The Humble and Deadly Cigarette

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

Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too, and we're just smoking, smoking.

Feel all right, just keep on talking.

And this is

Boston.

Yeah, okay.

Yep, that's right.

That was in my head.

I was getting there.

I thought you were going to go with Smoking in the Boys' Room.

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

Yeah, that was a remake, you know, Motley Crew.

Covered it.

I don't remember who did the original, do you?

No, I don't remember.

You don't need to email in and tell us.

That's all right.

If we're curious enough, we'll go look it up.

Or you can.

Feel free.

Okay.

Can't tell someone not to email?

Now I do want to know.

I'm going to look while you talk.

Well, I think you should wait for the email.

Maybe the writer of that song is listening.

Brownsville Station.

Okay, there you go.

I'd never in a million years would have come with that because I've never heard those two words together as a band name.

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

Have you ever heard of Brownsville Station?

Just when I took a train to Brownsville Station.

That's gross.

I think I know what you're talking about.

Oh, God.

All right, let's get get off this and get on something even grosser, which is cigarettes.

Nice.

And this was from

our pal Julia.

And I just sort of, I commissioned this one because I was like, you know what?

Let's just do one on the cigarette itself.

Not like smoking and not the lawsuits and all that stuff or lung cancer, but just on the thing, the object.

And Julia sent us an article called The Cigarette Itself, appropriately titled.

And I learned a lot in this one,

chiefly that the cigarette was born in Spain in the early

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.

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

people that didn't have as much money would come along, grab that thing.

and take out the tobacco,

you know, grind it up and pick it apart a little bit and wrap it in paper and smoke it.

And that was a little cigar or a cigarello.

Isn't that amazing?

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

Oh, really?

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

Ironically, I never thought of a kitchenette as a small version of a kitchen.

Come on.

So, Chuck, let's just hold our horses here.

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

Great.

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.

And if you really want to get technical about a cigarette, next time you're at a party and you're bumming one from somebody or castigating somebody for smoking, even better, you can say that a cigarette is also technically known as a heated tobacco product.

That's right.

As we'll see, a camel first started putting them in packs of 20.

And I could not find out if

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

Oh, really?

I'm pretty sure that's the story.

I wish somebody would have told the hot dog makers that.

Because, you know, you got the buns of eight or the pack of eight hot dogs and buns of six.

I can never keep up these days days with witches.

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.

Who knows?

That's a good one, though.

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

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

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

And I think before the advent of mass-produced cigarettes, maybe you had a lesser chance of developing all sorts of hideous cancers and other diseases.

But

even if that's not true, or even if it is true, it doesn't matter because we live in the age of mass-produced cigarettes.

And these things are exquisitely engineered

products that so much time and money and effort has gone into and so much research that most of what we know about cigarettes, what cigarettes do to the human body, how addictive they are, comes from the research the tobacco companies did over the decades that they kept that eventually had to be handed over to the state attorneys general who sued them back in the 90s.

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

If you're looking looking at, you know, and Julia kind of breaks it down with the white end and the brown end, but there are plenty of cigarettes that are white through and through, meaning the filter end is the same color.

But the tobacco end

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

I think, how many did they admit?

599.

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 to think about.

I think they had 600, but some very sharp-eyed tobacco lobbyist was like,

you got arsenic in here twice.

So it says, cut tobacco leaves.

It's held in a porous wrapped paper that is sealed by an adhesive.

And if you'll look closely,

there's printed information on that paper that you're also smoking.

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

And the smoke that comes out, and these are words I did not know, the smoke that comes just from a burning cigarette sitting there is called sidestream smoke.

The stuff that you inhale is called mainstream smoke.

Yeah, the mainstream smoke comes out of the filter in.

You draw through the filter

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.

It's essentially to give smokers the illusion that they're preventing some sort of harm to themselves when they actually aren't.

Another illusion is that these

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

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,

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

Yeah.

