Latest / Stuff You Should Know / The Humble and Deadly Cigarette

Transcript

The Humble and Deadly Cigarette · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
• 0:11
  Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just smoking smoking,
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: feel all right? Just keep on choking.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: And this is Segnestion, uh Boston. Yeah, okay, yep, that's right.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: I was in my head, I was getting there. I
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: thought you were going to go with smoking in the
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: boys room.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: No. I always thought that was just kind of a lame.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that was a remake. You know, Motley Crue covered it.
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: I don't remember who did the original, do you?
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: No, I don't remember.
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: You don't need to email in and tell us. That's
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: all right. If we're curious enough, we'll go.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Look it up where you can feel free. Okay, who Okay,
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: tell someone not to email now.
• 0:55
  Speaker 2: I do want to know. I'm gonna look while you talk.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: Well, I think you should wait for the email. Maybe
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: the writer of that song.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: Is listening Brownsville Station.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: Okay, there you go.
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: I never in a million years would it come with that,
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: because I've never heard those two words together as a
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: band name.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: Oh well, you've never taken the train there? Then?
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: Have you ever heard of Brownsfield Station.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Just when I took a train to Brownsfield Station.
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: That's gross, I think, I know what you're talking about.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: Oh God, all right, let's get off this and get
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: on something even grosser, which is cigarettes.
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: Nice.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: And this was from our pal Julia, and I just
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: sort of I commissioned this one because I was like,
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: you know what, let's just do one on the cigarette itself,
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: not like smoking, and not the lawsuits and all that
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: stuff or lung cancer, but just on the thing, the object.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: And Julia sen us an article called the Cigarette Itself,
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: appropriately titled. And I learned a lot in this one,
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: chiefly that the cigarette was born in Spain in the
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: early sixteenth sixteenth century when cigar smokers. Cigars were around,
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: and it was sort of a luxury item for the
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: wealthy at the time because they were you know, hand
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: rolled and imported from Mexico and South America. But when
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: they would you know, stub out that last you know,
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: half inch of a cigar or whatever, people that didn't
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: have as much money would come along grab that thing
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: and take out the tobacco, you know, grind it up
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: and pick it apart a little bit and wrap it
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: in paper and smoke it, and that was a little
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: cigar or a cigaretllo.
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: H isn't that amazing?
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah? I mean I never thought about the word cigarette
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: being a play on cigar. Oh really like a tiny cigar, like,
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: because I always started cigarello. But like a kitchenette, a
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: cigarette is just like the same sort of version of that.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: Ironically, I never thought of a kitchenette as a small
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: version of a kitchen. Come on, so, chuck, let's just
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: hold our horses here before we go any further into
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: the history. Let's give a few basics about the cigarette.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: Eight.
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: So they're about eighty four millimeters long a standard cigarette,
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: and for a reference, that's about the length of a cigarette.
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: They're sold in packs of twenty. And if you really
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: want to get technical about a cigarette, next time you're
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: at a party and you're bumming one from somebody or
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: castigating somebody for smoking, even better, you can say that
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: a cigarette is also technically known as a heated tobacco product.
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: That's right. As we'll see a Camel's first started putting
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: them in packs of twenty, and I could not find
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: out if I think they did that to match the
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: number of matches in a matchbook. Which is twenty. Oh really,
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure that's the story.
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: I wish somebody would have told the hot dog makers that,
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: because you know, you got the bug eight or a
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: pack of eight hot dogs and buns of six. I
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: can never keep up these days with witches.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: Well yeah, that just still doesn't make any sense at all.
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: But yeah, I'm pretty sure that they put it in
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: a pack up twenty eventually to match the matches in
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: a matchbook. But that may also be apocryphal.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: Who knows, it's a good one.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: What cigarettes are for is to deliver nicotine to your body,
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: which is a feel good chemical that is naturally occurring
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: in tobacco. And the whole point is to with a pipe,
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: cigar or cigarette or anything like that an esig is
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: to get you that nicotine, to get you addicted to it,
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: to eventually kill you from it.
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's crazy, but that's essentially the point. And I
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: think before the advent of mass produced cigarettes, maybe you
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: had a lesser chance of developing all sorts of hideous
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: cancers and other diseases. But even if that's not true,
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: or even if it is true, it doesn't matter, because
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: we live in the age of mass produced cigarettes, and
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: these things are exquisitely engineered products that so much time
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: and money and effort has gone into, and so much
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: research that most of what we know about cigarettes, what
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: cigarettes due to the human body, how addictive they are,
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: comes from the research the tobacco companies did over the
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: decades that they kept that eventually had to be handed
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: over to the state attorneys general who sued them back
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: in the nineties.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's crazy how it all panned out. If you're
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: looking at you know, and Julia kind of breaks it
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: down with the white end and the brown end, but
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: there are plenty of cigarettes that are white through and through,
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: meaning the filter end is the same color, but the
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: tobacco end is a filler of cut tobacco leaves. And
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: then plenty of additives. I think how many did they admit?
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: Five hundred and ninety nine.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they wanted to get to six hundred so bad.
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: But they finally in nineteen ninety four released their additives
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: and it was a list five ninety long, which is
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: crazy to think about it.
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: I think they had six hundred, but some very sharp
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: eyed tobacco lobbyists like, uh, you got arsenic in here twice, so.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: It says cut tobacco leaves. It's held in a porous
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: wrapped paper that is sealed by an adhesive. And if
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: you'll look closely, there is a printed there's printed information
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: on that paper that you're also smoking and you're gonna
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: be burning when you're smoking that tobacco, that paper, those additives,
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: that ink, that adhesive and everything, and the smoke that
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: comes out and these are words I did not know.
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: The smoke that comes just from a burning cigarette sitting
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: there is called side stream smoke. The stuff that you
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: inhale is called mainstream smoke.
