• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Wednesday, August 22, 2007 11:30 AM

Black Americans are historically more likely to be targeted by tobacco advertisements than are white men and women, according to a study being published this month.

The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine report supports previous research, as well as unearthed tobacco industry documents which show that blacks and other minorities were increasingly seduced by tobacco ads, especially after the 1970s, when smoking rates began to drop among middle-class white populations.

Researchers sought to enumerate that known advertising strategy by counting the total ads found in a given market, extracting the tobacco-related ads, and then correlating that data with the population of that market. Per person, there are 2.6 times as many ads in black neighborhoods than in white neighborhoods, the data showed. That means if a white neighborhood had 1,000 tobacco ads, a black neighborhood would have 2,600.

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