Those filters are cellulose acetate.

And there are companies that put charcoal in there, but because charcoal is a great filter generally, naturally, but there aren't any studies that show that charcoal in a filter helps at all as far as like health outcomes or anything like that.

There are two paper wraps on the filter end.

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 and that is also sealed up so that you know you don't want that smoke coming out of the side of the filter right you want it going into your mouth and then that filter is also treated

they changed the pH on that filter to to purposefully turn it brown as you smoke so you look and you see man look at all that brown stuff that's not getting into my lungs it fooled me for 20 years up until a couple of days ago i had no idea that that was was the case.

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

That's nuts.

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

Let's do it.

So

the cigaretto, I think you said it was the early 16th century, so the early 1500s, right after the age of discovery kicked off, right?

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.

Apparently, people didn't think that much of the Cigarillo by then.

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?

Yeah, I mean, it's crazy.

The rise of the cigarette is tied directly to the various wars over the years and the fact that soldiers wanted to smoke.

It was, you know, it helped calm their nerves.

I think it was

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

Don't ever even try it.

But I bet when you're a war, sitting in a foxhole in miserable conditions, I bet that cigarette is one of the few pleasures that comes your way, you know?

Yeah.

I bet that's a great cigarette to smoke.

I would think so, too.

Yeah.

So anyway,

French and British soldiers discovered them in the early 1800s during the Napoleonic Wars.

And this is where the French came up with the word cigarette instead of cigarillo.

And the Crimean War around the middle of the century came along.

A new generation of British and French soldiers

got these cigarettes with that pretty harsh Turkish tobacco.

They said, we love this stuff.

They brought it home.

And there was a tobacconist named Philip Morris that had a shop on Bond Street in 1847 where he was selling cigars and tobacco products.

And he was like, I'm going to start making cigarettes.

So, yeah, okay.

So Philip Morris, the Philip Morris Company, one of the largest producers of cigarettes in the entire world, is directly related to Philip Morris.

It's not just like

a shout-out or something like that?

Oh, I never looked that up, but I just assumed that it was...

eventually became the big company.

I mean, it would make sense because

a lot of these companies did grow out or were consolidated by larger companies, a lot of the original cigarette companies.

So it's entirely possible for sure.

But regardless, he was one of the people who brought it to London and made it kind of like a fancy thing, which is really surprising because, Chuck, in America, it went a totally different way.

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

became associated essentially with juvenile delinquents at first.

It was not a fancy, like a Bond Street type thing to do.

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

Yeah, near-do-wells.

Yes, near-do-wells.

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

They were not mass-produced, obviously.

He had people hand rolling just like they did with cigars.

But they were pretty good.

They would get out, they would pump out like three or four a minute, which is pretty fast.

They were pretty expensive as a result.

And

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

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

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

And the American cigarette, which used

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.

Smooth, mild.

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 Butzheim's.

They have like a big Duke stencil on a

like a smokestack at some place.

Oh, that's funny.

I'm pretty sure.

So

he created W.

Duke Sons and Company in 1883 to start making

cigarettes.

Sorry, 1881.

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.

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, Iran.

And yeah, exactly.

And he said, sure.

And he said, all all right all you cigarette rollers uh you're out of business and they said no you can't hire a machine to do work that humans do and he said watch me and so he put these machines in

all of a sudden they were a lot uh cheaper to to sell uh to make and to sell they were readily available and like you said they were they were smoother and they got uh popular at least with the with the juveniles but that would be the first step toward making them a little more mainstream.

But it is interesting that they were, I think in 1900, 2% of the market was tobacco market with cigarettes.

People were still really into chewing tobacco at the time and dipping snuff.

Yeah, people love that kind of stuff.

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?

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

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

They're like, what are you doing out of the coal mine?

Right, exactly.

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.

Okay, we're going to take a break, everybody.

We just decided.

Not a smoke break, just a break.