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the mainstream smoke comes out of the filter. You
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: draw through the filter, and the smoke that comes out
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: that's the mainstream smoke. The filters we'll see it does
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: something a little bit here there, but not really. It's
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: essentially to give smokers the illusion that they're preventing some
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: sort of harm to themselves when they actually aren't. Another
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: illusion is that these cigarette butts, which are the most
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: littered item in the entire world. I saw as something
• 7:07
  Speaker 2: like four point one trillion cigarette butts are littered, not
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: thrown away, littered every year around the world. And a
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: common misconception amongst smokers, is that they're biodegradable. They're not.
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: They're photodegradable, not biodegradable, which is a real problem because
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: they kind of well, they litter all over the place
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: and their type of plastic.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, those filters are cellulose acetate, and there are companies
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: that put charcoal in there, but because charcoal is a
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: great filter generally naturally, but there aren't any studies that
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: show that charcoal in a filter helps it all. Yeah,
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: as far as health outcomes or anything like that. There
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: are two paper wraps on the filter in there's a
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: plug rap around the actual filter, and then there is
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: if it's a brown filter, there's the brown it's called
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: tipping paper around the plug rap, and that is also
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: sealed up so that you know, you don't want that
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: smoke coming out of the side of the filter, right,
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: you want it going into your mouth. And then that
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: filter is also treated. They changed the pH on that
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: filter to purposefully turn it brown as you smoke, so
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: you look and you see, man, look at all that
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: brown stuff that's not getting into my lungs.
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: It fooled me for twenty years up until a couple
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: of days ago. I had no idea that that was
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: the case.
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, just one of the dirty tricks that cigarette manufacturers
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: used and still used.
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: It's you know, nuts. So let's go back to the cigarillo,
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: shall we.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: Let's do it.
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: So the cigarello, I think you said it was the
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: early sixteenth century, so the early fifteen hundreds, right after
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: the Age of Discovery kicked off, right, And it took
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: all the way to the late seventeen hundreds before it
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: really started to spread outward into Italy and Portugal, which
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: are not that far away. So apparently people didn't think
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: that much of the cigarello by then. But as Europe
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: started to go to war with itself, the cigarillo kind
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: of hitchhiked to the fronts and it was like, hey,
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: what do you guys think about me? Pretty great?
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: Huh yeah, I mean it's crazy. The rise of the
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: cigarette is tied directly to the various wars over the
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: years and the fact that soldiers wanted to smoke. It was,
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: you know, helped calm their nerves. I think it was
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: as was a comfort piece when you're I bet a
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: cigarette and kids don't ever try it, don't ever even
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: try it. But I bet when you're a war sitting
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: in a foxhole in miserable conditions. I bet that cigarette
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: is one of the few pleasures that comes your way,
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: you know, yeah, I bet that's a great cigarette to smoke.
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: I would think so too. Yeah.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: So anyway, French and British soldiers discovered them in the
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: early eighteen hundreds during the Napoleonic Wars, and this is
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: where the French came up with the word cigarette instead
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: of cigarillo. And the Crimean War around the this century
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: came along a new generation of British and French soldiers
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: this you got these cigarettes with that pretty harsh Turkish tobacco.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: They said, we love this stuff. They brought it home
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: and there was a tobacconist named Philip Morris that had
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: a shop on Bond Street in eighteen forty seven where
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: he was selling cigars and tobacco products, and he was like,
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: I'm going to start making cigarettes.
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: So yeah, okay, So Philip Morris, the Philip Morris Company,
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: one of the largest producers of cigarettes in the entire world,
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: is directly related to Philip Morris. It's not just like
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: a like a shout out or something like that.
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: Oh I never looked that up, but I just assumed
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: that it was eventually became the big company.
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: I mean, it would make sense because a lot of
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: these companies did grow out or were consolidated by larger companies,
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: a lot of the original cigarette companies, so it's entirely possible,
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: for sure. But regardless, he was one of the people
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: who brought it to London and made it kind of
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: like a fancy thing, which is really surprising because Chuck
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: in America it went a totally different way when it
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: really became a thing in the United States. As we'll see,
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: it became associated essentially with juvenile delinquents. At first, it
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: was not a fanancy like a Bond Street type thing
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: to do. It was kids playing craps rather than going
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: to school. Were smoking cigarettes too, yeah, ne'er do wells, Yes,
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: ne'er do wells.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: So at Philip Morris's Bond Street tobacco store, they started
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: making their own cigarettes. They were not mass produced, obviously,
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: he had people hand rolling, just like they did with cigars,
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: but they were pretty good. They would get out, they
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: would pump out like three or four a minute, which
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: is pretty fast. They were pretty expensive as a result,
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: and a couple of things happened that really made cigarettes,
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: you know, way more wide had spread. One was the
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: invention of a rolling machine, like a machine that could
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: pump out, you know, eventually like two hundred and fifty
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: thousand a day for a company, and the American cigarette,
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: which used a combination sometimes of Turkish tobacco or sometimes
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: just straight up American tobacco that was a lot less
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: harsh and more palatable for I guess American appetite.
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: Smooth, mild. So yeah, there's a guy named James Duke
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: who was a Durham, North Carolina tobacco air and I
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: think I remember correctly when we went to Durham for
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: our show recently. I think both times they have like
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: a big Duke stencil on a like a smokestack at
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: some place.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: Oh that's funny, I'm pretty sure. So on smokestack.
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: He created W. Duke, Sons and Company in eighteen eighty
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: three to start making cigarette sorry eighteen eighty one. By
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: eighteen eighty three he was making two hundred and fifty
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: thousand a day thanks to the invention of James Bonsac,
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: who created that cigarette rolling machine that you mentioned earlier
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: that could roll two hundred cigarettes per minute.
