¶ Intro / Opening
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just smoking smoking, feel all right? Just keep on choking.
And this is Segnestion, uh Boston. Yeah, okay, yep, that's right. I was in my head, I was getting there. I thought you were going to go with smoking in the boys room.
No. I always thought that was just kind of a lame.
Yeah, that was a remake. You know, Motley Crue covered it.
I don't remember who did the original, do you?
No, I don't remember.
You don't need to email in and tell us. That's all right. If we're curious enough, we'll go.
Look it up where you can feel free. Okay, who Okay, tell someone not to email now.
I do want to know. I'm gonna look while you talk.
Well, I think you should wait for the email. Maybe the writer of that song.
Is listening Brownsville Station.
Okay, there you go.
I never in a million years would it come with that, because I've never heard those two words together as a band name.
Oh well, you've never taken the train there? Then?
Have you ever heard of Brownsfield Station.
¶ Cigarette Anatomy and Early History
Just when I took a train to Brownsfield Station.
That's gross, I think, I know what you're talking about.
Oh God, all right, let's get off this and get on something even grosser, which is cigarettes.
Nice.
And this was from our pal Julia, and I just sort of I commissioned this one because I was like, you know what, let's just do one on the cigarette itself, not like smoking, and not the lawsuits and all that stuff or lung cancer, but just on the thing, the object. And Julia sen us an article called the Cigarette Itself, appropriately titled. And I learned a lot in this one, chiefly that the cigarette was born in Spain in the
early sixteenth sixteenth century when cigar smokers. Cigars were around, and it was sort of a luxury item for the wealthy at the time because they were you know, hand
rolled and imported from Mexico and South America. But when they would you know, stub out that last you know, half inch of a cigar or whatever, people that didn't have as much money would come along grab that thing and take out the tobacco, you know, grind it up and pick it apart a little bit and wrap it in paper and smoke it, and that was a little cigar or a cigaretllo.
H isn't that amazing?
Yeah? I mean I never thought about the word cigarette being a play on cigar. Oh really like a tiny cigar, like, because I always started cigarello. But like a kitchenette, a cigarette is just like the same sort of version of that.
Ironically, I never thought of a kitchenette as a small version of a kitchen. Come on, so, chuck, let's just hold our horses here before we go any further into the history. Let's give a few basics about the cigarette.
Eight.
So they're about eighty four millimeters long a standard cigarette, and for a reference, that's about the length of a cigarette. They're sold in packs of twenty. And if you really want to get technical about a cigarette, next time you're at a party and you're bumming one from somebody or castigating somebody for smoking, even better, you can say that a cigarette is also technically known as a heated tobacco product.
That's right. As we'll see a Camel's first started putting them in packs of twenty, and I could not find out if I think they did that to match the number of matches in a matchbook. Which is twenty. Oh really, I'm pretty sure that's the story.
I wish somebody would have told the hot dog makers that, because you know, you got the bug eight or a pack of eight hot dogs and buns of six. I can never keep up these days with witches.
Well yeah, that just still doesn't make any sense at all. But yeah, I'm pretty sure that they put it in a pack up twenty eventually to match the matches in a matchbook. But that may also be apocryphal.
Who knows, it's a good one.
What cigarettes are for is to deliver nicotine to your body, which is a feel good chemical that is naturally occurring in tobacco. And the whole point is to with a pipe, cigar or cigarette or anything like that an esig is to get you that nicotine, to get you addicted to it, to eventually kill you from it.
Yeah, it's crazy, but that's essentially the point. And I think before the advent of mass produced cigarettes, maybe you had a lesser chance of developing all sorts of hideous
cancers and other diseases. But even if that's not true, or even if it is true, it doesn't matter, because we live in the age of mass produced cigarettes, and these things are exquisitely engineered products that so much time and money and effort has gone into, and so much research that most of what we know about cigarettes, what cigarettes due to the human body, how addictive they are, comes from the research the tobacco companies did over the
decades that they kept that eventually had to be handed over to the state attorneys general who sued them back in the nineties.
Yeah, it's crazy how it all panned out. If you're looking at you know, and Julia kind of breaks it down with the white end and the brown end, but there are plenty of cigarettes that are white through and through, meaning the filter end is the same color, but the tobacco end is a filler of cut tobacco leaves. And then plenty of additives. I think how many did they admit?
Five hundred and ninety nine.
Yeah, they wanted to get to six hundred so bad. But they finally in nineteen ninety four released their additives and it was a list five ninety long, which is crazy to think about it.
I think they had six hundred, but some very sharp eyed tobacco lobbyists like, uh, you got arsenic in here twice, so.
