When Columbus arrived in the Americas in the 1400s, Native Americans offered him a gift of tobacco; later, he learned how to smoke it from them. We haven’t stopped puffing, sniffing and spitting tobacco since then.
Throughout following decades, from Colonial times to today, tobacco became an incredible money-maker and known as a controversial harmful drug -- both at the same time. Even as Surgeon Generals and medical communities warned it could and would kill, its praises were sung in flashy commercials and touted by expensive talents. Nicotine was quickly embraced by the famous and not so famous. Until the 1980s, nicotine’s been so commonly used that smoking, sniffing, chewing and spitting tobacco was accepted as “innocent” and “normal” behavior.
Before I continue to tell you the history of tobacco product use in America, let’s take a quick look at the chemicals in Cigarette Smoke
Did you know that cigarette smoke contains over 4,000 chemicals, many of which are poisonous? If you smoke, these are just some of the substances you're putting into your body:
• Tar. See those yellow stains on a smoker's teeth? It's caused by tar, a sticky brown substance that contains many toxic chemicals. If the tar from cigarette smoke can stain your teeth, imagine what it does to your lungs! In fact, tar is the main cause of lung and throat cancers in smokers.
• Cyanide is used to make rat poison.
• Formaldehyde is used to preserve dead bodies. Yuck!
• Benzene is found in gasoline.
• Acetone is the main ingredient in nail polish remover.
• Ammonia is found in many disinfectants that you use to clean your house. Ammonia is also an ingredient in fertilizer.
• Nicotine is the drug in cigarette smoke that makes it hard to quit smoking. Nicotine is at least as addictive as heroin. It is also a deadly poison that was once used as an insecticide.
Of course, in early Colonial days, the growers and users of tobacco products did not know this since most of these things were added by companies along the way from those days to ours.
New York City’s Greenwich Village and Christopher Streets, later two of my student addresses, are said to have been tobacco fields in the early Colony days. According to Gene Borio, a foremost American tobacco historian, Christopher Street was lined with tobacco fields. In early Virginia, tobacco growing was the gold that made Virginia the Colony’s Golden State.
Tobacco’s history is alternately layered with great financial tobacco fortunes being made, along with alarms about nicotine’s high level of addictiveness and life-threatening dangers to our health. As early as 1761, scientists and physicians warned that snuff – now referred to as “dipping” -- could cause cancer of the nose. The alarm about chewing tobacco came later. By the 1800s, tobacco was called “a fashionable poison.”
Since 1964 – over 200 years later, 28 Surgeon General’s reports concluded that tobacco use is the single most avoidable cause of disease, disability, and death in the United States.
However, during the 50s and 60s, television’s golden days of growth, most people surveyed were not even aware of the surgeon generals’ tobacco reports. Further, America had a wealth of TV stars happy to put in a good word for tobacco.
Lucile Ball and Desi Arnaz, Jack Benny, Joey Bishop, the cast of “The Dick Van Dyke Show”, the “Beverly Hillbillies”, and Jack Webb who smoked Chesterfields for his “Dragnet” sponsor; and “The Phil Silvers Show” all unwittingly pitched tobacco smoking to American families.
In 1952, actor John Wayne spoke up for Camel cigarettes, when he said he’d been smoking Camels for 20 years. 27 years later, the Duke died of lung cancer. The last commercials he made asked audiences to stop smoking.
In 1970, Congress passed the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act banning the advertising of cigarettes on television and radio. The last cigarette TV commercial, broadcast on the Johnny Carson Tonight Show at 11:59pm on January 1, 1971 was for Virginia Slims. see www.tvparty.com
By the mid-1970s, cigarettes were the most heavily advertised product in America. Newspapers and magazines, the beneficiary of the new tobacco advertising windfall, chose to ignore the nature and health dangers connected with tobacco smoking. Yes, advertising dollars can and does drive editorial content. Then and now.
Throughout the 80s, the push/pull of health warnings and tobacco product glorification, aptly assisted by the membership group, The Tobacco Institute, went on. Millions of dollars went to fight local smoke-free legislation. More millions, if not billions, were spent on creating slam bang pro-tobacco advertising campaigns. More big bucks went to fight law suits being placed by those who considered their health impaired by tobacco use. Or suits placed by their survivors.
The industry’s position was that tobacco is a/not harmful to humans; b/the user chose to use it so it’s their problem, and c/anyway, it isn’t provable that injury or death is caused by tobacco use.
