The Humble and Deadly Cigarette

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 26 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too, and we're just smoking, smoking.

Speaker 26 Feel all right, just keep on talking.

Speaker 26 And this is Second Shane.

Speaker 8 Boston. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 26 Yep, that's right.

Speaker 8 That was in my head. I was getting there.

Speaker 8 I thought you were going to go with smoking in the boys' room.

Speaker 26 No, I always thought that was just kind of lame.

Speaker 8 Yeah. That was a remake, you know, Motley Crew.

Speaker 26 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 8 Covered it.

Speaker 26 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.
Or you can. Feel free.

Speaker 26 Okay.

Speaker 8 Can't tell someone not to email.

Speaker 26 Now I do want to know. I'm going to look while you talk.

Speaker 8 Well, I think you should wait for the email. Maybe the writer of that song is listening.

Speaker 26 Brownsville Station.

Speaker 26 Okay, there you go. I'd never in a million years would have come up with that because I've never heard those two words together as a band name.

Speaker 8 Oh, well, you've never taken a train there then.

Speaker 26 Have you ever heard of Brownsville Station?

Speaker 8 Just when I took a train to Brownsville Station.

Speaker 26 That's gross. I think I know what you're talking about.
Oh God.

Speaker 8 All right. Let's get off this and get on something even grosser, which is cigarettes.
Nice.

Speaker 8 And this was from

Speaker 8 our pal Julia. And I just sort of commissioned this one because I was like, you know what? Let's just do one on the cigarette itself.

Speaker 8 Not like smoking and not the lawsuits and all that stuff or lung cancer, but just on the thing, the object. And Julia sent us an article called The Cigarette Itself, appropriately titled.

Speaker 8 And I learned a lot in this one,

Speaker 8 chiefly that the cigarette was born in Spain in the early

Speaker 8 16th 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.

Speaker 8 But when they would, you know, stub out that last, you know, half inch of a cigar or whatever,

Speaker 8 people that didn't have as much money would come along, grab that thing, and take out the tobacco,

Speaker 8 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 cigarello.

Speaker 26 Isn't that amazing?

Speaker 8 Yeah, I mean, I never thought about the word cigarette being a play on cigar.

Speaker 26 Oh, really?

Speaker 8 Like a tiny cigar, like, because I always heard cigarello, but like a kitchenette, a cigarette is just like a same sort sort of version of that.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 26 Before we go any further into the history, let's give a few basics about the cigarette.

Speaker 26 Great.

Speaker 26 So, they're about 84 millimeters long, a standard cigarette. And for a reference, that's about the length of a cigarette.
They're sold in packs of 20.

Speaker 26 And if you really want to get technical about a cigarette, next time you're at a party and you're bowing 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.

Speaker 26 That's right.

Speaker 8 As we'll see, a camel first started putting them in packs of 20. And I could not find out if

Speaker 8 I think they did that to match the number of matches in a matchbook, which is 20.

Speaker 26 Oh, really?

Speaker 8 I'm pretty sure that's the story.

Speaker 26 I wish somebody would have told the hot dog

Speaker 26 makers that, because, you know, you got the buns of eight or the pack of eight hot dogs and buns of six. I can never keep up these days with witches.

Speaker 8 Yeah, that just still doesn't make any sense at all. But yeah, I am pretty sure that they put it in a pack of 20 eventually to match the matches in a matchbook, but that may also be apocryphal.

Speaker 26 Who knows? That's a good one, though.

Speaker 8 What cigarettes are for is to deliver nicotine to your body, which is a feel-good chemical that is naturally occurring in tobacco.

Speaker 8 And the whole point is to, with a pipe, a cigar, or a cigarette or anything like that, an e-cig, is to get you that nicotine, to get you addicted to it, to eventually kill you from it.

Speaker 26 Yeah, it's crazy, but that's essentially the point.

Speaker 26 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

Speaker 26 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

Speaker 26 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 do to the human body, how addictive they are.

Speaker 26 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 90s.

Speaker 8 Yeah, it's crazy how it all panned out.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 But the tobacco end

Speaker 8 is a filler of cut tobacco leaves and then plenty of additives.

Speaker 8 I think, how many did they admit?

Speaker 26 599.

Speaker 8 Yeah, they wanted to get to 600 so bad, but they finally in 1994 released their additives, and it was a list 599 long, which is crazy to think about.

Speaker 26 I think they had 600, but some very sharp-eyed tobacco lobbyist was like, uh, uh, you got arsenic in here twice.

Speaker 8 So it says, cut tobacco leaves. It's held in a porous wrapped paper that is sealed by an adhesive.

Speaker 8 And if you'll look closely, there is a printed, there's printed information on that paper that you're also smoking.