It says cut tobacco leaves. It's held in a porous wrapped paper that is sealed by an adhesive. And if you'll look closely, there is a printed there's printed information on that paper that you're also smoking and you're gonna be burning when you're smoking that tobacco, that paper, those additives, that ink, that adhesive and everything, and the smoke that comes out and these are words I did not know. The smoke that comes just from a burning cigarette sitting
there is called side stream smoke. The stuff that you
¶ Filter Deception and Global Spread
inhale is called mainstream smoke.
Yeah, the mainstream smoke comes out of the filter. You draw through the filter, and the smoke that comes out that's the mainstream smoke. The filters we'll see it does something a little bit here there, but not really. It's essentially to give smokers the illusion that they're preventing some sort of harm to themselves when they actually aren't. Another illusion is that these cigarette butts, which are the most
littered item in the entire world. I saw as something like four point one trillion cigarette butts are littered, not thrown away, littered every year around the world. And a common misconception amongst smokers, is that they're biodegradable. They're not. They're photodegradable, not biodegradable, which is a real problem because they kind of well, they litter all over the place and their type of plastic.
Yeah, those filters are cellulose acetate, and there are companies that put charcoal in there, but because charcoal is a great filter generally naturally, but there aren't any studies that show that charcoal in a filter helps it all. Yeah,
as far as health outcomes or anything like that. There are two paper wraps on the filter in there's a plug rap around the actual filter, and then there is if it's a brown filter, there's the brown it's called tipping paper around the plug rap, and that is also sealed up so that you know, you don't want that smoke coming out of the side of the filter, right, you want it going into your mouth. And then that
filter is also treated. They changed the pH on that filter to purposefully turn it brown as you smoke, so you look and you see, man, look at all that brown stuff that's not getting into my lungs.
It fooled me for twenty years up until a couple of days ago. I had no idea that that was the case.
Yeah, just one of the dirty tricks that cigarette manufacturers used and still used.
It's you know, nuts. So let's go back to the cigarillo, shall we.
Let's do it.
So the cigarello, I think you said it was the early sixteenth century, so the early fifteen hundreds, right after the Age of Discovery kicked off, right, And it took all the way to the late seventeen hundreds before it really started to spread outward into Italy and Portugal, which are not that far away. So apparently people didn't think that much of the cigarello by then. But as Europe started to go to war with itself, the cigarillo kind of hitchhiked to the fronts and it was like, hey,
what do you guys think about me? Pretty great?
Huh yeah, I mean it's crazy. The rise of the cigarette is tied directly to the various wars over the years and the fact that soldiers wanted to smoke. It was, you know, helped calm their nerves. I think it was as was a comfort piece when you're I bet a cigarette and kids don't ever try it, don't ever even try it. But I bet when you're a war sitting
in a foxhole in miserable conditions. I bet that cigarette is one of the few pleasures that comes your way, you know, yeah, I bet that's a great cigarette to smoke.
I would think so too. Yeah.
So anyway, French and British soldiers discovered them in the early eighteen hundreds during the Napoleonic Wars, and this is where the French came up with the word cigarette instead of cigarillo. And the Crimean War around the this century came along a new generation of British and French soldiers this you got these cigarettes with that pretty harsh Turkish tobacco.
They said, we love this stuff. They brought it home and there was a tobacconist named Philip Morris that had a shop on Bond Street in eighteen forty seven where he was selling cigars and tobacco products, and he was like, I'm going to start making cigarettes.
So yeah, okay, So Philip Morris, the Philip Morris Company, one of the largest producers of cigarettes in the entire world, is directly related to Philip Morris. It's not just like a like a shout out or something like that.
Oh I never looked that up, but I just assumed that it was eventually became the big company.
I mean, it would make sense because a lot of these companies did grow out or were consolidated by larger companies, a lot of the original cigarette companies, so it's entirely possible, for sure. But regardless, he was one of the people who brought it to London and made it kind of like a fancy thing, which is really surprising because Chuck in America it went a totally different way when it really became a thing in the United States. As we'll see,
it became associated essentially with juvenile delinquents. At first, it was not a fanancy like a Bond Street type thing to do. It was kids playing craps rather than going to school. Were smoking cigarettes too, yeah, ne'er do wells, Yes, ne'er do wells.
So at Philip Morris's Bond Street tobacco store, they started making their own cigarettes. They were not mass produced, obviously, he had people hand rolling, just like they did with cigars, but they were pretty good. They would get out, they would pump out like three or four a minute, which is pretty fast. They were pretty expensive as a result, and a couple of things happened that really made cigarettes,
you know, way more wide had spread. One was the invention of a rolling machine, like a machine that could pump out, you know, eventually like two hundred and fifty thousand a day for a company, and the American cigarette, which used a combination sometimes of Turkish tobacco or sometimes
¶ American Mass Production and Early Bans
just straight up American tobacco that was a lot less harsh and more palatable for I guess American appetite.
