What must you do to market a product that kills half of its regular users? What enticements must you resort to in order to addict those regular users early, sometimes as early as nine years old? How do you package death as life, disease as health and deadly addiction as the taste of freedom and a celebration of life?

Look no further than your nearest playground or the shirt on your favorite athlete's back or the shoe, bag, or jacket. Look no further than tobacco companies' own documents that tell you how they promote death in the playground to unsuspecting children. The tobacco companies say they don't want to market cigarettes to young people, and even lecture parents and teachers to become more involved in tackling youth smoking. But whose examples will teenagers follow – teachers' or race car drivers'? parents' or cricket superstars'?

The World Health Organization (WHO) says tobacco use is a communicated disease – communicated through advertising and sponsorship. Perhaps the most pernicious form of that marketing pitch is to be found in stadia and sports arenas worldwide.

Tobacco companies pump hundreds of millions of dollars every year into sponsoring sports events worldwide. In the United States alone, according to the Federal Trade Commission, the major domestic cigarette companies reported spending US$ 113.6 million on sports and sporting events in 1999. In countries where direct tobacco advertising is banned by law, sponsorship of sports amounts to a cynical manipulation of national laws. Despite a federal ban on tobacco advertising on television, it is estimated that tobacco companies achieve the equivalent of more than US$ 150 million in television advertising every year in the USA through their sponsorship of motor sports events. Formula One motor racing has been described as
"... the ideal sport for sponsorship. It's got glamour and worldwide television coverage. It's a 10-month activity involving 16 races in 14 countries with drivers from 16 nationalities. After football it's the number one multinational sport. It's got total global exposure, total global hospitality, total media coverage and 600 million people watching it on TV every fortnight...It's macho, it's excitement, it's color, it's international, it's glamour...They're there to get visibility. They're there to sell cigarettes."

Tobacco companies claim they are sponsoring sports out of a sense of philanthropic duty. Their internal documents, however, tell another story.

An internal R.J. Reynolds memo from 1989 has this to say:
"We're in the cigarette business. We're not in the sports business. We use sports as an avenue for advertising our products. We can go into an area when we're marketing an event, measure sales during an event and measure sales after the event, and see an increase in sales."

That is no idle boast. When an Indian associate of the British American Tobacco (BAT) group sponsored the Indian World Cup Cricket in 1996, a survey showed that smoking among Indian teenagers increased five-fold. There was also marked increase in false perceptions about athletic excellence and smoking. Tobacco companies think that if they can place their logos, their branding, on enough sportsmen and women, in enough stadia, then people will be fooled into thinking that smoking can't really be all that bad. If it is associated closely enough with sport, people will think it must stand for all the same things as sport stands for – health, excitement, fitness.

The deception is for the public. The profits are for the companies. And the death and disease burden is for countries to cope with. Tobacco companies know exactly how many smokers they can get for every dollar spent on advertising in the sports arena. "We're not handing out money for nothing. We have gone into this very thoroughly and the entire...publicity is built around motor racing seen as a fast, exciting and trendy sport for the young and, if you like, the young at heart. That's who we are aiming at in the local market and early indications are that we are on target," said Gordon Watson, BAT official quoted in the South China Morning Post in 1984.

The company is on target, but so are the death rates. Some twenty years after that early addiction set in, new studies show that one-third of Chinese men currently under 29 years of age will die prematurely due to a tobacco-related disease. Of the 8.4 million tobacco deaths that will occur by 2020, seven out of ten will occur in the developing countries.