Speaker 8 And you're going to be burning when you're smoking that tobacco, that paper, those additives, that ink, that adhesive, and everything.

Speaker 8 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 sidestream smoke.

Speaker 8 The stuff that you inhale is called mainstream smoke.

Speaker 26 Yeah, the mainstream smoke comes out of the filter. You draw through the filter

Speaker 26 and the smoke that comes out, that's the mainstream smoke. The filter, as we'll see, it does something a little bit here or there, but not really.

Speaker 26 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

Speaker 26 these cigarette butts, which are the most littered item in the entire world, I saw something like 4.1 trillion cigarette butts are littered, not thrown away, littered every year around the world.

Speaker 26 And a common misconception among smokers is that they're biodegradable. They're not.
They're photodegradable, not biodegradable, which is a real problem because they kind of,

Speaker 26 well, they litter all over the place and they're a type of plastic.

Speaker 8 Yeah. Those filters are cellulose acetate.

Speaker 8 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 at all as far as like health outcomes or anything like that.

Speaker 8 There are two paper wraps on the filter in. There's a plug wrap 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 wrap.

Speaker 8 And that is also sealed up so that you don't want that smoke coming out of the side of the filter.

Speaker 8 You want it going into your mouth. And then that filter is also treated.

Speaker 8 They changed the pH on that filter to purposefully turn it brown as you smoke. So So you look and you see, man, look at all that brown stuff that's not getting into my lungs.

Speaker 26 It fooled me for 20 years. Up until a couple days ago, I had no idea that that was the case.

Speaker 8 Yeah, just one of the dirty tricks that cigarette manufacturers use and still use.

Speaker 26 That's nuts.

Speaker 26 So let's go back to the cigarillo, shall we?

Speaker 8 Let's do it.

Speaker 26 The cigarillo, I think you said it was the early 16th century, so the early 1500s, right after the Age of Discovery kicked off, right?

Speaker 26 And it took all the way to the late 1700s before it really started to spread outward into Italy and Portugal, which are not that far away.

Speaker 26 Apparently, people didn't think that much of the cigaretto by then.

Speaker 26 But as Europe started to go to war with itself, the cigarillo kind of hitchhiked to the fronts and was like, hey, what do you guys think about me? Pretty great, huh?

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 It was, you know, it helped calm their nerves. I think it was

Speaker 8 a comfort piece when you're, I bet a cigarette, and kids don't ever try it. Don't ever even try it.

Speaker 8 But I bet when you're at 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.

Speaker 8 I bet that's a great cigarette to smoke.

Speaker 26 I would think so too. Yeah.

Speaker 8 So anyway,

Speaker 8 French and British soldiers discovered them in the early 1800s during the Napoleonic Wars. And this is where the French came up with the word cigarette instead of cigarillo.

Speaker 8 And the Crimean War around the middle of the century came along. A new generation of British and French soldiers

Speaker 8 got this, got these cigarettes with that pretty harsh Turkish tobacco. They said, we love this stuff.
They brought it home.

Speaker 8 And there was a tobacconist named Philip Morris that had a shop on Bond Street in 1847 where he was selling cigars and tobacco products. And he was like, I'm going to start making cigarettes.

Speaker 26 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...

Speaker 26 like a shout out or something like that?

Speaker 8 Oh, I never looked that up, but I just assumed that it was eventually became the big company.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 26 When it really became a thing in the the United States, as we'll see, it

Speaker 26 became associated essentially with juvenile delinquents at first. It was not a fancy, like a Bond Street-type thing to do.

Speaker 26 It was kids playing craps rather than going to school were smoking cigarettes too.

Speaker 8 Yeah, near-do-wells.

Speaker 26 Yes, near-do-wells.

Speaker 8 So at Philip Morris's Bond Street tobacco store, they started making their own cigarettes.

Speaker 8 They were not mass-produced, obviously. He had people hand-rolling just like they did with with cigars.

Speaker 8 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

Speaker 8 a couple of things happened that really made cigarettes, you know, way more widespread.

Speaker 8 One was the invention of a rolling machine, like a machine that could pump out,

Speaker 8 you know, eventually like 250,000 a day for a company.

Speaker 8 And the American cigarette, which used

Speaker 8 a combination sometimes of Turkish tobacco or sometimes just straight up American tobacco that was a lot less harsh and more palatable for, I guess, American appetites.

Speaker 26 Smooth, mild.

Speaker 26 So, yeah, there was a guy named James Duke who was a Durham, North Carolina tobacco heir. And I think I remember correctly when we went to Durham for our show recently, I think both times.