Smooth, mild. So yeah, there's a guy named James Duke who was a Durham, North Carolina tobacco air and I think I remember correctly when we went to Durham for our show recently. I think both times they have like a big Duke stencil on a like a smokestack at some place.
Oh that's funny, I'm pretty sure. So on smokestack.
He created W. Duke, Sons and Company in eighteen eighty three to start making cigarette sorry eighteen eighty one. By eighteen eighty three he was making two hundred and fifty thousand a day thanks to the invention of James Bonsac, who created that cigarette rolling machine that you mentioned earlier that could roll two hundred cigarettes per minute.
Yeah, that's quite an increase from three or four over there on Bond Street. So Duke said, hey, give me a deal. I'll buy a few of those things if you give me a good price on him and yeah, exactly, and he said sure. And he said, all right, I'll use cigarette rollers. You're out of business. And they said no, you can't hire a machine to do work that humans do. And he said, watch me, And so he put these machines in. All of a sudden, they were a lot
cheaper to sell, to make, and to sell. They were readily available, and like you said, they were smoother, and they got popular at least with the juveniles. But that would be the first step toward making them a little more mainstream. But it is interesting that they were I think in nineteen hundred and two percent of the market was tobacco market with cigarettes. People were still really into your tobacco at the time and dipping snuff.
Yeah, people love that kind of stuff. So by the eighteen nineties, though, this was enough of the thing that kids were smoking cigarettes that as early as the eighteen nineties states started to pass bands on selling cigarettes to minors. Isn't that interesting?
Yeah, I mean I think I didn't think they cared about children at all back then. Apparently they were like, hey, this doesn't look good these kids walking around smoking like they're seven years old.
They're like, what are you doing out of the coal mine right exactly? Uh, do you want to keep going and talk about where the cigarette really broke out in America? Or do you want to take a break first.
I think it's break time, buddies.
Okay, we're going to take a break, everybody. We just decided not a smoke break, just a break. So, just like in Europe, Chuck War helped cigarettes just blow up. Basically in World War One in particular, brought cigarettes to America by introducing it to American troops. And, like you said, the men fighting World War One and the trenches were like,
we need something. Somebody give us something to smoke. And the US government was like, that's fine, but cigars are kind of pricey, and I don't know if you guys have been to a cigar shop lately. We can't really give all of you cigars all the time. What about these cigarettes that are being made that are pretty cheap.
And the men in the trenches said, whatever, we just need to smoke something, so very quickly, a steady, never ending stream of packs of cigarettes started being sent to the boys on the front in Europe and also like business, individual, citizens, the government, they were all paying for it. And they just smoked, smoke, smoked out of the trenches in World War One, and when they came back they were like, you, guys, you gotta try these. They're amazing. Yeah.
I mean it was kind of perfect for a foxhole because it was much quicker than a cigar, Like, you know, you can smoke a cigar for an hour, and you didn't have that kind of time if you just wanted a quick nicotine fix. The cigarette was kind of perfect for wartime. And buddy, did they explode. Camel cigarettes in nineteen thirteen sold about a million packs of cigarettes or is that a million cigarettes?
A million packs?
A million packs of cigarettes. In nineteen fourteen they sold four hundred and twenty five million packs, and by nineteen nineteen they sold twenty one billion packs of cigarettes.
Yeah, which not coincidentally was after World War One ended and all of those men fighting in World War One came back with pretty healthy little cigarette habits. By then.
That's an astounding number and I knew it was going to be a lot, but that kind of jump. I mean, can you imagine the kind of money they were making.
I know, And that's just Cammebell cigarettes. That's not all cigarettes, that's just one caramel. Yeah. Another thing World War One did was kind of change the United States's view on life and was like, Okay, a lot of people just died, and maybe we should start thinking of life as a little more valuable and precious and relax a little bit and enjoy ourselves. And one of the exactly right one of the upshots of that was that I guess norms
and expectations around women really loosened up. And one of the things that women did almost immediately was they started smoking.
¶ War, Glamour, and Pervasive Ads
It became socially acceptable for women to start smoking, and the tobacco companies clapped their hands together and rubbed them and just started drooling at the jowls.
Oh yeah. All of a sudden they were targeting with advertising campaigns about how glamorous it was, how feminine it was, how independent you were if you were a smoker as a woman.
Yep.
This is also a very fun fact. Philip Morris. The Marlboro cigarette, which I have always associated with.
Like Cowboy killed dude.
Yeah, like a dude cigarette. Cowboy killers that, the Marlboro Man and the famous Sunset Boulevard you know, cut out that was there forever and Kramer.
Don't forget Kramer was the Marlborough Man for a minute.
