipping.
Male teen: Chewing.
Male teen: To get addicted to their product.
Female teen: And stay addicted until their product kills us.
Male teen: Kills us.
Female teen: You.
Female teen: Me.
Male teen: All of us.
Male teen: All of us.
Male teen: We’re SWAT.
Female teen: We’re fighting back.
Male teen: We’re not afraid.
Male teen: They will not have our generation.
Male teen: My generation.
Male teen: Your generation.
Text: SWAT Mission Possible.