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So, just like in Europe, Chuck,

war helped cigarettes just blow up, basically.

And World War I, in particular,

brought cigarettes to America by introducing it to American troops.

And, like you said,

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.

I don't know if you guys have been to a cigar shop lately.

We can't really give all of you cigars all the time.

What about these cigarettes that are being made that are pretty cheap?

And the men in the trenches said, whatever, we just need to smoke something.

So, very quickly, a steady,

never-ending stream of packs of cigarettes started being sent to the boys on the front in Europe.

And also, like

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.

And when they came back, they were like, you guys, you got to try these.

They're amazing.

Yeah.

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

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.

And, buddy, did they explode?

Camel cigarettes in 1913

sold about a million packs of cigarettes, or is that a million cigarettes?

A million packs.

A million packs of cigarettes.

In 1914, they sold 425 million packs.

And by 1919, they sold 21 billion packs of cigarettes.

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.

That's an astounding number.

And I knew it was going to be a lot, but...

That kind of jump, I mean, can you imagine the kind of money they were making?

I know.

And that's just Camel cigarettes.

That's not all cigarettes.

That's just Camel.

Yeah.

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.

And one of the smoke.

Exactly.

One of the upshots of that was that

I guess norms and expectations around women really loosened up.

And one of the things that women did almost immediately was they started smoking.

It became socially acceptable for women to start smoking.

And the tobacco companies clapped their hands together and rubbed them and just started drooling at the jowls.

Oh, yeah.

All of a sudden they were targeting with advertising campaigns about how glamorous it was, how feminine it was, how independent you were if you were a smoker as a woman.

This is also a very fun fact, Philip Morris, the Marlboro cigarette, which I have always associated with like

a dude.

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

And Kramer.

Don't forget Kramer was the Marlboro man for a minute.

That's right, he was.

But the Marlboro cigarette, I had such a hard time saying that.

It's hard to say.

It was launched as a women's cigarette.

It was known as Mild as May.

And I'm not sure when that switched, but that's...

kind of a fun little fact.

I vow to pick up Mild as May is a phrase I'm going to start using.

I like that.

Lucky 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.

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

But

I'd be a liar if I didn't say in an old movie when someone took out one of those little slender cigarette cases and popped out a cigarette from that neat row and tapped it on the outside of that metal case.

I don't know.

It was pretty cool looking to young Chuck.

Yeah, I recently read Rebecca by Daphne DeMaurier.

Have you ever read that?

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.

Have you seen the movie?

Was it about a woman who is basically living in the shadow of her husband's first wife?

Yes.

So

that's the book.

But people...

Great,

undervalued Hitchcock movie, by the way.

It's a great book, too.

But people bust out cigarette cases like every couple paragraphs in there and offer cigarette, and everyone smokes after tea and all this stuff.

So I know exactly what you're talking about.

It just stuck out to me.

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 bizarre to look back like that.

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.

Oh, yeah,

yeah, because you know, they were like, hey, look at me, I'm different.

And, you know, I'm an art major.

So this is what we do.

I'm like frigging Audrey Hepburn here.

The other thing that happened was they started

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

in cars, a little push-button cigarette lighter.

So now they're saying like smoke everywhere.

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?

Yeah, and right out of the gate, movie stars started smoking on screen, men and women, and started getting

deals, started getting sponsorship deals with certain cigarette companies.

Yeah, you could get 150 grand plus a year supply of Lucky 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.

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.

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.

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

Yeah.

And they're like, they sent me a year supply.

So they sent me 1,000 packs of cigarettes.

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.

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

give our ratings to movies that have smoking in them, which I hadn't heard of, but I ran ran across that recently.

Yeah, I heard about that.

Much different back then, obviously.

By the middle of the 20th century,

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.

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.

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

It's crazy when you look back at old like TV show, either, not just episodes, but like Dick Cabot Show and stuff like that.

Just like everybody was smoking all the time.