That's right, he was. But the Marlboro cigarette had such hard type of thing hard to say. It was launched as a women's cigarette. It was known as mild As May and I'm not sure when that switch, but that's kind of a fun little fact.
I vow to pick up mild as May is a phrase I'm going to start rising.
I like that.
A lucky Strike was also like, hey, rather than reaching for a suite, which will eventually disappoint your husband, reach for a lucky strike instead. Just smoke anytime you have a chocolate craving.
Uh yeah, and all those accessories that Hey, listen again, kids don't smoke. But I'd be a liar if I didn't say. In an old movie, when someone took out one of those little slender cigarette cases and popped out a cigarette from that neat row and tapped it on the outside of that metal case, I don't know. That was pretty cool. Looking to young Chuck.
Yeah, I recently read Rebecca by Daphne de Maurier. Have you ever read that?
No, is it the Rebecca Hitchcock movie Rebecca?
I think Hitchcock may have made it. Yeah, and that tracks because I think it was written in the early thirties. Have you seen the movie? Was it about a woman who is basically living in the shadow of her husband's first wife. Yeah, so that's the book.
But people great undervalued Hitchcock movie.
By the way, it's a great book too, But people bust out cigarette cases like every couple paragraphs in there and offer cigarette and everyone smokes after tea and all this stuff, so I you know exactly what you're talking about. It just suck out to me. I think I guess as a twenty first century person knowing what smoking does, looking at people who were living at a time when they didn't know what smoking did, it's kind of not funny to see. But it's just bizarre to look back like that.
Yeah, I mean I remember in college in Athens, it was always one like classy co ed who like carried her cigarettes in a case and maybe even had one of those little cigarette holder extenders or whatever. Oh, yeah, yeah, because you know, they were like, hey, look at me, I'm different, and you know I'm an art major. So this is what we did.
I'm like friggin' Audrey Hepburn here.
The other thing that happened was they started putting cigarette lighters in cars in I think nineteen twenty five nineteen twenty six is when they became standard and cars a little push button cigarette lighter. So now they're saying, like, smoke everywhere.
Yeah, and it just so happens. Nineteen twenty five nineteen twenty six is when the first cars came up basically, so right out of the gate they had cigarette lighters.
Huh yeah, And right out of the gate. Movie stars started smoking on screen, men and women, and started getting deals, started getting sponsorship deals with certain cigarette companies.
Yeah, you could get one hundred and fifty grand plus a year's supply of Lucky Strikes if you're smoking was sponsored by a Lucky Strike, which I think Joan Crawford, Spencer, Tracy, Gary Cooper, they all had those deals with Lucky Strikes.
So they would out in public be smoking Lucky Strikes, but during the reviews they'd also stop and be like, wow, this Lucky Strike is so mild, smooth or whatever, like they would talk about it like as if it were you know how people try to place ads or they used to, I don't know if they still do in podcasts where suddenly we'd just be talking about a product and it'd take you a second, yeah, to catch up. That's what they used to do with Lucky Strikes.
Yeah, and they're like, they send me a year supply, So they sent me one thousand packs of cigarettes.
Exactly. It's nuts. So there's just tons of stars smoking. They were literally really sponsored by tobacco companies, and even if you weren't, you could still be pitching them in regular ads. And there's a push today to I think, retroactively and moving forward, give our ratings to movies that have smoking in them, which I hadn't heard of, but I ran across that recently.
Yeah, I heard about that much different back then. Obviously, by the middle of the twentieth century, cigarettes had eighty one percent of the tobacco market, so people really ditched the jaw and the snuff for cigarettes generally speaking, and people, you know, pregnant women were smoking. You smoke in the movie theater, smoking planes on buses in the office. Your doctor would smoke in front of you during an appointment.
People reading the news on TV would be smoking while they were giving you the news.
It's crazy when you look back at old TV show either not just episodes, but like Dick Cabot Show and stuff like that, just like everybody was smoking all the time.
Yeah, I mean they were ads that were doctors recommending a certain kind of cigarette because they were smoother, they made you cough less or something like that. Is just absolutely crazy. But eventually people started getting hip to the idea that these things might kind of be bad for us.
I think as far back as the seventeen sixties there was a doctor named John Hill who wrote Cautions against the Immoderate Use of Snuff because he'd noticed that people who were using snuff tobacco, which is exactly what it sounds like, powdered tobacco you sniff like it's a bump of cocaine, that they were He had observed navel nasal swellings and excreacences in snuff users and he's like, even is that it's I think puffy pussy looks in their noses.
And he's like, I think those are probably cancerous. And this is back in the seventeen sixties.
