Big Tobacco are a bunch of lying, cheating drug dealing scoundrels. Just like the people at Big Guns, Big Pharma and Big Alcohol. Everyone with half a brain knows that. I'm thankful that the genes I inherited from my ancestors don't seem to predispose me to either addiction or stupidity
11
How many smokers burden our already burdened health care system with lung cancer, pneumonia, and emphysema? More deaths are caused by tobacco use than by HIV, illegal drug use, alcohol use, motor vehicle injuries, suicides, and murders combined.
e-cigarettes can contain the same or more nicotine than regular tobacco and yet it is promoted as a "safe" alternative.
Tobacco, e-cigarettes, and vapors should be banned completely!!
10
Evil doers. And the brand ambassadors, microinfluencers, macroinfluencers, cex.daily models, etc., who support tobacco are not much better.
7
Still such liars after all these years. Vaping is killing the tobacco industry at every turn so Big Tobacco, knowing it has lost the battle to people giving up smoking and to the vaping hardware companies in China and e-liquid blenders in America now tries to create a new false image. Pitiful.
5
"Smart" phones from Apple and social media sites like Fakebook, are all about profiting by making people stupider and lazier and, therefore, easier to manipulate. Both produce damaging addictions to their products.
3
NYC Mayor Bloomberg, whose charity Bloomberg Philanthropies is mentioned in this article, has been donating money now approaching $960 million (and Bill Gates has added more than $250 million) to combat tobacco in low- and middle-income countries, (eg. China, Russia, Bangladesh, but also Turkey). The plan promoted is the WHO MPOWER plan which is the plan used in NYC beginning in 2001.
Raising tobacco taxes has more than half the impact of getting people to quit or to never start. Also important is banning smoking in public places, hard-hitting anti-smoking ads. These policy initiative seek to stigmatize tobacco use. Also part of MPOWER is clinical involvement with doctors working with patients to quit. But the first three policy items have by far the greatest impact.
While the overall tobacco use has been declining in the US, the percent of smokings at the poverty rate and below has remained at 35% since 2000, if not before.
The plan as implemented in NYC and with Bloomberg/Gates help in low-income countries should be implemented in the US.
For more details about the MPOWER plan:
"How to prevent 100 million deaths from tobacco"
https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(07)60782-X/abstract
7
The connection with disease, including lung cancer is clear. Assuming Medicare is still around, it will be the non - smokers who pay the billions for their being "cool."
7
In the world of amoral capitalism there are few more practiced at lies and deception then the tobacco industry. That they are using social media to entice young people to smoke while creating a screen of marketing and misdirection is reminiscent of a time when medical professionals, paid researchers & paper media served the same purpose. Old game, new tricks, more victims & above all profit for the pushers.
9
They are telling lies they are still using models to lure new smokers. The tobacco companies are giving big campaign money to their truth isn't truth GOP who are turning their heads and allowing them to sell to the teenagers. The business world when allies with the Republicans are morally bankrupt.
3
At this point I no longer have much sympathy left for anyone who would willfully addict themselves to tobacco.
Tobacco is not a pain prescription gone rogue, its not a self medication of misery run amok.
Kids smoke to look cool. They smoke purely to look hipster, gangsta, whatever.
Enough is known about tobacco at this point to ban it.
I mean, they actually banned Ma Huang, & Tobacco's legal?
But kids who start smoking/vaping to look cool are idiots.
3
@Tldr, the time has come for the public and general media to start referring to smokers as what they are: nicotine addicts. The sooner we start bunching them in with crack and cocaine addicts, the faster the "coolness" will leave smoking, and the less desirable it will become.
3
If the people running these businesses were willing to continue aggressively marketing their products for decades after they knew how toxic and addictive they were and asserted that they weren’t, why would anyone believe them now?
14
I remember very clearly when the tabacco industry finally lost the legal battle that finally attempted to punish them for the social damage/utter carnage they had been perpetuating for decades. They were fined billions of dollars and promised to spend billions to keep kids away for m the perils of tobacco. They then proceeded to better develop markets overseas where billions of people (victims) live, forsaking the hundreds of millions here in the states, and made commericials that were engineered by highly paid marketers and psychologists that made it look like cool kids still smoked, and the dorky ones did not. Now what kind of kid do most teenagers want to be? Nothing is sacred in the market. When billions in profits are on the line, don’t be looking for a huge corporation with no individuals names attached to just up and do the right thing.
11
Whenever I see someone vaping, I always laugh out loud. It's as absurd as someone trying to walk in high heels. Monkey see, monkey do.
1
@Fourteen I like to refer to these people as "smokestacks, cause that's what they look like.
Hopefully once they grow up, they will leave it all behind. Physical nicotine addiction is easily resolved, but psychological dependence can last forever. Then the undoable damage is done.
1
@laurie Addiction to nicotine is not “easily resolved”. According to the U.S. Surgeon General nicotine is as addictive as heroin. From personal experience, of myself, family and friends, I know that it is normal to make many attempts to quit, using a variety of strategies, before finally being able to quit. .
9
Merchants of death enjoying vulture capitalism.
Nice people.
25
The tobacco industry is one those curious legacies in our modern day society. Gone from something that was an intrinsic part of Western society to what basically amounts to a very rich pariah.
As much as we attempt to rid ourselves of this pariah, many factors work against these attempts. From the addiction itself, to the very resourceful and debatably evil people at the tobacco companies, as we see again in this article.
From engineering cigarettes to be as addictive as possible, to subtle subversion of our children to make them see smoking as something harmless and cool.
Even though smoking is rapidly decreasing, we still have a long way to go to rid ourselves of this still popular product whose only real purpose is to cause harm and injury.
4
"The tobacco industry says...."
Reminds me of the Chesterfield ads in the piles of Life Magazines stacked up in the antique stores, with a clown in a white coat and a stethoscope around his neck, sucking on a coffin nail.
10