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's quite an increase from three or four over
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: there on Bond Street. So Duke said, hey, give me
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: a deal. I'll buy a few of those things if
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: you give me a good price on him and yeah, exactly,
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: and he said sure. And he said, all right, I'll
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: use cigarette rollers. You're out of business. And they said no,
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: you can't hire a machine to do work that humans do.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: And he said, watch me, And so he put these
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: machines in. All of a sudden, they were a lot
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: cheaper to sell, to make, and to sell. They were
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: readily available, and like you said, they were smoother, and
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: they got popular at least with the juveniles. But that
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: would be the first step toward making them a little
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: more mainstream. But it is interesting that they were I
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: think in nineteen hundred and two percent of the market
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: was tobacco market with cigarettes. People were still really into
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: your tobacco at the time and dipping snuff.
• 14:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, people love that kind of stuff. So by the
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: eighteen nineties, though, this was enough of the thing that
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: kids were smoking cigarettes that as early as the eighteen
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: nineties states started to pass bands on selling cigarettes to minors.
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: Isn't that interesting?
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I think I didn't think they cared
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: about children at all back then. Apparently they were like, hey,
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: this doesn't look good these kids walking around smoking like
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: they're seven years old.
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: They're like, what are you doing out of the coal
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: mine right exactly? Uh, do you want to keep going
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: and talk about where the cigarette really broke out in America?
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: Or do you want to take a break first.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: I think it's break time, buddies.
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: Okay, we're going to take a break, everybody. We just
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: decided not a smoke break, just a break. So, just
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: like in Europe, Chuck War helped cigarettes just blow up.
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: Basically in World War One in particular, brought cigarettes to
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: America by introducing it to American troops. And, like you said,
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: the men fighting World War One and the trenches were like,
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: we need something. Somebody give us something to smoke. And
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: the US government was like, that's fine, but cigars are
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: kind of pricey, and I don't know if you guys
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: have been to a cigar shop lately. We can't really
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: give all of you cigars all the time. What about
• 15:38
  Speaker 2: these cigarettes that are being made that are pretty cheap.
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: And the men in the trenches said, whatever, we just
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: need to smoke something, so very quickly, a steady, never
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: ending stream of packs of cigarettes started being sent to
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: the boys on the front in Europe and also like business, individual, citizens,
• 16:02
  Speaker 2: the government, they were all paying for it. And they
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: just smoked, smoke, smoked out of the trenches in World
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: War One, and when they came back they were like, you, guys,
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: you gotta try these. They're amazing. Yeah.
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: I mean it was kind of perfect for a foxhole
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: because it was much quicker than a cigar, Like, you know,
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: you can smoke a cigar for an hour, and you
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: didn't have that kind of time if you just wanted
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: a quick nicotine fix. The cigarette was kind of perfect
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: for wartime. And buddy, did they explode. Camel cigarettes in
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: nineteen thirteen sold about a million packs of cigarettes or
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: is that a million cigarettes?
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: A million packs?
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: A million packs of cigarettes. In nineteen fourteen they sold
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: four hundred and twenty five million packs, and by nineteen
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: nineteen they sold twenty one billion packs of cigarettes.
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, which not coincidentally was after World War One ended
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: and all of those men fighting in World War One
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: came back with pretty healthy little cigarette habits. By then.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: That's an astounding number and I knew it was going
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: to be a lot, but that kind of jump. I mean,
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: can you imagine the kind of money they were making.
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: I know, And that's just Cammebell cigarettes. That's not all cigarettes,
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: that's just one caramel. Yeah. Another thing World War One
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: did was kind of change the United States's view on
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: life and was like, Okay, a lot of people just died,
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: and maybe we should start thinking of life as a
• 17:28
  Speaker 2: little more valuable and precious and relax a little bit
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: and enjoy ourselves. And one of the exactly right one
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: of the upshots of that was that I guess norms
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: and expectations around women really loosened up. And one of
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: the things that women did almost immediately was they started smoking.
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: It became socially acceptable for women to start smoking, and
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: the tobacco companies clapped their hands together and rubbed them
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: and just started drooling at the jowls.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah. All of a sudden they were targeting with
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: advertising campaigns about how glamorous it was, how feminine it was,
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: how independent you were if you were a smoker as
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: a woman.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: Yep.
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: This is also a very fun fact. Philip Morris. The
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: Marlboro cigarette, which I have always associated with.
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: Like Cowboy killed dude.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, like a dude cigarette. Cowboy killers that, the Marlboro
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: Man and the famous Sunset Boulevard you know, cut out
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: that was there forever and Kramer.
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: Don't forget Kramer was the Marlborough Man for a minute.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: That's right, he was. But the Marlboro cigarette had such
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: hard type of thing hard to say. It was launched
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: as a women's cigarette. It was known as mild As
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: May and I'm not sure when that switch, but that's
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: kind of a fun little fact.
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: I vow to pick up mild as May is a
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: phrase I'm going to start rising.
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: I like that.
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: A lucky Strike was also like, hey, rather than reaching
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: for a suite, which will eventually disappoint your husband, reach
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: for a lucky strike instead. Just smoke anytime you have
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: a chocolate craving.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: Uh yeah, and all those accessories that Hey, listen again,
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: kids don't smoke. But I'd be a liar if I
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: didn't say. In an old movie, when someone took out
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: one of those little slender cigarette cases and popped out
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: a cigarette from that neat row and tapped it on
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: the outside of that metal case, I don't know. That
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: was pretty cool. Looking to young Chuck.
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I recently read Rebecca by Daphne de Maurier. Have
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: you ever read that?
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: No, is it the Rebecca Hitchcock movie Rebecca?
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: I think Hitchcock may have made it. Yeah, and that
• 19:33
  Speaker 2: tracks because I think it was written in the early thirties.
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: Have you seen the movie? Was it about a woman
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: who is basically living in the shadow of her husband's
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: first wife. Yeah, so that's the book.
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: But people great undervalued Hitchcock movie.
