Essay About Advent Of More Tenacious Laws And Big Tobacco

Smoking War
Essay title: Smoking War
The war on smoking has existed for decades. With the
advent of more tenacious laws prohibiting smoking in public
locations, and most recently Minnesotas historic tobacco
settlement, many actions against “Big Tobacco” have become more
successful. Anti-smoking campaigns have become more
confrontational, directly targeting tobacco companies in an
effort to expose its manipulative and illegal marketing tactics.
On the surface, last Novembers $206 billion settlement
agreement between the tobacco companies and 46 states looks like
a serious blow for Big Tobacco. In addition to the money, it
contains some important concessions: a ban on outdoor
advertising, limits on sports sponsorships and merchandising, no
more “product placement” in movies, and they have to close the
Tobacco Institute and other instruments. And Joe Camel – along
with all other cartoon characters – is gone for good.
Yet this did not hurt the tobacco industrys ability to
sell cigarettes. On Nov. 20, the day the attorneys general
announced the settlement, the stock of the leading tobacco
companies soared. After all, the Big Four tobacco makers will
pay only 1 percent of the damages (at most) directly; the rest
will be passed on to smokers through higher prices. Since many
states are already figuring the settlement money into their
budgets, this puts them in the odd position of depending on the
continued health of the tobacco industry for their roads,
schools, and hospitals.
Punishing the industry, in other words, doesnt
necessarily address the root of the problem – reducing demand
for cigarettes. And that wont go down until we all face the
fact that smoking is once again cool. In the 1980s, scarcely any
teenagers smoked. However, according to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, teen smoking rose 73 percent from 1988
to 1996.
As long as movie stars like John Travolta and Uma Thurman
flirt gorgeously through a haze of cigarette smoke, as long as
it drifts through all the right nightclubs and bars and
hang-outs – not to mention the magazines and posters and
billboards – teenagers will find ways to smoke, no matter how
many public service announcements or laws are written to stop
them. Most of these kids know that smoking fills their lungs
with toxins like arsenic, cyanide, and formaldehyde. Theyll
even recite the statistics to you: Smoking kills over 1,000
people a day in this country alone, and is far deadlier, in
terms of mortality rates, than any hard drug. And then theyll
blow their smoke into your face.
The only way to get any leverage with teenagers is to
return fire with fire, taking on the various influences that
make smoking seem attractive. We need, in other words, to find
new ways to make smoking look ridiculous.