Scott Larouche
Rio Hondo College
Psy 123
Debra Kaiser
March 11, 2012
Project 1
This paper will discuss the American Legacy Foundation and its anti-smoking prevention campaign known as “Truth.” The history of the foundation will be reviewed, and the fundamental elements of the program, including its claims of success, how that success is measured, and the basis for the program design, will be presented.
Foundations, Elements and Focus
The Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) between the tobacco industry, 46 state governments and five U.S. territories resulted in the creation of the American Legacy Foundation. The American Legacy Foundation was created in 1999 and is a non-profit 501c health foundation. Using Florida’s Truth program as a model, the American Legacy Foundation started the “Truth” campaign in 2000. Truth was the very first national antismoking campaign to target youths and teens. Truth is currently the largest national youth prevention campaign and the only national campaign not directed by the tobacco industry (Truth - American Legacy Foundation, 2012, para. 1).
The main objective of Truth is to reduce youth smoking through changing social norms. The truth campaign sought to reveal the “tricks” and “schemes” tobacco companies were using to try to hook new generations of smokers. The campaign also sought to “brand” rebellion against adults and companies that promoted smoking, particularly in youths. To clarify its mission however, Truth is not an anti-smoking campaign, nor does it seek to ban smoking. Rather, the campaign is focused on anti-manipulations and the disclosure of Big Tobacco’s manipulative tactics as a means to inform and dissuade smoking (Truth - American Legacy Foundation, 2012). The campaign established its success and made its mission “cool” by targeting the inherent, rebellious nature of the target group (teenagers), and reduced the price of the behavior by focusing it towards adults that everyone agreed had been