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: By the way, it's a great book too, But people
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: bust out cigarette cases like every couple paragraphs in there
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: and offer cigarette and everyone smokes after tea and all
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: this stuff, so I you know exactly what you're talking about.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: It just suck out to me. I think I guess
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: as a twenty first century person knowing what smoking does,
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: looking at people who were living at a time when
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: they didn't know what smoking did, it's kind of not
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: funny to see. But it's just bizarre to look back
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: like that.
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I remember in college in Athens, it
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: was always one like classy co ed who like carried
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: her cigarettes in a case and maybe even had one
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: of those little cigarette holder extenders or whatever. Oh, yeah, yeah,
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: because you know, they were like, hey, look at me,
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: I'm different, and you know I'm an art major. So
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: this is what we did.
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: I'm like friggin' Audrey Hepburn here.
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: The other thing that happened was they started putting cigarette
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: lighters in cars in I think nineteen twenty five nineteen
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: twenty six is when they became standard and cars a
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: little push button cigarette lighter. So now they're saying, like,
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: smoke everywhere.
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and it just so happens. Nineteen twenty five nineteen
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: twenty six is when the first cars came up basically,
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: so right out of the gate they had cigarette lighters.
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: Huh yeah, And right out of the gate. Movie stars
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: started smoking on screen, men and women, and started getting deals,
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: started getting sponsorship deals with certain cigarette companies.
• 21:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you could get one hundred and fifty grand plus
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: a year's supply of Lucky Strikes if you're smoking was
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: sponsored by a Lucky Strike, which I think Joan Crawford, Spencer, Tracy,
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: Gary Cooper, they all had those deals with Lucky Strikes.
• 21:26
  Speaker 2: So they would out in public be smoking Lucky Strikes,
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: but during the reviews they'd also stop and be like, wow,
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: this Lucky Strike is so mild, smooth or whatever, like
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: they would talk about it like as if it were
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: you know how people try to place ads or they
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: used to, I don't know if they still do in
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: podcasts where suddenly we'd just be talking about a product
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: and it'd take you a second, yeah, to catch up.
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: That's what they used to do with Lucky Strikes.
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and they're like, they send me a year supply,
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: So they sent me one thousand packs of cigarettes.
• 21:55
  Speaker 2: Exactly. It's nuts. So there's just tons of stars smoking.
• 21:59
  Speaker 2: They were literally really sponsored by tobacco companies, and even
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: if you weren't, you could still be pitching them in
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: regular ads. And there's a push today to I think,
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: retroactively and moving forward, give our ratings to movies that
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: have smoking in them, which I hadn't heard of, but
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: I ran across that recently.
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I heard about that much different back then. Obviously,
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: by the middle of the twentieth century, cigarettes had eighty
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: one percent of the tobacco market, so people really ditched
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: the jaw and the snuff for cigarettes generally speaking, and people,
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: you know, pregnant women were smoking. You smoke in the
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: movie theater, smoking planes on buses in the office. Your
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: doctor would smoke in front of you during an appointment.
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: People reading the news on TV would be smoking while
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: they were giving you the news.
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: It's crazy when you look back at old TV show
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: either not just episodes, but like Dick Cabot Show and
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: stuff like that, just like everybody was smoking all the time.
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean they were ads that were doctors recommending
• 23:02
  Speaker 2: a certain kind of cigarette because they were smoother, they
• 23:05
  Speaker 2: made you cough less or something like that. Is just
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: absolutely crazy. But eventually people started getting hip to the
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: idea that these things might kind of be bad for us.
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: I think as far back as the seventeen sixties there
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: was a doctor named John Hill who wrote Cautions against
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: the Immoderate Use of Snuff because he'd noticed that people
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: who were using snuff tobacco, which is exactly what it
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: sounds like, powdered tobacco you sniff like it's a bump
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: of cocaine, that they were He had observed navel nasal
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: swellings and excreacences in snuff users and he's like, even
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: is that it's I think puffy pussy looks in their noses.
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: And he's like, I think those are probably cancerous. And
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: this is back in the seventeen sixties.
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's super early on. In nineteen hundred, they
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: finally put like tobacco extract They did like official scientific tests.
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: They put tobacco extracts. They applied it to guinea pigs,
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: of course, and they saw cellular activity associated with cancer development.
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: They linked it to cheek cancer as early as nineteen
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: twenty eight, and then about a decade after that they said,
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: you know what, if you smoke, you're not going to
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: live as long.
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: No, And then I think by nineteen fifty they started
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: having enough studies that they could do meta analysis essentially
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: and say, if you smoke, you have a higher chance
• 24:31
  Speaker 2: of getting lung cancer than somebody who doesn't smoke. Four
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: years after that, the British Medical Journal published a study
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: that said that cigarettes were killing doctors in significant numbers too,
• 24:44
  Speaker 2: and the fact that doctors are now dying from smoking
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: cigarettes that kind of got people's attention.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and these were all unfiltered basically up until nineteen fifty.
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty, the Winston cigarette was the first one
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: to come out as a mass marketed filtered cigarette. And again,
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: you know, it helps a little bit. It's not like
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: the filter is completely useless, but it's not filtering out.
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: It was largely a ruse to say, hey, they're saying
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: smoking is bad for you, so now we've added a
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: thing to make it safe.
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I read that Initially it was an earnest attempt
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: to create a healthier, less deadly cigarette. And see they
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: were just like, well, we failed at this, but now
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: we've basically fooled people into thinking the filters are actually
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: doing something. We have to keep filters on forever. And yeah,
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: it very quickly just became a device rather than something
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: that actually worked. It can catch some particulate matter, but
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: it's doing nothing to the gases in the smoke. They're
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: just coming through fully toxic. But again, smokers were like, okay, great,
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: we've got that licked. We have filters. Now let's all
• 25:55
  Speaker 2: go back to smoking as much as we want. Yeah.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: I think by year in nineteen sixty five, forty two
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: percent of American adults smoked. In nineteen eighty, it went
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: down to thirty three. By ninety five it was down
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: to twenty five twenty ten, nineteen percent, and just a
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: couple of years ago, in twenty twenty three, eleven percent.
