Ed Note: Nicotine is highly addicting as any cigarette smoker can tell you. I cared for two doctors who died from COPD – neither able to stop smoking. Big Tobacco has long tried to lure us (especially teenagers and women) to smoke. Remember “You’ve Come a Long Way Baby?” Now there’s a new way to get people hooked on nicotine – the e-cig a vaping device powered by a battery with nicotine in a flavored solution. Basically the only use of this device is to deliver an addicting drug (nicotine) to a susceptible individual. Once the person is addicted, the vaping device becomes an entry pathway to taking up cigarette smoking – though it’s marketed as a way to get off cigarettes. The nicotine by vaping may not be as toxic when delivered by the vaping device, but we really don’t know how safe the fumes are. Basically, the public is undergoing an experiment in the probable toxic effects of vaping. The 20th century will be remembered for its tobacco abuse. Will the 21st be remembered for corporations trying successfully to get us addicted by vaping nicotine?
By Jeneen Interlandi from the New York Times
I was 15 when I started smoking, and so were most of my friends. We smoked to rebel against our parents but also to identify with them — of course they smoked, even as they told us not to. We smoked because it was feminine and sexy, and also masculine and tough. Because celebrities did it, and they looked cool. Because the prissy kids didn’tdo it, and we weren’t them. Because cigarettes were both forbidden and easy to get: ten quarters in a cigarette vending machine, which you could still find in most pizza joints and doughnut shops in suburban New Jersey in the early 1990s.
All of that — the appeal, the access, the illicitness of cigarettes — was by design. By the time my friends and I were born, cigarette makers had stitched their products into the fabric of our culture so thoroughly that not even a century’s worth of research tying those products to an array of slow, painful deaths was enough to deter many of us.
Tobacco companies made cigarettes a diet tool and a matter of high fashion. They made smoking a feminist act. They didn’t just assure the public that it was safe to smoke; they used doctors to push their brands. And the more they came to understand their own product, the more they advertised cigarettes to the young. Most people who don’t start smoking by the end of adolescence never will. The cigarette makers knew that. They used cartoon camels, pictures of Santa Claus and larger-than-life cowboys in their ads.The Marlboro cowboy and Joe Camel were mainstays in cigarette advertising.CreditStanford Research Into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising
It helped that their key ingredient was highly addictive. It also helped that they were willing to lie. When concerns emerged about nicotine dependence, cancer and heart disease, they kept regulators at bay by playing up scientific uncertainty. Then they bought off scientists and disguised corporate propaganda as independent research. By the timetheir deceptions were exposed, a new generation of smokers — promising billions of dollars in industry revenue — was already hooked.Early tobacco advertising appealed to young people, and made health and diet claims.CreditStanford Research Into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising