Many businesses will gleefully sell you a harmful addiction.
The tobacco industry was supposedly subdued decades ago by a historic legal beat-down, yet somehow spends $22 million every day promoting its wares. That’s nearly a million dollars an hour. Websites for kids sport vaping ads. “Cigfluencers” work the podcasts. And movies are smoke-choked like never before.
There was a time when a cigarette company could pay a mere $43,000 for Superman to be thrown into a Marlboro truck by the evil General Zod in front of Marlboro-smoker Lois Lane. (She had never smoked in the comic books, by the way.)
These days, modern Hollywood supposedly disdains tobacco cash. Yet somehow the movies remain one long, glamorous advertisement for cigarettes. Of this year’s ten Oscar Best Picture nominees, nine featured seductive and edgy smoking. (Only “Barbie” did not.)
The marketeers assure us we’ll be inhaling happiness and hipness. Maybe so, but there are also those hot, lung-damaging fumes — a reality that eventually catches up and kills about half a million of us every year.
(Brief digression: COVID-19 had a U.S. death toll of about 1.2 million over three tough years. Many COVID-19 victims were also smokers, so it’s hard to compare the pandemic and smoking death tolls. That said, we can certainly compare the public health responses. When COVID-19 arrived, we shut down the entire planet, and the virus would go on to kill an average of 400,000 Americans a year for three years. Smoking has been here all along — glamorized, marketed to kids — cheerfully killing 500,000 Americans a year, every year, forever.)
Hellbound and Down 