Yeah, I mean, 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.

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

I think as far back as the 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.

He had observed nasal swellings and excrescences in snuff users.

What even is that?

It's, I think, puffy,

pussy lumps in their noses.

and he's like i think those are probably cancerous and this is back in the 1760s yeah so that's super early on uh in 1900 uh they finally put like tobacco extract they did like official scientific tests they put tobacco extracts um they applied it to guinea pigs of course and they saw cellular activity associated with cancer development

They linked it to cheek cancer as early as 1928.

And then about a decade after that, they said, you know what, if you smoke, you're not going to live as long.

No.

And then I think by 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.

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

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

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

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

And again, you know,

it helps a little bit.

It's not like the filter is completely useless.

But it's not filtering out.

It was largely a ruse to say, hey, they're saying smoking is bad for you.

So now we've added a thing to make it safe.

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

And they were just like, well, we failed at this, but now we've basically fooled people into thinking the filters are actually doing something.

We have to keep filters on forever.

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

It can catch some particulate matter, but it's doing nothing to the gases in the smoke.

They're just coming through fully toxic.

But again, smokers are like, okay, great.

We've got that licked.

We have filters now.

Let's all go back to smoking as much as we want.

Yeah, I think

by year

1965, 42%

of American adults smoked.

In 1980, it went down to 33.

By 95, it was down to 25.

2010, 19%.

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

But that's nuts.

Like 40, like close to half of American adults in the 60s were smoking.

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

That seems low to me.

Yeah, it looks like 100%.

Yeah,

it really does for sure.

But yeah.

I wonder who didn't smoke.

Like half the people probably just were like,

I mean, I'm sure some people were like, this seems really unhealthy.

But some people, you know, they make your fingers smell nasty.

They make your breath gross.

That probably had a lot to do with it.

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?

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.

And so they had to invest a lot of money into making sure like the draw draw was correct and that you weren't, you know, what they didn't want was for you to lose any of that habit forming nicotine.

So they put a lot of dough into,

I guess, like you said, probably earnestly trying to reduce some toxins, but also make sure that experience stayed the same to keep people smoking cigarettes.

Yeah, and they spent billions of dollars figuring this out because if you're a smoker and you have to, like if you have a crushed filter, it makes it hard to draw through.

And it's essentially a ruined cigarette cigarette because

you don't want to have to have to exert any kind of effort in smoking.

And if you do, it's just not worth it.

So they could not mess with the smoking experience.

They had to make it as good or better

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

What they essentially came up with was to use more porous paper, then actually poke like little tiny holes in the seam where the tobacco comes up against the filter, which is sealed, as you talked about by that tipping paper.

But they poked little holes in that end of the tipping paper so that more outside air could be sucked in and mixed with the smoke.

So it was a milder smoke.

And from what I can tell, light cigarettes, that's it.

They have more tiny holes than a non-light, a regular cigarette.

That's the only difference.

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

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

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

Wow.

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Should we take another break?

Yes.

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

So there are different sizes of cigarettes.

If you've ever been a smoker or worked in a convenience store or something like I did at the Golden Pantry in Athens, Georgia, you learn a lot about cigarettes and what kind of people smoke what kind of cigarettes.

It's pretty interesting, actually.

Yeah.

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

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

What was the cheapest brand?

I totally remember the ones that we had.

I don't remember what they were back then.

The cheapest cigarettes, and these are the people, this is the stuff I always felt the worst about, was when people were like, I can only afford to buy the bare bones swept off-the-floor tobacco cigarette brand.

That was just more depressing to me even.

And in our store, they were bucks.

I don't remember those at all.

Had a big antler deer on the front of it, and bucks were really cheap compared to the other ones.

So I can't imagine what was in those.

That sounds very scary.

But there are different links, different kinds of filters.

I remember the parliaments had the recess filter occasionally when I had cigarettes here and there.

In New Jersey, that's a lot of people smoke parliaments.