Yeah, so that's super early on. In nineteen hundred, they finally put like tobacco extract They did like official scientific tests. They put tobacco extracts. They applied it to guinea pigs, of course, and they saw cellular activity associated with cancer development. They linked it to cheek cancer as early as nineteen twenty eight, and then about a decade after that they said, you know what, if you smoke, you're not going to live as long.
No, And then I think by nineteen fifty they started having enough studies that they could do meta analysis essentially and say, if you smoke, you have a higher chance of getting lung cancer than somebody who doesn't smoke. Four years after that, the British Medical Journal published a study that said that cigarettes were killing doctors in significant numbers too,
¶ Health Warnings and Filter Engineering
and the fact that doctors are now dying from smoking cigarettes that kind of got people's attention.
Yeah, and these were all unfiltered basically up until nineteen fifty. In nineteen fifty, the Winston cigarette was the first one to come out as a mass marketed filtered cigarette. And again, you know, it helps a little bit. It's not like the filter is completely useless, but it's not filtering out. It was largely a ruse to say, hey, they're saying smoking is bad for you, so now we've added a thing to make it safe.
Yeah. I read that Initially it was an earnest attempt to create a healthier, less deadly cigarette. And see they were just like, well, we failed at this, but now we've basically fooled people into thinking the filters are actually doing something. We have to keep filters on forever. And yeah, it very quickly just became a device rather than something that actually worked. It can catch some particulate matter, but it's doing nothing to the gases in the smoke. They're
just coming through fully toxic. But again, smokers were like, okay, great, we've got that licked. We have filters. Now let's all go back to smoking as much as we want. Yeah.
I think by year in nineteen sixty five, forty two percent of American adults smoked. In nineteen eighty, it went down to thirty three. By ninety five it was down to twenty five twenty ten, nineteen percent, and just a couple of years ago, in twenty twenty three, eleven percent. But that's that's nuts. Like forty close to half of American adults in the sixties were smoking.
Well, it's funny. It's based on old movies and TVs and books and stuff like that, or TV shows and books. That seems low to me.
Yeah, it looks like one hundred percent.
Yeah, it really does for sure.
But yeah, I wonder who didn't smoke. Like half the people probably just were like, I mean, I'm sure some people were like, this seems really unhealthy. But some people, you know, they make your fingers smell nasty, they make your breath gross. That probably had a lot to do.
I would guess so too. And then also, I mean, if back in the twenties they were like, you can get my mouth and cheek cancer from it, it's probably trickled out to some people more than others, you.
Know, for sure. So they add the filter. But a lot of R and D and money was spent because all of a sudden, you're adding this barrier between the smoker and the smoke, and so they had to invest a lot of money into making sure like the draw was correct and that you weren't you know, what they didn't want was for you to lose any of that
habit forming nicotine. So they put a lot of dough into I guess, like you said, probably earnestly trying to reduce some toxins but also make sure that experience stayed the same to keep people smoking cigarette.
Yeah, and they spent billions of dollars figuring this out, because if you're a smoker and you have to, like if you have a crushed filter, it makes it hard to draw through, and it's essentially a ruined cigarette because you don't, like, you don't want to have to have to exert any kind of effort in smoking, and if you do, it's just it's not worth it. So they could not mess with the smoking experience to make it as good or better while also preserving all the best
parts of an unfiltered cigarette. What they essentially came up with was to use more porous paper then actually poke like little tiny holes in the seam where the tobacco comes up against the filter, which is sealed, as you talked about, by that tipping paper. But they poked little holes in that end of the tipping paper so that more outside air could be sucked in and mixed with the smoke. So it was a milder smoke. And from what I can tell, light cigarettes that's it. They have
more tiny holes than non light irregular cigarette. That's the only difference.
Yeah, it's not like lighter chemical additives or lesser chemical additives and stuff like that.
But the big tobacco companies are very happy for you to walk around thinking that that's what it means. But all it means is it just hits you lighter because it has more little micro holes in that tipping at the end.
Should we take another break? Yes, all right, we'll be right back right after this. So there are different, you know, sizes of cigarettes. If you've ever been a smoker or worked in a convenience store or something like I did at the Golden Pantry in Athens, Georgia, you learn a lot about cigarettes and what kind of people smoke, what kind of cigarettes. It's pretty interesting, actually.
Yeah. I worked at a last chance gas station and liquor store and we sold cigarettes for a dollar twenty five a pack, which is far and away the cheapest cigarettes and all of Athens. So we had a lot of people come in there too.
What was the cheapest brand? Totally? Remember the ones that we had.
I don't remember what they were back then.
The cheapest cigarettes, and these are the people. This is the stuff I always felt the worst about was when people were like, I can only afford to buy the bare bones swept off the floor tobacco cigarette brand. That was just more depressing to me, even in our store. They were Bucks.
I don't remember those at all.