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: But that's that's nuts. Like forty close to half of
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: American adults in the sixties were smoking.
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: Well, it's funny. It's based on old movies and TVs
• 26:26
  Speaker 2: and books and stuff like that, or TV shows and books.
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: That seems low to me.
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it looks like one hundred percent.
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it really does for sure.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: But yeah, I wonder who didn't smoke. Like half the
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: people probably just were like, I mean, I'm sure some
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: people were like, this seems really unhealthy. But some people,
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: you know, they make your fingers smell nasty, they make
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: your breath gross. That probably had a lot to do.
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: I would guess so too. And then also, I mean,
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: if back in the twenties they were like, you can
• 26:54
  Speaker 2: get my mouth and cheek cancer from it, it's probably
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: trickled out to some people more than others, you.
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: Know, for sure. So they add the filter. But a
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: lot of R and D and money was spent because
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: all of a sudden, you're adding this barrier between the
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: smoker and the smoke, and so they had to invest
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: a lot of money into making sure like the draw
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: was correct and that you weren't you know, what they
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: didn't want was for you to lose any of that
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: habit forming nicotine. So they put a lot of dough
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: into I guess, like you said, probably earnestly trying to
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: reduce some toxins but also make sure that experience stayed
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: the same to keep people smoking cigarette.
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and they spent billions of dollars figuring this out,
• 27:38
  Speaker 2: because if you're a smoker and you have to, like
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: if you have a crushed filter, it makes it hard
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: to draw through, and it's essentially a ruined cigarette because
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: you don't, like, you don't want to have to have
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: to exert any kind of effort in smoking, and if
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: you do, it's just it's not worth it. So they
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: could not mess with the smoking experience to make it
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: as good or better while also preserving all the best
• 28:04
  Speaker 2: parts of an unfiltered cigarette. What they essentially came up
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: with was to use more porous paper then actually poke
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: like little tiny holes in the seam where the tobacco
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: comes up against the filter, which is sealed, as you
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: talked about, by that tipping paper. But they poked little
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: holes in that end of the tipping paper so that
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: more outside air could be sucked in and mixed with
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: the smoke. So it was a milder smoke. And from
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: what I can tell, light cigarettes that's it. They have
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: more tiny holes than non light irregular cigarette. That's the
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: only difference.
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not like lighter chemical additives or lesser chemical
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: additives and stuff like that.
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: But the big tobacco companies are very happy for you
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: to walk around thinking that that's what it means. But
• 28:53
  Speaker 2: all it means is it just hits you lighter because
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: it has more little micro holes in that tipping at
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: the end.
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: Should we take another break? Yes, all right, we'll be
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: right back right after this. So there are different, you know,
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: sizes of cigarettes. If you've ever been a smoker or
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: worked in a convenience store or something like I did
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: at the Golden Pantry in Athens, Georgia, you learn a
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: lot about cigarettes and what kind of people smoke, what
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: kind of cigarettes. It's pretty interesting, actually.
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I worked at a last chance gas station and
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: liquor store and we sold cigarettes for a dollar twenty
• 29:51
  Speaker 2: five a pack, which is far and away the cheapest
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: cigarettes and all of Athens. So we had a lot
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: of people come in there too.
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: What was the cheapest brand? Totally? Remember the ones that
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: we had.
• 30:02
  Speaker 2: I don't remember what they were back then.
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: The cheapest cigarettes, and these are the people. This is
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: the stuff I always felt the worst about was when
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: people were like, I can only afford to buy the
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: bare bones swept off the floor tobacco cigarette brand. That
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: was just more depressing to me, even in our store.
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: They were Bucks.
• 30:22
  Speaker 2: I don't remember those at all.
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: Had a big antler deer on the front of it,
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: and Bucks were really cheap compared to the other one.
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: So I can't imagine what was in those.
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: That sounds very scary.
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: But there are different links, different kinds of filters. I
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: remember the parliaments had the recess s filter occasionally when
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: I had cigarettes here and there in New Jersey. That's
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: a lot of people smoke parliaments. You can have those
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: long one twenties they're called extra longs and different diameters,
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: including something I tried in college occasionally. It was the
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: old camel wide.
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: Oh, I forgot about those.
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: Remember those plugs?
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: Yep? I went the opposite direction. I smoked Capri Ultra
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: slim one twenties for a little while. Are you serious?
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: They were essentially as big around as like a popsicle
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: or a sucker stick.
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Oh yeah. I remember my friend Justin's mother smoked those,
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: and I had never saw anyone that wasn't a mom
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: smoke use.
• 31:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I took a lot of crap back in the
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: day because I would smoke those. I smoked Virginia Slims
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: for a while.
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: That's really funny.
• 31:23
  Speaker 2: I don't remember how either of those came to be
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: my brand, but I would guess that I started smoking
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: Capris because I like the watercolor design on the box.
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: That's probably what I first caught my attention.
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: You always marched, have marched to the beat of your
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: own drum, so I could see Ess Clark doing that
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: just to be different.
• 31:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, we're good though. I liked them. I wait,
• 31:42
  Speaker 2: let me rephrace that. Kids. Kids, please don't listen to
• 31:46
  Speaker 2: any kind of nostalgic tone in anything I'm saying, because
• 31:50
  Speaker 2: if I could go back and do it again, I never, ever,
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: sure ever was smoked. Quitting smoking was the single hardest
• 31:57
  Speaker 2: thing I've ever done in my entire life far. It
• 32:01
  Speaker 2: is definitely not worth it.
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. I was the dreaded social smoker who all
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: my smoker friends hated because I could always take it
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: or leave it. Oh yeah, it never got it, It
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: never got its hooks to me. As as far as
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: an addiction.