Speaker 26 They have like a big Duke stencil on

Speaker 26 a smokestack at some place. Oh, that's funny.
I'm pretty sure. So

Speaker 26 he created W. Duke Sons and Company in 1883 to start making

Speaker 26 cigarettes. Sorry, 1881.

Speaker 26 By 1883, he was making $250,000 a day thanks to the invention of James Bonsack, who created that cigarette rolling machine that you mentioned earlier that could roll 200 cigarettes per minute.

Speaker 8 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 them. He's like, a raw.

Speaker 8 And yeah, exactly. And he said, sure.
And he said, all right, all you cigarette rollers, you're out of business. And they said, no, you can't hire a machine to do work that humans do.

Speaker 8 And he said, watch me. And so he put these machines in.

Speaker 8 All of a sudden, they were a lot cheaper to sell. to make and to sell.
They were readily available.

Speaker 8 And like you said, they were smoother and they got popular, at least with the, with the juveniles, but that would be the first step toward making them a little more mainstream.

Speaker 8 But it is interesting that they were, I think in 1900, 2% of the market was tobacco market with cigarettes. People were still really into chewing tobacco at the time and dipping snuff.

Speaker 26 Yeah, people love that kind of stuff.

Speaker 26 So by the 1890s, though, this was enough of a thing that kids were smoking cigarettes that as early as the 1890s, states started to pass bans on selling cigarettes to minors. Isn't that interesting?

Speaker 8 Yeah. I mean, I think, I didn't think they cared about children at all back then.

Speaker 8 Apparently, they were like, hey, this doesn't look good, these kids walking around smoking like they're seven years old.

Speaker 26 They're like, what are you doing out of the coal mine? Right, exactly.

Speaker 26 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, buddy.

Speaker 26 Okay, we're going to take a break, everybody. We just decided.

Speaker 8 Not a smoke break, just a break.

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Speaker 26 So, just like in Europe, Chuck,

Speaker 26 war helped cigarettes just blow up, basically. And World War I in particular

Speaker 26 brought cigarettes to America by introducing it to American troops. And like you said,

Speaker 26 the men fighting World War I in the trenches were like, we need something. Somebody give us something to smoke.
And the U.S. government was like, that's fine, but cigars are kind of pricey.

Speaker 26 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?

Speaker 26 And the men in the trenches said, Whatever, we just need to smoke something. So, very quickly, a steady,

Speaker 26 never-ending stream of packs of cigarettes started being sent to the boys on the front in Europe. Um, and all like

Speaker 26 businesses, individual citizens, the government, they were all paying for it. And they just smoked, smoked, smoked out of the trenches in World War I.

Speaker 26 And when they came back, they were like, You guys, you got to try these, they're amazing.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I I mean, it was kind of perfect for a foxhole because it was much quicker than a cigar.

Speaker 8 Like, you know, you sit, 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.

Speaker 8 And buddy, did they explode? Camel cigarettes in 1913

Speaker 8 sold about a million packs of cigarettes. Or is that a million cigarettes?

Speaker 26 A million packs.

Speaker 8 A million packs of cigarettes. In 1914, they sold 425 million packs.
And by 1919, they sold 21 billion packs of cigarettes.

Speaker 26 Yeah, which not coincidentally was after World War I ended and all of those men fighting in World War I came back with pretty healthy little cigarette habits by then.

Speaker 8 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?

Speaker 26 I know. And that's just Campbell cigarettes.
that's not all cigarettes, that's just one camel, yeah.

Speaker 26 Um, another thing World War I 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.

Speaker 26 And one of the

Speaker 26 smoke, exactly, right?

Speaker 26 One of the upshots of that was that, um,

Speaker 26 I guess norms and expectations around women really loosened up. And one of the things that women did almost immediately was they started smoking.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 This is also a very fun fact: Philip Morris, the Marlborough cigarette, which I have always associated with like cowboy killers.

Speaker 8 Yeah, like a dude cigarette, cowboy killers that the Marlboro man and the famous Sunset Boulevard, you know, cut out that was there forever.

Speaker 26 And Kramer. Don't forget Kramer was the Marlboro man for a minute.
That's right, he was.

Speaker 26 But the Marlboro cigarette, I have such a hard time saying that. It's hard to say.

Speaker 8 It was launched as a women's cigarette.

Speaker 8 It was known as Mild as May.

Speaker 8 And I'm not sure when that switched, but that's kind of a fun little fact.

Speaker 26 I vow to pick up Mild mild as may is a phrase I'm going to start using.

Speaker 8 I like that.

Speaker 26 Lucky strike was also like, hey, rather than reaching for a sweet, which will eventually disappoint your husband, reach for a lucky strike instead. Just smoke anytime you have a chocolate craving.

