Tobacco Company Mentality: Selling Cigarettes

Merchants of Death - The American Tobacco Industry
By Larry C. White:

Advertisers have never had much more to sell than the "sizzle" of cigarettes. Smokes are not like candy, or liquor, which have their own payoff.

Cigarettes taste horrible to people who have never smoked and the nicotine kick is anything but euphoric. It takes a certain amount of perseverance to learn to smoke, so young people have to be motivated by peer pressure, which is generated, at least in part, by alluring advertising.

Cigarettes also present problems for habituated smokers. The minor annoyances smokers have always endured include throat irritation, shortness of breath, and a sharp decline in sensitivity to tastes and smells. Smokers who have a cold have to experience the pain of hot tobacco smoke scratching their already sore throats.

To wake up in the morning with a mouth tasting like stale tobacco is one of life's small torments. On top of all this, cigarette smokers now have to put up with growing social disapproval. Hostile stares and remarks, as well as banishment to porches and hallways [written in 1988] are becoming the standard lot of smokers. And then there's the fear of lung cancer, emphysema, heart disease...

But for cigarette marketers there is one factor that counterbalances all of the negative facts about smoking. Users of the Dalkon Shields got rid of them quickly when they were discovered to be dangerous. Everyone now shrinks from asbestos.

But cigarettes continue to sell because they are addictive, and it is for that reason alone that more than 50 million Americans still smoke.