Had a big antler deer on the front of it, and Bucks were really cheap compared to the other one. So I can't imagine what was in those.
That sounds very scary.
But there are different links, different kinds of filters. I remember the parliaments had the recess s filter occasionally when I had cigarettes here and there in New Jersey. That's a lot of people smoke parliaments. You can have those long one twenties they're called extra longs and different diameters, including something I tried in college occasionally. It was the old camel wide.
Oh, I forgot about those.
Remember those plugs?
Yep? I went the opposite direction. I smoked Capri Ultra slim one twenties for a little while. Are you serious? They were essentially as big around as like a popsicle or a sucker stick.
Yeah, Oh yeah. I remember my friend Justin's mother smoked those, and I had never saw anyone that wasn't a mom smoke use.
Yeah, I took a lot of crap back in the day because I would smoke those. I smoked Virginia Slims for a while.
That's really funny.
I don't remember how either of those came to be my brand, but I would guess that I started smoking Capris because I like the watercolor design on the box. That's probably what I first caught my attention.
You always marched, have marched to the beat of your own drum, so I could see Ess Clark doing that just to be different.
Yeah, yeah, we're good though. I liked them. I wait, let me rephrace that. Kids. Kids, please don't listen to any kind of nostalgic tone in anything I'm saying, because if I could go back and do it again, I never, ever, sure ever was smoked. Quitting smoking was the single hardest thing I've ever done in my entire life far. It is definitely not worth it.
Yeah, totally. I was the dreaded social smoker who all
¶ Cigarette Varieties and Personal Anecdotes
my smoker friends hated because I could always take it or leave it. Oh yeah, it never got it, It never got its hooks to me. As as far as an addiction.
I just that just did not compute with me. But I was always in awe of people like you.
Yeah. I was the one who would bum the cigarettes off my smoker friends, and they're always nice about it. I was not the guy at the party who let the filter it in because I had too much to drink.
I was the guy who would smoke with the flu.
Or the guy that if you if the cigarette broke the tobacco and broke a little bit, you would hold your finger around that part just so you can still not waste that, sire. But again, we're not waxing nostalgic everybody.
So where are we, Chuck? Oh, we were talking about some innovations at the time.
I guess, uh, yeah, I mean one innovation, and by innovation we means terrible things cigarette companies did to make them worse and more addictive. Basically, so like innovation for them was what's called puffed or expanded tobacco. And that's when they soak tobacco leaves in ammonia and free on to make them puff out and increase their volume. They swell up some and then they freeze dry that and they do that so then get more cigarettes out of less of a tobacco purchase or hardvest.
Yeah, it's just a space filler. And yeah, from what I saw free on, they only use that only for about thirty years. That just continue a couple decades ago. But ammonia is still very very much an ingredient in cigarettes.
One of the big things ammonia does is it allows you to absorb free based nicotine more easily, so you get more nicotine out of each puff of cigarette, which a lot of observers point to is clear evidence that tobacco companies went out of their way to make their products more addictive.
Yeah, for sure. Also we should mention while we were kind of talking about what kinds of people smoke what cigarettes, and if you work at a convenience story, you kind of see repeated patterns. It's clear if you've ever sold cigarettes that African Americans tend to prefer menthol cigarettes. I think more than eighty five percent of black smokers smoke menthols.
And once again, the tobacco companies found this out kind of during the Civil rights movement, and they're like, hey, we found a new target demographic of people that we can try and kill and market to.
Yeah, because about the same time as the civil rights movement was just barely starting and the black press became an actual viable outlet for national brands to advertise in all of a sudden, Menthol cigarettes became a thing. Salem, Newport, Cool, Alpine all came out within a year or two of
each other. Alpine's not around anymore. And so just by essentially I guess, targeted happenstance, the tobacco companies started heavily advertising ment in the black press, and so that eventually came to be the favorite kind of cigarette among black
people in America. And I read an article by a guy named Alan Blum, who is the director of the Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society, and he kicked out an estimate that about a third of the ads in some issues of Ebony and Jet magazines, black oriented national magazines in the US were for tobacco products,
¶ Additives and Targeted Marketing
mostly cigarettes, mostly menthol cigarettes.
Yeah, I mean, that's that's crazy. A third. And then in nineteen ninety, some people say, like peak targeted advertising and branding came when R. J. Reynolds was going to release their Uptown menthol cigarette, the first cigarette made like specifically targeted toward Black Americans. They did a bunch of market research and Rjr. Was like, Hey, you know what they'll really like is this classy black and gold package
and the name Uptown Cigarettes. They were the only cigarettes with had the filters down in the pack because the company found through research that black smokers open packs from the bottom so they could grab the tobacco in to avoid crushing that filter and order to keep their fingers for being on it because that's the part that went into their mouth. So they literally flipped how they packaged cigarettes to appeal to black customers.