Speaker 8 Yeah, and all those accessories that, hey, listen, again, kids, don't smoke. But

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 I don't know. It was pretty cool looking to young Chuck.

Speaker 26 Yeah, I recently read Rebecca by Daphne DeMaurier. Have you ever read that?

Speaker 26 No, was it the Rebecca, the Hitchcock movie, Rebecca? I think Hitchcock may have made it. Yeah, and that tracks because I think it was written in the early 30s.

Speaker 26 Have you seen the movie? Was it about a woman who is basically living in the shadow of her husband's first wife? Yes. Yes.
So that's that that's the book.

Speaker 8 But people great under undervalued Hitchcock movie, by the way.

Speaker 26 It's a great book too.

Speaker 26 But people bust out cigarette cases like every couple paragraphs and they're an offer cigarette and everyone smokes after

Speaker 26 tea and all this stuff. So I know exactly what you're talking about.

Speaker 26 It just stuck out to me.

Speaker 26 I think, I guess, as a 21st century person, knowing what smoking does, looking at people who are living in a time when they didn't know what smoking did, it's kind of not funny to see, but it's just, it's just bizarre to look back like that.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I mean, there were, I remember in college in Athens, there 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.

Speaker 8 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 8 Yeah, because you know, they were like, hey, look at me, I'm different. And, you know, I'm an art major.

Speaker 26 So this is what we do. I'm like frigging Audrey Hepburn here.

Speaker 8 The other thing that happened was they started

Speaker 8 putting cigarette lighters in cars in, I think, 1925, 1926 is when they became standard

Speaker 8 in cars, a little push-button cigarette lighter. So now they're saying like smoke everywhere.

Speaker 26 Yeah, and it just so happens 1925, 1926 is when the first cars came up, basically. So right out of the gate, they had cigarette lighters, huh?

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 26 Yeah, you could get 150 grand plus a year supply of Lucky Strikes if your smoking was sponsored by Lucky Strike, which I think Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, they all had those deals with Lucky Strike.

Speaker 26 So they would out in public be smoking Lucky Strikes, but during interviews, they'd also stop and be like, wow, this Lucky Strike is so mild, smooth, or whatever.

Speaker 26 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 to catch up.

Speaker 26 That's what they used to do with Lucky Strikes.

Speaker 8 Yeah. And they're like, they sent me a year supply.
So they sent me 1,000 packs of cigarettes.

Speaker 26 Exactly. It was nuts.
So there's just tons of stars smoking. They were literally sponsored by tobacco companies.
And even if you weren't, you could still be pitching them in regular ads.

Speaker 26 And there's a push today to, I think, retroactively and moving forward,

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 8 Much different back then, obviously.

Speaker 8 By the middle of the 20th century,

Speaker 8 cigarettes had 81% of the tobacco market. So people really ditched the chaw and the snuff for cigarettes, generally speaking.
And people, you know, pregnant women were smoking.

Speaker 8 You smoke in the movie theater, smoke on planes, on buses, in the office. Your doctor would smoke in front of you during an appointment.

Speaker 26 People reading the news on TV would be smoking while they were giving you the news.

Speaker 8 It's crazy when you look back at old like TV show, either, not just episodes, but like Dick Cabot Show and stuff like that. Just like everybody was smoking all the time.

Speaker 26 Yeah, I mean, there were ads that were doctors recommending a certain kind of cigarette because they were smoother. They made you cough less or something like that.
It was just absolutely crazy.

Speaker 26 But eventually, people started getting hip to the idea that these things might kind of be bad for us.

Speaker 26 I think, as far back as the 1760s, 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, it's powdered tobacco you sniff like it's a bump of cocaine.

Speaker 26 That they were, he had observed nasal swellings and excrescences in snuff users.

Speaker 26 What even is that? It's, I think, puffy,

Speaker 26 pussy looks in their noses. And he's like, I think those are probably cancerous.
And this is back in the 1760s.

Speaker 8 Yeah, so that's super early on. In 1900,

Speaker 8 they finally put like tobacco extract. They did like official scientific tests.
They put tobacco extracts.

Speaker 8 They applied it to guinea pigs, of course. And they saw cellular activity associated with cancer development.

Speaker 8 They linked it to cheek cancer as early as 1928. And then about a decade after that, they said, you know what, if you smoke, you're not going to live as long.

Speaker 26 No.

Speaker 26 And then I think by 1950, 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.

Speaker 26 Four years after that, a British medical journal published a study that said that cigarettes were killing doctors in significant numbers too.

Speaker 26 And the fact that doctors are now dying from smoking cigarettes, that kind of got people's attention.

Speaker 8 Yeah, and these were all unfiltered basically up until 1950.