• 32:16
  Speaker 2: I just that just did not compute with me. But
• 32:18
  Speaker 2: I was always in awe of people like you.
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I was the one who would bum the cigarettes
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: off my smoker friends, and they're always nice about it.
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: I was not the guy at the party who let
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: the filter it in because I had too much to drink.
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: I was the guy who would smoke with the flu.
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: Or the guy that if you if the cigarette broke
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: the tobacco and broke a little bit, you would hold
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: your finger around that part just so you can still
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: not waste that, sire. But again, we're not waxing nostalgic everybody.
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: So where are we, Chuck? Oh, we were talking about
• 32:51
  Speaker 2: some innovations at the time.
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: I guess, uh, yeah, I mean one innovation, and by
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: innovation we means terrible things cigarette companies did to make
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: them worse and more addictive. Basically, so like innovation for
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: them was what's called puffed or expanded tobacco. And that's
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: when they soak tobacco leaves in ammonia and free on
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: to make them puff out and increase their volume. They
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: swell up some and then they freeze dry that and
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: they do that so then get more cigarettes out of
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: less of a tobacco purchase or hardvest.
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just a space filler. And yeah, from what
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: I saw free on, they only use that only for
• 33:30
  Speaker 2: about thirty years. That just continue a couple decades ago.
• 33:33
  Speaker 2: But ammonia is still very very much an ingredient in cigarettes.
• 33:38
  Speaker 2: One of the big things ammonia does is it allows
• 33:40
  Speaker 2: you to absorb free based nicotine more easily, so you
• 33:45
  Speaker 2: get more nicotine out of each puff of cigarette, which
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: a lot of observers point to is clear evidence that
• 33:54
  Speaker 2: tobacco companies went out of their way to make their
• 33:57
  Speaker 2: products more addictive.
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. Also we should mention while we were
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: kind of talking about what kinds of people smoke what cigarettes,
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: and if you work at a convenience story, you kind
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: of see repeated patterns. It's clear if you've ever sold
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: cigarettes that African Americans tend to prefer menthol cigarettes. I
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: think more than eighty five percent of black smokers smoke menthols.
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: And once again, the tobacco companies found this out kind
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: of during the Civil rights movement, and they're like, hey,
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: we found a new target demographic of people that we
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: can try and kill and market to.
• 34:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, because about the same time as the civil rights
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: movement was just barely starting and the black press became
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: an actual viable outlet for national brands to advertise in
• 34:42
  Speaker 2: all of a sudden, Menthol cigarettes became a thing. Salem, Newport, Cool,
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: Alpine all came out within a year or two of
• 34:49
  Speaker 2: each other. Alpine's not around anymore. And so just by
• 34:54
  Speaker 2: essentially I guess, targeted happenstance, the tobacco companies started heavily
• 34:59
  Speaker 2: advertising ment in the black press, and so that eventually
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: came to be the favorite kind of cigarette among black
• 35:07
  Speaker 2: people in America. And I read an article by a
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: guy named Alan Blum, who is the director of the
• 35:12
  Speaker 2: Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society, and he
• 35:15
  Speaker 2: kicked out an estimate that about a third of the
• 35:18
  Speaker 2: ads in some issues of Ebony and Jet magazines, black
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: oriented national magazines in the US were for tobacco products,
• 35:28
  Speaker 2: mostly cigarettes, mostly menthol cigarettes.
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, that's that's crazy. A third. And then
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety, some people say, like peak targeted advertising
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: and branding came when R. J. Reynolds was going to
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: release their Uptown menthol cigarette, the first cigarette made like
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: specifically targeted toward Black Americans. They did a bunch of
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: market research and Rjr. Was like, Hey, you know what
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: they'll really like is this classy black and gold package
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: and the name Uptown Cigarettes. They were the only cigarettes
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: with had the filters down in the pack because the
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: company found through research that black smokers open packs from
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: the bottom so they could grab the tobacco in to
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: avoid crushing that filter and order to keep their fingers
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: for being on it because that's the part that went
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: into their mouth. So they literally flipped how they packaged
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: cigarettes to appeal to black customers.
• 36:27
  Speaker 2: Yes, and this did not land well with people in
• 36:31
  Speaker 2: the United States. There happened to be a black Health
• 36:34
  Speaker 2: and Human Services Secretary at the time named Lewis Sullivan,
• 36:38
  Speaker 2: and he buck tradition and directly targeted Uptown Cigarettes and RJ.
• 36:44
  Speaker 2: Reynolds has basically a vile product that needed to be
• 36:49
  Speaker 2: removed from the shelves. It hadn't been released yet. Their
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: release was targeted for February of nineteen ninety, not coincidentally
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: Black History Month, and enough of a protest erupted in
• 37:01
  Speaker 2: the US led by Lewis Sullivan that R. J. Reynolds
• 37:05
  Speaker 2: withdrew it before they could ever roll a mountain and
• 37:08
  Speaker 2: sell up town cigarettes.
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: Hurrah for them.
• 37:12
  Speaker 2: But the upshot of this is is that, like you said,
• 37:15
  Speaker 2: eighty five percent of black smokers smoke menthols, and because
• 37:19
  Speaker 2: of the apparent feeling of menthols, it feels nothing like
• 37:24
  Speaker 2: you're killing yourself. In fact, it almost feels refreshing. In
• 37:27
  Speaker 2: some cases, the black press relying so much on tobacco
• 37:31
  Speaker 2: advertising that they didn't tend to cover the dangers of smoking.
• 37:38
  Speaker 2: Mainstream press heavily targeted advertising in black communities. By nineteen ninety,
• 37:44
  Speaker 2: black Americans had a fifty eight percent higher rate of
• 37:48
  Speaker 2: lung cancer than white people, and it still goes on today.