Yes, and this did not land well with people in the United States. There happened to be a black Health and Human Services Secretary at the time named Lewis Sullivan, and he buck tradition and directly targeted Uptown Cigarettes and RJ. Reynolds has basically a vile product that needed to be
removed from the shelves. It hadn't been released yet. Their release was targeted for February of nineteen ninety, not coincidentally Black History Month, and enough of a protest erupted in the US led by Lewis Sullivan that R. J. Reynolds withdrew it before they could ever roll a mountain and sell up town cigarettes.
Hurrah for them.
But the upshot of this is is that, like you said, eighty five percent of black smokers smoke menthols, and because of the apparent feeling of menthols, it feels nothing like you're killing yourself. In fact, it almost feels refreshing. In some cases, the black press relying so much on tobacco advertising that they didn't tend to cover the dangers of smoking.
Mainstream press heavily targeted advertising in black communities. By nineteen ninety, black Americans had a fifty eight percent higher rate of lung cancer than white people, and it still goes on today. There's a national ban on flavored cigarettes, but menthol got exempted because black led community organizations tend to lobby the White House to prevent menthols being taken out of circulation, because those groups tend to be funded by tobacco companies,
so essentially they're fronts for the tobacco company lobby. And this one twenty twelve study found that nearly forty percent of black smokers said they would quit if there weren't menthols any longer. So the tobacco companies have a lot to lose and half of an entire market if menthols are done away with, Like all the other flavors, it's the only flavor still allowed in the US.
Pretty despicable stuff. So you're probably wondering, like, hey, if smoking so terrible, surely it started to wane. And I gave you some stats earlier, and it has. And that's because in the nineteen sixties we started slow rolling a little bit more warnings, Surgeon General warnings. On sixty four,
the Surgeon General released smoking in Health. This is a report that basically said, it's the single largest contributor to lung cancer in men, it's linked to premature birth, it'll increase your risk of a fatal heart attack by seventy percent. In sixty five. Just a year later, they started mandating warning labels on packs. In nineteen seventy they said you can't advertise on TV and radio, even though in print
you still could. And then in nineteen seventy two, finally the Surgeon General said, and this was really the beginning of the change of how they were reviewed, and like public smoking in seventy two, they said involuntary smoking, which is a second hand smoke, it's also really bad for you. We're just gonna leave it there. And fourteen years later, in the mid eighties, they said it can actually give you lung cancer. Like you cannot smoke at all and be around smokers and get lung cancer.
Yeah, that happened to Screech from Saved by the Bell. Dustin Diamond died of lung cancer and he never smoked a cigarette in his life. Apparently he attributed it to staying in cheap hotels where you could smoke.
Still, Oh interesting. I mean I remember my parents never smoked or anything. But I remember having friends whose parents smoked in the car with the windows rolled up.
Yeah that's nuts. I lived in college with a guy who did that. I was just I, even as a smoker, I was like, this is wrong. There's something really wrong with.
Yes, oh got in the car, like, good luck selling them.
But yeah, also your kids in the back seat, Like that was definitely a thing.
Yeah. I mean, well, the other thing we should mention that I never really thought about until this is that smoke is in even going through a filter. So what little work the filter is doing that side stream smoke is just going right into your lung.
Yeah, and even your exhaled smoke contains a lot of toxins that are just getting right back out that are part of secondhand smoke too, So yes, yeah, for sure, it definitely changed the calculus of how people viewed smoking. It wasn't like you're killing yourself thing anymore. It was a you're killing all of us thing now, and that definitely to bands in restaurants, movie theaters all over the place.
¶ Public Health Reckoning and Decline
I remember I was, I think I've said before, I was one of the last smokers on an international flight. Yeah, in the nineties, on the way to the Netherlands. That just seems bizarre to me now too, that especially that it was that recent. But finally America came around and was like, you can't smoke indoors anymore in public places. And another thing simultaneously was people started banning smoking in their own homes. That was simultaneous to government mandated smoking
bands in public places. People were making that choice as well, So smokers were getting pushed further and further out of the mainstream essentially.
Yeah, like literally outside, like you had to start telling people like I'm sorry, there's a non smoking house. Yeah. The idea of somebody walking into my house and lighting up a cigarette is so bizarre sounding, like it seems like a hundred years ago that people were doing that, but we lived through it, Like I remember all that.
Yeah, oh for sure, I had a house that we smoked him and it was It's crazy how much things have changed in just a couple of decades. Yeah, because now if somebody did that, it's like a hostile act, like they're just slapping you in the face like they mean to be starting something. As Michael Jackson said.
Yeah, I'm going to screw up your house right now.
Yeah, what are you can do about it?