Speaker 8 In 1950, the Winston cigarette was the first one to come out as a mass-marketed filtered cigarette.

Speaker 8 And again,

Speaker 8 you know,

Speaker 26 it helps a little bit.

Speaker 8 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's bad for you. So now we've added a thing to make it safe.

Speaker 26 Yeah, I read that initially it was an earnest attempt to create a healthier, less deadly cigarette.

Speaker 26 And 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.

Speaker 26 And yeah, it very quickly just became a device rather than something that actually worked.

Speaker 26 It can catch some some particulate matter, but it's doing nothing to the gases in the smoke. They're just coming through fully toxic.
But again, smokers are like, okay, great. We've got that licked.

Speaker 26 We have filters now. Let's all go back to smoking as much as we want.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I think

Speaker 8 by year

Speaker 8 1965, 42%

Speaker 8 of American adults smoked.

Speaker 8 In 1980, it went down to 33. By 95, it was down to 25.
2010, 19%.

Speaker 8 And just a couple of years ago in 2023, 11%.

Speaker 8 But that's, that's nuts. Like 40, like close to half of American adults in the 60s were smoking.

Speaker 26 Well, it's funny is based on old movies and TVs and books and stuff like that, or TV shows and books.

Speaker 26 That seems low to me.

Speaker 8 Yeah, it looks like 100%.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 26 It really does for sure. But yeah.

Speaker 8 I wonder who didn't smoke. Like half the people probably just were like,

Speaker 8 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, your breath gross.

Speaker 8 That probably had a lot to do with it.

Speaker 26 I would guess so, too. And then also, I mean, if back in the 20s, they were like, you, you can get mouth and cheek cancer from it.
It's probably trickled out to some people more than others, you know?

Speaker 8 For sure. So they add the filter, but a lot of R D and money was spent because all of a sudden you're adding this barrier between the smoker and the smoke.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 So they put a lot of dough into,

Speaker 8 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 cigarettes.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 26 And it's essentially a ruined cigarette because

Speaker 26 you don't want to have to have to exert any kind of effort in smoking. And if you do, it's just

Speaker 26 not worth it. So they could not mess with the smoking experience.
They had to make it as good or better

Speaker 26 while also preserving all the best parts of an unfiltered cigarette.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 26 And from what I can tell, light cigarettes, that's it. They have more tiny holes than a non-light, a regular cigarette.
That's the only difference.

Speaker 8 Yeah, it's not like lighter chemical additives or lesser chemical additives and stuff like that, right?

Speaker 26 But the big tobacco companies are very happy for you to walk around thinking that that's what it means.

Speaker 26 But all it means is it just hits you lighter because it has more little micro holes in that tipping paper at the end. Wow.

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Speaker 8 Uh, should we take another break?

Speaker 26 Yes.

Speaker 8 All right, we'll be right back right after this.

Speaker 8 so there are different, you know, sizes of cigarettes.

Speaker 8 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 kind of people smoke what kind of cigarettes.

Speaker 8 It's pretty interesting, actually.

Speaker 26 Yeah. I worked at a Last Chance gas station and liquor store, and we sold cigarettes for $1.25 a pack, which is far and away the cheapest cigarettes in all of Athens.

Speaker 26 So we had a lot of people come in there, too.

Speaker 8 What was the cheapest brand?

Speaker 8 I totally remember the ones that we had.

Speaker 26 I don't remember what they were back then.

Speaker 8 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 uh that was just more depressing to me even uh and in our store they were bucks i don't remember those at all had a big antlered deer on the front of it and bucks were really cheap compared to the other ones so i can't imagine what was in those that sounds very scary But there are different links, different kinds of filters.

Speaker 8 I remember the parliaments had the recess filter occasionally when I had cigarettes here and there. In New Jersey, a lot of people smoke parliaments.
You can have those long 120s.

Speaker 8 They're called extra longs.

Speaker 8 And different diameters, including something I tried in college occasionally, was the old Camel Wide.

Speaker 26 Oh, I forgot about those.

Speaker 8 Remember those plugs? Yep.

Speaker 26 I went the opposite direction. I smoked Capri Ultra Slim 120s for a little while.
Are you serious? They were essentially as big around as like a popsicle or a sucker stick.

Speaker 8 Yeah. Oh, yeah.
I remember my my friend Justin's mother smoked those, and I never saw anyone that wasn't a mom smoke those.

Speaker 26 Yeah, I took a lot of crap back in the day because I would smoke those. I smoked Virginia Slim's for a while.
That's really funny.

Speaker 26 I don't remember how either of those came to be my brand, but I would guess that I started smoking Capri's because I like the watercolor design on the box.

Speaker 26 That's probably what first caught my attention.

