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The Nightingales’ mission is to highlight
the tobacco industry’s behavior and its
contributions to the suffering nurses witness
in their jobs, and to call on the industry to
end active promotion of tobacco products.
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Twelve nurses from around the United States paid their
way and each bought a share of stock in the Philip
Morris USA company to attend the cigarette maker’s
annual shareholders meeting in April in East Hanover,
N.J. Their quest was not to hear about the company’s
financial progress; rather, it was to pressure the
industry to voluntarily stop promoting tobacco products.
Ruth Malone, RN, PhD, associate professor of nursing
at the University of California, San Francisco, spearheaded
the effort. “Nurses have always been against
smoking, but we’ve never taken on the industry
as a group,” she said.
Malone helped form the Nightingales, a group of nurses
whose mission is to highlight the tobacco industry’s
behavior and its contributions to the suffering that
nurses witness in their jobs, and to call on the industry
to voluntarily end active promotion of tobacco products.
In her research into tobacco industry documents, Malone
found a “critics,” or “enemies,” list,
in which people working for the industry had assessed
organizations that could be critical of the industry
and their potential power against tobacco. The American
Nurses Association was listed, according to Malone,
but the comment in the document was that while nurses
are staunchly antitobacco, they have never become active
on the issue.
If they would become active, the document went on
to say, they would be formidable opponents.
“I thought, ‘We need to be formidable
opponents. We are the ones who see what this does to
people day in and day out,’” Malone said.
The meeting
The Nightingales decided that the Philip
Morris shareholders meeting would be a good starting
point to make their
feelings known. The meeting was for the Altria
Group Inc., the parent company of Philip Morris USA,
Philip
Morris International, and Kraft Foods.
The nurses went armed with a 37-foot banner of letters
from cigarette smokers and their families. Malone found
the letters in tobacco industry files while doing her
research. They weren’t allowed to bring the banner
into the meeting, but displayed it outside. They attended
the meeting in their white lab coats and came prepared
with questions that each would pose during the shareholders’ question-and-answer
session.
Malone admits that it was “scary” walking
into the meeting, “but we also have the power
of being nurses. I think that nurses are coming of
age in terms of being able to speak out on issues beyond
what had been traditionally seen as nursing practice
at the bedside.”
She was the first among the nurses attending to speak.
She read a few excerpts from letters about people dying
from cigarette smoking and asked Atria Group Inc. chairman
and CEO Louis Camilleri how the company responds to
letters like these.
Sharon Brown, MN, MPH, FNP, PhD(c), a family nurse
practitioner and doctoral student at the University
of California, Irvine, talked about the loss of a loved
one to cigarettes during her allotted two minutes for
questioning. Brown requested that for 30 seconds everyone
observe a moment of silence for her father, whose 78th
birthday would have been the day of the meeting. She
said her father “could have been here today had
he not become so addicted to tobacco and died at the
very young age of 60 years.”She asked what the
company was doing not only to inform consumers about
the addictive nature of the products, but also to diminish
the addictiveness of cigarettes.
Camilleri said, according to Brown, “I’m
sorry about your father.” He mentioned that there
were some cessation statements on the company website.
“It was a very rehearsed and generic response,
I felt,” Brown says.
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