I'm gonna smoke next to your cat or.
Cat, although I'll bet cats smoke if they could.
That's true. You're probably right. The other thing that came in the early nineties when everyone said, when the all the health experts said, hey, you know, you need to quit smoking if you want to live, is all of a sudden, there were nicotine patches and nicorette gum and stuff like that, all kinds of quitting aids that hit the market that were also big money.
Yeah, something else I found and that stuff worked, and what also worked. I really wanted to do an episode just on this was that big tobacco settlement among the state's attorney's in the US that just, yeah, we should crippled the tobacco industry and really helped lead to its downfall because they had to keep handing over all these documents they had that were so damning, and then the press would just run story after story about this stuff, and it really turned a lot of people off on tobacco.
But I remember when vaping started to be a thing, and I was like, no, how did this happen? Like we like the anti tobacco forces won. They won, They beat big tobacco. One of the most powerful groups in the world got beaten by the people who were like, no, we shouldn't be smoking. And then vaping came along. So Julia turned up the statistic that I found very heartening. She said that in twenty nineteen, twenty eight percent of high school students in the US vape cigarettes. Essentially three
years later it was ten percent. So it was that's great, Yeah, cut by two thirds. So I attribute that almost exclusively to our vaping app where we really came out against it. Either way, whether that had anything to do with it or not. I was really happy to see that.
I think gen Z has been known so far for avoiding some of the trappings of these vices of previous generations. I've read that they're smoking less and they're drinking less, and that's great. They seem to be a little smarter. There's another stat here that I thought was pretty interesting was when I was talking about percentage of smokers. In nineteen sixty five, forty two percent smoked. In nineteen eighty it was thirty three percent. But there were more cigarettes
sold in the early eighties. In nineteen sixty five, at forty two percent smoking, they sold five hundred and twenty one billion cigarettes. That dropped to thirty three percent of the population smoking, but they sold six hundred and thirty seven billions, so fewer people seemingly smoking more cigarettes.
I would guess that in that interim the tobacco companies figured out out how to make their product more addictive. Then that's when it would have happened. That'd be my guess.
Yeah, probably so.
¶ The End of an Era and Future Trends
Well. I can't wait to tee off on that tobacco settlement episode whenever we do it. But this is this is a good one. I thought this was a good idea, Chuck, I'm glad you selected it.
Thanks. I mean, they're not hurting. Twenty twenty three, Philip Morris raked in thirty five almost thirty six billion dollars. So they're doing okay. And people in different countries is different. I think Americans smoke less. I mean when I've traveled through Europe, a lot of people smoke. I know in Asian countries there's a lot of smoking.
Yeah, it's everywhere. Yeah, right after I quit, when we went to Japan and it was they smoked. They smoked during a funeral. Yeah, and I was sitting there like, I want one of those so bad.
Yeah. When we were in Vegas collecting our Lifetime Achievement and word a couple of years ago. Yes, I went to a dinner at a really nice Chinese restaurant in one of the casinos. Unfortunately it was a smoking casino. And you know, the restaurants aren't like walled off, it's
just kind of part of the casino. There was a group of young Japanese men, probably in their late teens to early twenties, like thirteen of them standing just on the other side of where our table was, and just chain smoking wow, over and over and over to the point where I was like, man, this is legitimately ruined this awesome meal.
Yeah, that sucks it definitely. Can he can just one person smoking can ruin the meil? I can't imagine thirteen.
Yeah, but oh boy, they were loving them. They were pretty happy smoking those cigarettes.
You got anything else?
I got nothing else?
All right, Well that's it for cigarettes, everybody, Thanks for listening. And since I said thanks for listening, and Chuck's got nothing else, you put those two together and we've just unlocked the listener.
Mail correction for Josh during our Boy listener Mail, a couple of this isn't a big one. Hey, guys, long time listener, first time writer. Reference to the listener mail and the USAID episode, Josh mentioned redtail Or Redhawk beer and said it was from Adesto, but the beer is Mendocino.
Yeah, I remember.
Now, given the seminary and those names as easy to confuse these very different California towns, I can personally confirm Mendocino Brewing Company was and now still is a great brewery. They seized operation in twenty eighteen, but were purchased and are now back in production. And hop Land, which is in Mendocino County. Thanks for everything you do. You guys. That's from Devon in California.
Very nice, Devin, Thank you for that. And yeah, it's still a good beer even if it is from Mendocino rather than my Desto.
Yeah, we just want to shout out the right town.
Yeah, but thank you for being gentle. I appreciate it and not calling me a dipstick or anything.
No, that's not dipstick. Cordy.
Who was it again? I know I just said their name.
That's Devon, Devin.
Thanks a lot, Devin. If you want to be like Devon, you can send us an email to send it off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
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