Speaker 8 You always have marched to the beat of your own drum. So I could see Josh Clark doing that just to be different.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 26 They were good, though. I liked them.

Speaker 26 Wait, let me rephrase 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, ever would have smoked.

Speaker 26 Of course. Quitting smoking was the single hardest thing I've ever done in my entire life by far.
It is definitely not worth it.

Speaker 8 Yeah, totally. I was a...
the dreaded social smoker who all my smoker friends hated because I could always take it or leave it. And

Speaker 8 it never got its hooks in me as far as an addiction goes.

Speaker 26 That just did not compute with me, but I was always in awe of people like you.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I was the one who would bum the cigarettes off my smoker friends, and they were always nice about it.

Speaker 8 I was not the guy at the party who let the filtered in because I had too much to drink.

Speaker 26 I was the guy who would smoke with the flu.

Speaker 8 Or the guy that if the cigarette broke, the tobacco and broke a little bit, you would hold your finger around that part just so you could still not waste that cigarette.

Speaker 8 But again, we're not waxing nostalgic, everybody.

Speaker 26 So where are we, Chuck? Oh, we were talking about some innovations at the time, I guess.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I mean, one innovation, and by innovation, we mean terrible things cigarette companies did to make them worse and more addictive, basically. So like innovation for them.

Speaker 8 was what's called

Speaker 8 puffed or expanded tobacco. And that's when they soak tobacco leaves in ammonia and Freon

Speaker 8 to make them puff out and increase their volume. They swell up some, and then they freeze dry that, and they do that so they can get more cigarettes out of less of a tobacco purchase or harvest.

Speaker 26 Yeah, it's just a space filler. And from what I saw, Freon, they only used that only for about 30 years.
That just continued a couple decades ago.

Speaker 26 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-base nicotine more easily.

Speaker 26 So you get more nicotine out of each puff of cigarette, which a lot of observers point to as clear evidence that tobacco companies went out of their way to make their products more addictive.

Speaker 8 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 8 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 store, you kind of see repeated patterns.

Speaker 8 It's clear if you've ever sold cigarettes that African Americans tend to prefer menthol cigarettes. I think more than 85% of black smokers smoke menthols.

Speaker 8 And once again, the tobacco companies found this out kind of during the civil rights movement.

Speaker 8 And they were like, hey, we found a new target demographic of people that we can try and kill and market to.

Speaker 26 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,

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 26 And so just by essentially, I guess, targeted happenstance, the tobacco companies started heavily advertising menthols in the black press.

Speaker 26 And so that eventually came to be the favored kind of cigarette among black people in America.

Speaker 26 And I read an article by a guy named Alan Blum, who is the director of the Center for the Study of Tobacco in Society.

Speaker 26 And he kicked out an estimate that about a third of the ads in some issues of Ebony and Jet magazines,

Speaker 26 black-oriented national magazines in the U.S., were for tobacco products, mostly cigarettes, mostly menthol cigarettes. Yeah.

Speaker 8 I mean, that's crazy, a third. And then in 1990, Some people say like peak targeted advertising and branding came when R.J.

Speaker 8 Reynolds was going to release their Uptown menthol cigarette, the first cigarette made like specifically targeted toward black Americans.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 They were the only cigarettes with...

Speaker 8 had the filters down in the pack because the company found through research that black smokers open

Speaker 8 open packs from the bottom so they could grab the tobacco in to avoid crushing that filter

Speaker 8 and or to keep their fingers from 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.

Speaker 26 Yes. And this did not land well with people in the United States.

Speaker 26 There happened to be a black health and human services secretary at the time named Lewis Sullivan, and he bucked tradition and directly targeted Uptown cigarettes and R.J.

Speaker 26 Reynolds as basically a vile product that needed to be removed from the shelves. It hadn't been released yet.
The release was targeted for February of 1990, not coincidentally, Black History Month.

Speaker 26 And enough of a protest erupted in the U.S. led by Lewis Sullivan that R.J.
Reynolds withdrew it before they could ever roll a mountain and sell uptown cigarettes.

Speaker 26 Hurrah for them. But the upshot of this is that, like you said, 85% of black smokers smoke menthols.
And

Speaker 26 because of the apparent feeling of menthols, it feels nothing like you're killing yourself. In fact, it almost feels refreshing in some cases.

Speaker 26 The black press relying so much on tobacco advertising that they didn't tend to cover the dangers of smoking

Speaker 26 like

Speaker 26 mainstream press

Speaker 26 heavily targeted advertising in black communities. By 1990, black Americans had a 58% higher rate of lung cancer than white people.
And it still goes on today.

Speaker 26 There is 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.