• 37:51
  Speaker 2: There's a national ban on flavored cigarettes, but menthol got
• 37:54
  Speaker 2: exempted because black led community organizations tend to lobby the
• 38:00
  Speaker 2: White House to prevent menthols being taken out of circulation,
• 38:04
  Speaker 2: because those groups tend to be funded by tobacco companies,
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: so essentially they're fronts for the tobacco company lobby. And
• 38:13
  Speaker 2: this one twenty twelve study found that nearly forty percent
• 38:17
  Speaker 2: of black smokers said they would quit if there weren't
• 38:19
  Speaker 2: menthols any longer. So the tobacco companies have a lot
• 38:22
  Speaker 2: to lose and half of an entire market if menthols
• 38:27
  Speaker 2: are done away with, Like all the other flavors, it's
• 38:29
  Speaker 2: the only flavor still allowed in the US.
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: Pretty despicable stuff. So you're probably wondering, like, hey, if
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: smoking so terrible, surely it started to wane. And I
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: gave you some stats earlier, and it has. And that's
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: because in the nineteen sixties we started slow rolling a
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: little bit more warnings, Surgeon General warnings. On sixty four,
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: the Surgeon General released smoking in Health. This is a
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: report that basically said, it's the single largest contributor to
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: lung cancer in men, it's linked to premature birth, it'll
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: increase your risk of a fatal heart attack by seventy percent.
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: In sixty five. Just a year later, they started mandating
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: warning labels on packs. In nineteen seventy they said you
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: can't advertise on TV and radio, even though in print
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: you still could. And then in nineteen seventy two, finally
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: the Surgeon General said, and this was really the beginning
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: of the change of how they were reviewed, and like
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: public smoking in seventy two, they said involuntary smoking, which
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: is a second hand smoke, it's also really bad for you.
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: We're just gonna leave it there. And fourteen years later,
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: in the mid eighties, they said it can actually give
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: you lung cancer. Like you cannot smoke at all and
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: be around smokers and get lung cancer.
• 39:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that happened to Screech from Saved by the Bell.
• 39:52
  Speaker 2: Dustin Diamond died of lung cancer and he never smoked
• 39:54
  Speaker 2: a cigarette in his life. Apparently he attributed it to
• 39:57
  Speaker 2: staying in cheap hotels where you could smoke.
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: Still, Oh interesting. I mean I remember my parents never
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: smoked or anything. But I remember having friends whose parents
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: smoked in the car with the windows rolled up.
• 40:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah that's nuts. I lived in college with a guy
• 40:14
  Speaker 2: who did that. I was just I, even as a smoker,
• 40:17
  Speaker 2: I was like, this is wrong. There's something really wrong with.
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: Yes, oh got in the car, like, good luck selling them.
• 40:24
  Speaker 2: But yeah, also your kids in the back seat, Like
• 40:27
  Speaker 2: that was definitely a thing.
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, well, the other thing we should mention
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: that I never really thought about until this is that
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: smoke is in even going through a filter. So what
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: little work the filter is doing that side stream smoke
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: is just going right into your lung.
• 40:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and even your exhaled smoke contains a lot of
• 40:45
  Speaker 2: toxins that are just getting right back out that are
• 40:47
  Speaker 2: part of secondhand smoke too, So yes, yeah, for sure,
• 40:50
  Speaker 2: it definitely changed the calculus of how people viewed smoking.
• 40:53
  Speaker 2: It wasn't like you're killing yourself thing anymore. It was
• 40:56
  Speaker 2: a you're killing all of us thing now, and that
• 40:59
  Speaker 2: definitely to bands in restaurants, movie theaters all over the place.
• 41:03
  Speaker 2: I remember I was, I think I've said before, I
• 41:05
  Speaker 2: was one of the last smokers on an international flight. Yeah,
• 41:09
  Speaker 2: in the nineties, on the way to the Netherlands. That
• 41:13
  Speaker 2: just seems bizarre to me now too, that especially that
• 41:16
  Speaker 2: it was that recent. But finally America came around and
• 41:19
  Speaker 2: was like, you can't smoke indoors anymore in public places.
• 41:23
  Speaker 2: And another thing simultaneously was people started banning smoking in
• 41:26
  Speaker 2: their own homes. That was simultaneous to government mandated smoking
• 41:31
  Speaker 2: bands in public places. People were making that choice as well,
• 41:35
  Speaker 2: So smokers were getting pushed further and further out of
• 41:38
  Speaker 2: the mainstream essentially.
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, like literally outside, like you had to start telling
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: people like I'm sorry, there's a non smoking house. Yeah.
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: The idea of somebody walking into my house and lighting
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: up a cigarette is so bizarre sounding, like it seems
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: like a hundred years ago that people were doing that,
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: but we lived through it, Like I remember all that.
• 42:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, oh for sure, I had a house that we
• 42:02
  Speaker 2: smoked him and it was It's crazy how much things
• 42:05
  Speaker 2: have changed in just a couple of decades. Yeah, because
• 42:08
  Speaker 2: now if somebody did that, it's like a hostile act,
• 42:11
  Speaker 2: like they're just slapping you in the face like they
• 42:13
  Speaker 2: mean to be starting something. As Michael Jackson said.
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm going to screw up your house right now.
• 42:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, what are you can do about it?
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna smoke next to your cat or.
• 42:25
  Speaker 2: Cat, although I'll bet cats smoke if they could.
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: That's true. You're probably right. The other thing that came
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: in the early nineties when everyone said, when the all
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: the health experts said, hey, you know, you need to
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: quit smoking if you want to live, is all of
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: a sudden, there were nicotine patches and nicorette gum and
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: stuff like that, all kinds of quitting aids that hit
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: the market that were also big money.
• 42:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, something else I found and that stuff worked, and
• 42:53
  Speaker 2: what also worked. I really wanted to do an episode
• 42:55
  Speaker 2: just on this was that big tobacco settlement among the
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: state's attorney's in the US that just, yeah, we should
• 43:02
  Speaker 2: crippled the tobacco industry and really helped lead to its
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: downfall because they had to keep handing over all these
• 43:11
  Speaker 2: documents they had that were so damning, and then the
• 43:13
  Speaker 2: press would just run story after story about this stuff,
• 43:16
  Speaker 2: and it really turned a lot of people off on tobacco.