You can have those long 120s.

They're called extra longs.

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

Oh, I forgot about those.

Remember those plugs?

Yep.

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.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I remember my friend Justin's mother smoked those and I never saw anyone that wasn't a mom smoke those.

Yeah, I took a lot of crap back in the day because I would smoke those.

I smoked Virginia Slims for a while.

That's really funny.

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

That's probably what first caught my attention.

You always have marched to the beauty of your own drum.

So I could see Josh Clark doing that just to be different.

Yeah.

Yeah, you were good, though.

I liked him.

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, sure, ever would have smoked.

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.

Yeah, totally.

I was the dreaded social smoker who all my smoker friends hated because I could always take it or leave it.

And

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

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

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

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

I was the guy who would smoke with the flu.

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.

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

So, where are we, Chuck?

Oh, we were talking about some innovations at the time, I guess.

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,

was what's called

puffed or expanded tobacco.

And that's when they soak tobacco leaves in ammonia and Freon to make them puff out and increase their volume.

They swell up some and then they freeze dry that and they do that to then get more cigarettes out of less of a tobacco purchase or harvest.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, for sure.

Also, we should mention while we were kind of talking about what kinds of people smoke what cigarettes.

And if you work at a convenience store, you kind of see repeated patterns.

It's clear, if you've ever sold cigarettes, that African Americans tend to prefer menthol cigarettes.

I think more than 85% of black smokers smoke menthols.

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

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

Yeah, because about the same time as the civil rights movement was just barely starting and the black press became an actual viable outlet for national brands to advertise in all of a sudden,

menthol cigarettes became a thing.

Salem, Newport, Cool, Alpine all came out within a year or two of each other.

Alpine's not around anymore.

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

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

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

And he kicked out an estimate that about a third of the ads in some issues of ebony and jet magazines,

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

Yeah, I mean, that's...

That's crazy, a third.

And then in 1990, some people say like peak targeted advertising and branding came when R.J.

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

They did a bunch of market research and RJR was like, hey, you know what they'll really like is this classy black and gold package and the name Uptown cigarettes.

They were the only cigarettes with

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

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

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.

Yes.

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

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

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.

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.

Hurrah for them.

But the upshot of this is that, like you said, 85% of black smokers smoke menthols.

And

because of the apparent feeling of menthols, it feels nothing like you're killing yourself.

In fact, it almost feels refreshing in some cases.

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

like

mainstream press,

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pretty despicable stuff.

So you're probably wondering, like, hey, if smoking is so terrible,

surely it started to wane.

And I gave you some stats earlier, and it has.

And that's because

in the 1960s, we started slowrolling a little bit more warnings, Surgeon General warnings.

In 64, the Surgeon General released Smoking and Health.

This is a report that basically said it's the single largest contributor to lung cancer in men.

It's linked to premature birth.

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

In 1965, 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.

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.

In 1972, they said, Involuntary smoking, which is secondhand smoke, it's also really bad for you.

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.

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.

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

Oh, interesting.

I mean, I remember my parents never smoked or anything, but I remember having friends whose parents smoked in the the car with the windows rolled up.

Yeah, that's nuts.

I lived in college with a guy who did that.

I was just,

even as a smoker, I was like, this is wrong.

There's something really wrong with this.

Oh, God, in the car.

Like, good luck selling that.

But yeah, also your kids in the back seat.

Like, that was definitely a thing.

Yeah.

I mean, well, the other thing we should mention that I never really thought about until this is that smoke is even going through a filter.

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

Yeah, and even your exhaled smoke contains a lot of toxins that are just getting right back out that are part of secondhand smoke, too.

So, yes,

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.

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

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.

That just seems bizarre to me now, too, that especially that it was that recent.

But finally, America came around and was like, you can't smoke indoors anymore in public places.

And another thing simultaneously was people started banning smoking in their own homes.