Speaker 26 So essentially they're fronts for the tobacco company lobby. And this one 2012 study found that nearly 40% of black smokers said they would quit if there weren't menthols any longer.

Speaker 26 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 U.S.

Speaker 8 Pretty despicable stuff.

Speaker 8 So you're probably wondering, like, hey, if smoking is so terrible, surely it started to wane. And I gave you some some stats earlier, and it has.
And that's because

Speaker 8 in the 1960s, we started slowrolling a little bit more warnings, surgeon general warnings. In 64, the Surgeon General released Smoking and Health.

Speaker 8 This is a report that basically said it's the single largest contributor to lung cancer in men. It's linked to premature birth.

Speaker 8 It'll increase your risk of a fatal heart attack by 70%.

Speaker 8 In 65, just a year later, they started mandating warning labels on PACs. In 1970, they said you can't advertise on TV and radio, even though in print you still could.

Speaker 8 And then in 1972, finally, the Surgeon General said, and this was really the beginning of the change of how they were viewed in like public smoking.

Speaker 8 In 72, they said, Involuntary smoking, which is secondhand smoke, it's also really bad for you.

Speaker 8 We're just going to leave it there. And 14 years later, in the mid-80s, they said it can actually give you lung cancer.
Like you cannot smoke at all and be around smokers and get lung cancer.

Speaker 26 Yeah, that happened to Screech from Save by the Bell. Dustin Diamond died of lung cancer, and he never smoked a cigarette in his life, apparently.

Speaker 26 He attributed it to staying in cheap hotels where you could smoke still.

Speaker 26 Oh, interesting.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 26 Yeah, that's nuts. I lived in college with a guy who did that.
I was just,

Speaker 26 even as a smoker, I was like, this is wrong. There's something really wrong with this.

Speaker 8 Oh, yeah, in the car.

Speaker 26 Like, good luck selling that. But yeah, also your kids in the back seat.
Like, that was definitely a thing.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 8 I mean, well, the other thing we should mention that I never really thought about until this is that smoke isn't even going through a filter.

Speaker 8 So what little work the filter is doing, that side stream smoke is just going right into your lungs. Yeah.

Speaker 26 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,

Speaker 26 that definitely changed the calculus of how people viewed smoking. It wasn't like a you're killing yourself thing anymore, it was a you're killing all of us thing now.

Speaker 26 And that definitely led to bans in um restaurants, movie theaters, all over the place.

Speaker 26 I remember I was, I think I've said before, I was one of the last smokers on an international flight in the 90s on the way to the Netherlands.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 26 And another thing, simultaneously, was people started banning smoking in their own homes. That was simultaneous to government-mandated smoking bans in public places.

Speaker 26 People were making that choice as well. So smokers were getting pushed further and further out of the mainstream, essentially.

Speaker 8 Yeah, like literally outside. Like you had to start telling people, like, I'm sorry, there's a non-smoking house.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 Like I remember all that.

Speaker 26 Yeah. Oh, for sure.
I had a house that we smoked in, and it was

Speaker 8 crazy how much things have changed in just a couple of decades.

Speaker 26 Yeah, because now if somebody did that, it's like a hostile act. Like they're still slapping you in the face.
Like they mean to be starting something, as Michael Jackson said.

Speaker 26 Yeah, I'm going to screw up your house right now.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 26 What are you going to do about it?

Speaker 8 I'm going to smoke next to your cat.

Speaker 26 Poor cat. Although I'll bet cats smoke if they could.
No, that's true.

Speaker 8 You're probably right.

Speaker 8 The other thing that came in the early 90s when everyone said, or 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

Speaker 8 that were also big money.

Speaker 26 Yeah, something else I found, and that stuff worked.

Speaker 26 And what also worked, I really wanted to do an episode just on this, was that big tobacco settlement among the state's attorneys general in the U.S. that just

Speaker 26 crippled the

Speaker 26 tobacco industry and really helped lead to its downfall

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 26 So Julia turned up this statistic that i found very heartening she said that in 2019 28 of uh high school students in the u.s vaped cigarettes essentially three years later it was 10

Speaker 26 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

Speaker 8 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 far for avoiding some of the trappings of these vices of previous generations.

Speaker 8 I've read that they're smoking less and they're drinking less, and that's great. They seem to be a little smarter.

Speaker 8 There's another stat here that I thought was pretty interesting was

Speaker 8 when I was talking about

Speaker 8 percentage of smokers in 1965, 42% smoked. In 1980, it was 33%.

Speaker 8 But there were more cigarettes sold in the early 80s.

Speaker 8 In 1965, at 42% smoking, they sold 521 billion cigarettes.

Speaker 8 That dropped to 33% of the population smoking, but they sold 637 billion. So fewer people seemingly smoking more cigarettes.