• 43:19
  Speaker 2: But I remember when vaping started to be a thing,
• 43:22
  Speaker 2: and I was like, no, how did this happen? Like
• 43:26
  Speaker 2: we like the anti tobacco forces won. They won, They
• 43:30
  Speaker 2: beat big tobacco. One of the most powerful groups in
• 43:33
  Speaker 2: the world got beaten by the people who were like, no,
• 43:37
  Speaker 2: we shouldn't be smoking. And then vaping came along. So
• 43:40
  Speaker 2: Julia turned up the statistic that I found very heartening.
• 43:43
  Speaker 2: She said that in twenty nineteen, twenty eight percent of
• 43:47
  Speaker 2: high school students in the US vape cigarettes. Essentially three
• 43:51
  Speaker 2: years later it was ten percent. So it was that's great, Yeah,
• 43:55
  Speaker 2: cut by two thirds. So I attribute that almost exclusively
• 44:00
  Speaker 2: to our vaping app where we really came out against it.
• 44:04
  Speaker 2: Either way, whether that had anything to do with it
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: or not. I was really happy to see that.
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: I think gen Z has been known so far for
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: avoiding some of the trappings of these vices of previous generations.
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: I've read that they're smoking less and they're drinking less,
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: and that's great. They seem to be a little smarter.
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: There's another stat here that I thought was pretty interesting
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: was when I was talking about percentage of smokers. In
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: nineteen sixty five, forty two percent smoked. In nineteen eighty
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: it was thirty three percent. But there were more cigarettes
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: sold in the early eighties. In nineteen sixty five, at
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: forty two percent smoking, they sold five hundred and twenty
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: one billion cigarettes. That dropped to thirty three percent of
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: the population smoking, but they sold six hundred and thirty
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: seven billions, so fewer people seemingly smoking more cigarettes.
• 44:56
  Speaker 2: I would guess that in that interim the tobacco companies
• 44:59
  Speaker 2: figured out out how to make their product more addictive.
• 45:02
  Speaker 2: Then that's when it would have happened. That'd be my guess.
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, probably so.
• 45:08
  Speaker 2: Well. I can't wait to tee off on that tobacco
• 45:11
  Speaker 2: settlement episode whenever we do it. But this is this
• 45:14
  Speaker 2: is a good one. I thought this was a good idea, Chuck,
• 45:16
  Speaker 2: I'm glad you selected it.
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: Thanks. I mean, they're not hurting. Twenty twenty three, Philip
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: Morris raked in thirty five almost thirty six billion dollars.
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: So they're doing okay. And people in different countries is different.
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: I think Americans smoke less. I mean when I've traveled
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: through Europe, a lot of people smoke. I know in
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: Asian countries there's a lot of smoking.
• 45:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's everywhere. Yeah, right after I quit, when we
• 45:39
  Speaker 2: went to Japan and it was they smoked. They smoked
• 45:42
  Speaker 2: during a funeral. Yeah, and I was sitting there like,
• 45:45
  Speaker 2: I want one of those so bad.
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah. When we were in Vegas collecting our Lifetime Achievement
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: and word a couple of years ago. Yes, I went
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: to a dinner at a really nice Chinese restaurant in
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: one of the casinos. Unfortunately it was a smoking casino.
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: And you know, the restaurants aren't like walled off, it's
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: just kind of part of the casino. There was a
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: group of young Japanese men, probably in their late teens
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: to early twenties, like thirteen of them standing just on
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: the other side of where our table was, and just
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: chain smoking wow, over and over and over to the
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: point where I was like, man, this is legitimately ruined
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: this awesome meal.
• 46:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that sucks it definitely. Can he can just one
• 46:30
  Speaker 2: person smoking can ruin the meil? I can't imagine thirteen.
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but oh boy, they were loving them. They were
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: pretty happy smoking those cigarettes.
• 46:39
  Speaker 2: You got anything else?
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: I got nothing else?
• 46:41
  Speaker 2: All right, Well that's it for cigarettes, everybody, Thanks for listening.
• 46:45
  Speaker 2: And since I said thanks for listening, and Chuck's got
• 46:48
  Speaker 2: nothing else, you put those two together and we've just
• 46:50
  Speaker 2: unlocked the listener.
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: Mail correction for Josh during our Boy listener Mail, a
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: couple of this isn't a big one. Hey, guys, long
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: time listener, first time writer. Reference to the listener mail
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: and the USAID episode, Josh mentioned redtail Or Redhawk beer
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: and said it was from Adesto, but the beer is Mendocino.
• 47:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember.
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: Now, given the seminary and those names as easy to
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: confuse these very different California towns, I can personally confirm
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: Mendocino Brewing Company was and now still is a great brewery.
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: They seized operation in twenty eighteen, but were purchased and
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: are now back in production. And hop Land, which is
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: in Mendocino County. Thanks for everything you do. You guys.
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: That's from Devon in California.
• 47:36
  Speaker 2: Very nice, Devin, Thank you for that. And yeah, it's
• 47:39
  Speaker 2: still a good beer even if it is from Mendocino
• 47:43
  Speaker 2: rather than my Desto.
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we just want to shout out the right town.
• 47:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but thank you for being gentle. I appreciate it
• 47:48
  Speaker 2: and not calling me a dipstick or anything.
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: No, that's not dipstick. Cordy.
• 47:53
  Speaker 2: Who was it again? I know I just said their name.
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: That's Devon, Devin.
• 47:57
  Speaker 2: Thanks a lot, Devin. If you want to be like Devon,
• 48:00
  Speaker 2: you can send us an email to send it off
• 48:02
  Speaker 2: to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.