That was simultaneous to government-mandated smoking bans in public places.

People were making that choice as well.

So smokers were getting pushed further and further out of the mainstream, essentially.

Yeah, like literally outside.

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

The idea of somebody walking into my house and lighting up a cigarette is so bizarre sounding.

Like it seems like a hundred years ago that people were doing that, but we lived through it.

Like I remember all that.

Yeah.

Oh, for sure.

I had a house that we smoked in, and it was

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

Yeah, because now if somebody did that, it's it's like a hostile act.

Like they're slapping you in the face.

Like they mean to be starting something, as Michael Jackson said.

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

Yeah.

What are you going to do about it?

I'm going to smoke next to your cat.

Poor cat.

Although I'll bet cats smoke if they could.

No, that's true.

You're probably right.

The other thing that came in the early 90s when everyone said, or when all the health experts said, hey, you know, you need to quit smoking if you want to live,

is all of a sudden there were nicotine patches and nicorette gum and stuff like that, all kinds of quitting AIDS that hit the market

that were also big money.

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

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

that just

crippled the

tobacco industry and really helped lead to its downfall

because they had to keep handing over all these documents they had that were so damning.

And then the press would just run story after story about this stuff.

And it really turned a lot of people off on tobacco.

But I remember when vaping started to be a thing and I was like, no, how did this happen?

Like we, we like the anti-tobacco forces won.

They won.

They beat big tobacco.

One of the most powerful groups in the world got beaten by the people who were like, no, we shouldn't be smoking.

And then vaping came along.

So Julia turned up this statistic that I found very heartening.

She said that in 2019, 28%

of high school students in the U.S.

vaped cigarettes, essentially.

Three years later, it was 10%.

So it was

cut by two-thirds.

So I attribute that almost exclusively to our vaping app where we really came out against it.

Either way, whether that had anything to do with it or not, I was really happy to see that.

I think Gen Z has been known so far for avoiding some of the trappings of these vices of previous generations.

I've read that they're smoking less and they're drinking less, and that's great.

They seem to be a little smarter.

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

when I was talking about

percentage of smokers in 1965, 42% smoked.

In 1980, it was 33%.

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

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

That dropped to 33% of the population smoking, but they sold 637 billion.

So fewer people seemingly smoking more cigarettes.

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.

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.

Thanks.

I mean, they're not hurting.

2023, Philip Morris raked in $35, almost $36 billion.

So they're doing okay.

And people in different countries is different.

I think Americans smoke less.

I mean, when I've traveled through Europe, a lot of people smoke.

I know in

Asian countries, there's a lot of smoking.

Yeah, it's everywhere.

Yeah.

Right after I quit, we went to Japan and it was they smoked.

They smoked during a funeral.

Yeah.

And I was sitting there like, I want one of those so bad.

Yeah.

When we were in Vegas

collecting our Lifetime Achievement Award a couple of years ago.

Yes.

I went to a dinner at a really nice Chinese restaurant in one of the casinos.

Unfortunately, it was a smoking casino.

And, you know, the restaurants aren't like walled off.

It's just kind of part of the casino.

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

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

Yeah, that sucks.

It definitely can.

It can.

Just one person smoking can ruin a meal.

I can't imagine 13.

Yeah, but oh boy, they were loving them.

They were pretty happy smoking those cigarettes.

You got anything else?

I got nothing else.

All right.

Well, that's it for cigarettes, everybody.

Thanks for listening.

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

Correction

for Josh during our

Listener Mail a couple of...

This isn't a big one.

Hey guys, long time listener, first time writer.

referenced to the listener mail in the USAID episode.

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

Yeah, I remember now.

Given the similarity 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.

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.

Very nice, Devin.

Thank you for that.

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

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

Yeah, but thank you for being gentle.

I appreciate it and not calling me a dipstick or anything.

No, that's not dipstick worthy.

Who was it again?

I know I just said their name.

That's Devin.

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.

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