Speaker 26 I would guess that in the interim, the tobacco companies figured out how to make their product more addictive then. Yeah.
That's when it would have happened. That'd be my guess.
Yeah. Probably so.

Speaker 26 Well, I can't wait to tee off on that tobacco settlement episode whenever we do it. But this is a good one.
I thought this was a good idea, Chuck. I'm glad you selected it.

Speaker 8 Thanks. I mean, they're not hurting.
2023, Philip Morris raked in $35, almost $36 billion.

Speaker 8 So they're doing okay. And people in different countries is different.
I think Americans smoke less.

Speaker 8 I mean, when I've traveled through Europe, a lot of people smoke. I know in

Speaker 8 Asian countries, there's a lot of smoking.

Speaker 26 Yeah, it's everywhere.

Speaker 26 Right after I quit, we went to Japan and they smoked. They smoked during a funeral.
Yeah. And I was sitting there like, I want one of those so bad.

Speaker 8 Yeah. When we were in Vegas

Speaker 8 collecting our Lifetime Achievement Award a couple of years ago,

Speaker 8 I went to a dinner at a really nice Chinese restaurant in one of the casinos. Unfortunately, it was a smoking casino.

Speaker 8 And, you know, the restaurants aren't like walled off. It's just kind of part of the casino.

Speaker 8 There was a group of young Japanese men, probably in their late teens to early 20s, like 13 of them, standing just on the other side of where our table was and just chain smoking. Wow.

Speaker 8 Over and over and over to the point where I was like, man, this has legitimately ruined this awesome meal.

Speaker 26 Yeah, that sucks. It does.
It definitely can. It can.

Speaker 26 Just one person smoking can ruin a meal. I can't imagine 13.
Yeah, but oh boy, they were loving them.

Speaker 8 They were pretty happy smoking those cigarettes.

Speaker 26 You got anything else?

Speaker 8 I got nothing else.

Speaker 26 All right. Well, that's it for cigarettes, everybody.
Thanks for listening.

Speaker 26 And since I said thanks for listening and Chuck's got nothing else, you put those two together and we've just unlocked Listener Mail.

Speaker 8 Correction

Speaker 8 for Josh during our

Speaker 8 Listener Mail a couple of, this isn't a big one. Hey guys, longtime listener, first-time writer.
reference to the listener mail in the USAID episode.

Speaker 8 Josh mentioned Red Tail or Red Hawk beer and said it was from Odesto, but the beer is Mendocino.

Speaker 26 Yeah, I remember now.

Speaker 8 Given the Silminary and those names, it's easy to confuse these very different California towns. I can personally confirm Mendocino Brewing Company was and now still is a great brewery.

Speaker 8 They ceased operation in 2018, but were purchased and are now back in production in Hopland, which is in Mendocino County. Thanks for everything you do, you guys.
That's from Devin in California.

Speaker 26 Very nice, Devin. Thank you for that.

Speaker 26 And yeah, it's still a good beer, even if it is from Mendocino rather than Modesto.

Speaker 8 Yeah, we just want to shout out the right town.

Speaker 26 Yeah, but thank you for being gentle. I appreciate it and not calling me a dipstick or anything like that.

Speaker 8 That's not dipstick worthy.

Speaker 26 Who was it again? I know I just said their name.

Speaker 8 That's Devin.

Speaker 26 Devin, thanks a lot, Devin. And if you want to be like Devin, you can send us an email to send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Speaker 1 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Speaker 27 Attention, parents and grandparents.

Speaker 6 If you're looking for a gift that's more than just a toy, give them something that inspires confidence and adventure all year long.

Speaker 29 Give them a Guardian bike, the easiest, safest, and number one kids' bike on the market.

Speaker 26 Yeah, with USA-made kids-specific frames and patented safety technology, kids are learning to ride in just one day with no training wheels needed.

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Speaker 7 Join over a half a million families who've discovered the magic of Guardian.

Speaker 9 Visit guardianbikes.com to shop now.

Speaker 12 This podcast is sponsored by PayPal.

Speaker 14 Okay, let's talk holiday shopping.

Speaker 17 From now through December 8th, you can get 20% cash back when you pay in for with PayPal.

Speaker 19 No fees, no interest, and this limited-time offer is perfect for the Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals you've been eyeing.

Speaker 21 Save the offer in the app now.

Speaker 24 So, whether you're shopping for your foodie friend or outdoorsy uncle, PayPal helps you make the most of your money this holiday.

Speaker 25 Expires December 8th. See PayPal.com/slash promo terms, subject to approval.
Learn more at paypal.com/slash payin4. PayPal Inc.
NMLS 910457.

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