However, the 1980s was the decade when changes towards smoking began to be felt. The first jury verdict ever decided against a tobacco company for the death of a smoker was a mixed victory for Mr. Antonio Cipollone, the widower of Rose Cipollone. His wife died of cancer at age 58 after smoking cigarettes for 40 years. While Mr. Cipollone was awarded $400,00o in compensatory damages for his wife’s death–the first financial award in a liability suit against a tobacco company, nothing was awarded to his wife’s estate. The rationale: She was found to be 80 percent at fault for choosing to smoke tobacco.
As a gal who finds great suspense stories in trial transcripts, this one had a cliff-hanger for me. During a 1988 decision by Federal District Court Judge H. Lee Sarokin (the Cipollone trial) to dismiss four allegations against the tobacco companies, he said that the Council for Tobacco Research, started by the tobacco industry in 1954 with the announcement that it would research whether smoking was safe “was nothing but a hoax created for public relations purposes with no intention of seeking the truth or publishing it. “
“Evidence presented by the plaintiff, particularly that contained in documents of the defendants themselves, indicates the development of a public relations strategy aimed at combating the mounting scientific reports regarding the dangers of smoking,” wrote Judge Sarokin.
Unfortunately, the jury never read or heard these words.
By 1987, thanks to the work of anti-smoking groups, state legislators, and medical edicts, 44 percent of youngsters who had been smoking had quit. Consumption was down. But not for long.
According to the Economic Opportunity institute in Seattle, almost 90 percent of adult smokers begin their habits at or before age 18, making kids an essential market for tobacco advertisers. Bennet LeBow, owner of Liggett Tobacco, is quoted as saying “If you really and truly are not going to sell to children, you are going to be out of business in 30 years.”
In 1998, the tobacco industry signed the Master Settlement Agreement, in which they agreed not to market to kids or on billboards.
Never fear. If anyone is resourceful, it is the tobacco industry. A year later, they simple upped their promotional allowance to stores that kids go to frequently by 23 percent, upped cigarette-related giveaways by 134 percent and added 65 percent more temptations like tobacco purchase related t-shirts and lighters. Advertising around these stores also increased by 13 percent. Now, guys and gals, if I sound a little cranky about tobacco nicotine pushing to kids, read on and weep.
Today, nicotine, the main chemical drug in tobacco, is one of the most heavily used addictive drugs in the United States. In 2004, 29.2 percent of the U.S. population 12 and older—70.3 million people—used tobacco at least once in the month prior to being interviewed.
This figure includes 3.6 million young people age 12 to 17. Young adults aged 18 to 25 reported the highest rate of current use of any tobacco products (44.6 percent) in 2004.
According to TVParty.com, 2000 kids light up for the first time EVERY DAY.
Today, a more insidious form of tobacco advertising is with us. It’s called “product placement.” It goes like this: Instead of a celebrity standing there frankly pitching tobacco, the tobacco product is scripted into the movie, television or “reality” show. Highly visible lead actors “just happen” to be smoking cigarettes or cigars. (See Introduction and the report on Lifetime Channel’s chain smoking heroine played by actor Kelly Gillis in “Perfect Prey”)
Not only does tobacco “product placement” circumvent the law that tobacco ads cannot be placed on television, it convinces watchers that these actors are wildly fond of smoking and that therefore smoking is once again “Super Cool”.
This public relation’s ploy is designed to subliminally influence the viewers to run out and buy the product their idol uses. In addition to scripting in product placement, celebrities are once more being photographed and filmed smoking in their off screen lives. Their actions are telling our youth –and impressionable adults -- that “Smoking is “In”; Smoking is Hot; Smoking is “Baaad.” Television is smoking up those smoke-free zones.
Incidentally, if you think the tobacco industry gave a nice salute to the introduction of smoke free zones, well, wrong.
In 1990, Ellis Milan, president of the Retail Tobacco Distributors of America said, "President George Bush often talks of 1,000 points of light. I'd like to think those points of light are coming from the glowing ends of cigars, cigarettes and pipes across the country, and symbolize the cornerstone of this nation – tobacco”
Gee, and I always thought the American worker has been and is the cornerstone of this nation.
Reading the meticulous tobacco history research done by Mr. Borio is fascinating and revealing. The historic “tug of war " between the medical world and the tobacco production world began and continues to exist since the first tobacco leaf was grown for profit.
Further, because tobacco nicotine gives tobacco companies the kind of profits that led one tobacco executive to say “We make more money than God,” tobacco nicotine is likely to be on the market for a long time.
For some fascinating facts about tobacco – some very funny -- take a peek at www.tobacco.org I don’t know the author, probably never will, but Gene Borio is doing a great job. Thanks, Gene.
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