The Deception Of The Tobacco Industry Essay — страница 8

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percent 14-year-olds, 75 percent in 15-year-olds, 55 percent in 16-year-olds, and 35 percent in 17-year olds (Hilts 69). Within three years after Camels were introduced to children in 1988, the brand jumped from 3 percent to more than 13 percent of the cigarette market; the jump was even larger among the youngest groups (70). An R.J. Reynolds executive was asked exactly who the young people are that are being targeted, junior high school kids, or even younger? His reply made RJR s objective clear: They got lips? We Want em. If this is truly who the tobacco industry is aiming for, their achievements are considerable. More than 100,000 American children ages 12 and under are habitual smokers (Mixon 3). Every day, 3,000 to 5,000 American kids light a cigarette for the first time.

Children spend a billion dollars a year on cigarettes. Tobacco companies must make sure that they recruit enough new smokers every day, taking into account that they loose one of their life-long customers to disease every 13 seconds (Starr and Taggart 706). Tobacco products have claimed the lives of more people than those who died in World War Two (Jaffa 85). The sum of its victims exceeds the number of deaths resulting from alcohol abuse, illegal drug abuse, AIDS, traffic accidents, homicides, and suicides combined (Glantz xvii). There are thousands of documents from tobacco companies which reveal that the industry has been remarkably successful in protecting its ability to market an addictive product that not only kills its customers by the millions, but also shrinks the

economy by 22 billion dollars annually (Starr and Taggart 706). The industry has uniquely been able to market its lethal products by tactfully instilling completely irrational desires in the vulnerable minds of children. Although tobacco products have been proven to be seriously hazardous to health, some 50 million Americans continue to smoke regularly; this is not necessarily a matter of personal choice as the companies claim. Rather, after seducing young people s minds (by explaining smoking as glamorous rather than deadly), the whole business trusts that these youths will continue to smoke because they will develop addictions to the nicotine in tobacco. Along with some help from the government, the industry fights regulation of their product through the skilled legal,

political, and public relations tactics that helped them create an imaginary controversy on the effects of smoking. This situation, however, is slowly changing. The deception of the tobacco industry has recently become better publicized through the revelation of internal documents which previously have been suppressed by the companies. (Among these documents, those of Brown & Willamson and have been greatly exposed.) Every day, organizations such as the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) are taking steps to control the virtually unregulated sale of cigarettes and other tobacco products. Until something effective is done, however, the best way to fight the merchants of death is to influence their prey – the impressionable minds of children - before they do.