July 29, 2025 • 48 mins
This is not about smoking or lawsuits or lung cancer. This is about the cigarette itself, a truly unique and destructive invention.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just smoking smoking,
feel all right? Just keep on choking.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
And this is Segnestion, uh Boston. Yeah, okay, yep, that's right.
I was in my head, I was getting there. I
thought you were going to go with smoking in the
boys room.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
No. I always thought that was just kind of a lame.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Yeah, that was a remake. You know, Motley Crue covered it.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
I don't remember who did the original, do you?
Speaker 1 (00:43):
No, I don't remember.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
You don't need to email in and tell us. That's
all right. If we're curious enough, we'll go.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Look it up where you can feel free. Okay, who Okay,
tell someone not to email now.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
I do want to know. I'm gonna look while you talk.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Well, I think you should wait for the email. Maybe
the writer of that song.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Is listening Brownsville Station.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Okay, there you go.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
I never in a million years would it come with that,
because I've never heard those two words together as a
band name.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Oh well, you've never taken the train there? Then?
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Have you ever heard of Brownsfield Station.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Just when I took a train to Brownsfield Station.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
That's gross, I think, I know what you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Oh God, all right, let's get off this and get
on something even grosser, which is cigarettes.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
And this was from our pal Julia, and I just
sort of I commissioned this one because I was like,
you know what, let's just do one on the cigarette itself,
not like smoking, and not the lawsuits and all that
stuff or lung cancer, but just on the thing, the object.
And Julia sen us an article called the Cigarette Itself,
appropriately titled. And I learned a lot in this one,
(01:52):
chiefly that the cigarette was born in Spain in the
early sixteenth sixteenth century when cigar smokers. Cigars were around,
and it was sort of a luxury item for the
wealthy at the time because they were you know, hand
rolled and imported from Mexico and South America. But when
they would you know, stub out that last you know,
half inch of a cigar or whatever, people that didn't
(02:15):
have as much money would come along grab that thing
and take out the tobacco, you know, grind it up
and pick it apart a little bit and wrap it
in paper and smoke it, and that was a little
cigar or a cigaretllo.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
H isn't that amazing?
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Yeah? I mean I never thought about the word cigarette
being a play on cigar. Oh really like a tiny cigar, like,
because I always started cigarello. But like a kitchenette, a
cigarette is just like the same sort of version of that.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Eight.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
So they're about eighty four millimeters long a standard cigarette,
and for a reference, that's about the length of a cigarette.
They're sold in packs of twenty. And if you really
want to get technical about a cigarette, next time you're
at a party and you're bumming one from somebody or
castigating somebody for smoking, even better, you can say that
(03:22):
a cigarette is also technically known as a heated tobacco product.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
That's right. As we'll see a Camel's first started putting
them in packs of twenty, and I could not find
out if I think they did that to match the
number of matches in a matchbook. Which is twenty. Oh really,
I'm pretty sure that's the story.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
I wish somebody would have told the hot dog makers that,
because you know, you got the bug eight or a
pack of eight hot dogs and buns of six. I
can never keep up these days with witches.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Well yeah, that just still doesn't make any sense at all.
But yeah, I'm pretty sure that they put it in
a pack up twenty eventually to match the matches in
a matchbook. But that may also be apocryphal.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Who knows, it's a good one.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
What cigarettes are for is to deliver nicotine to your body,
which is a feel good chemical that is naturally occurring
in tobacco. And the whole point is to with a pipe,
cigar or cigarette or anything like that an esig is
to get you that nicotine, to get you addicted to it,
to eventually kill you from it.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
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
(04:48):
we live in the age of mass produced cigarettes, and
these things are exquisitely engineered products that so much time
and money and effort has gone into, and so much
research that most of what we know about cigarettes, what
cigarettes due to the human body, how addictive they are,
comes from the research the tobacco companies did over the
(05:12):
decades that they kept that eventually had to be handed
over to the state attorneys general who sued them back
in the nineties.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Yeah, it's crazy how it all panned out. If you're
looking at you know, and Julia kind of breaks it
down with the white end and the brown end, but
there are plenty of cigarettes that are white through and through,
meaning the filter end is the same color, but the
tobacco end is a filler of cut tobacco leaves. And
then plenty of additives. I think how many did they admit?
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Five hundred and ninety nine.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Yeah, they wanted to get to six hundred so bad.
But they finally in nineteen ninety four released their additives
and it was a list five ninety long, which is
crazy to think about it.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
I think they had six hundred, but some very sharp
eyed tobacco lobbyists like, uh, you got arsenic in here twice, so.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
It says cut tobacco leaves. It's held in a porous
wrapped paper that is sealed by an adhesive. And if
you'll look closely, there is a printed there's printed information
on that paper that you're also smoking and you're gonna
be burning when you're smoking that tobacco, that paper, those additives,
that ink, that adhesive and everything, and the smoke that
(06:26):
comes out and these are words I did not know.
The smoke that comes just from a burning cigarette sitting
there is called side stream smoke. The stuff that you
inhale is called mainstream smoke.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Yeah, the mainstream smoke comes out of the filter. You
draw through the filter, and the smoke that comes out
that's the mainstream smoke. The filters we'll see it does
something a little bit here there, but not really. It's
essentially to give smokers the illusion that they're preventing some
sort of harm to themselves when they actually aren't. Another
(06:59):
illusion is that these cigarette butts, which are the most
littered item in the entire world. I saw as something
like four point one trillion cigarette butts are littered, not
thrown away, littered every year around the world. And a
common misconception amongst smokers, is that they're biodegradable. They're not.
(07:20):
They're photodegradable, not biodegradable, which is a real problem because
they kind of well, they litter all over the place
and their type of plastic.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Yeah, those filters are cellulose acetate, and there are companies
that put charcoal in there, but because charcoal is a
great filter generally naturally, but there aren't any studies that
show that charcoal in a filter helps it all. Yeah,
as far as health outcomes or anything like that. There
are two paper wraps on the filter in there's a
plug rap around the actual filter, and then there is
(07:53):
if it's a brown filter, there's the brown it's called
tipping paper around the plug rap, and that is also
sealed up so that you know, you don't want that
smoke coming out of the side of the filter, right,
you want it going into your mouth. And then that
filter is also treated. They changed the pH on that
filter to purposefully turn it brown as you smoke, so
(08:15):
you look and you see, man, look at all that
brown stuff that's not getting into my lungs.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
It fooled me for twenty years up until a couple
of days ago. I had no idea that that was
the case.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Yeah, just one of the dirty tricks that cigarette manufacturers
used and still used.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
It's you know, nuts. So let's go back to the cigarillo,
shall we.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Let's do it.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
So the cigarello, I think you said it was the
early sixteenth century, so the early fifteen hundreds, right after
the Age of Discovery kicked off, right, And it took
all the way to the late seventeen hundreds before it
really started to spread outward into Italy and Portugal, which
are not that far away. So apparently people didn't think
that much of the cigarello by then. But as Europe
(09:00):
started to go to war with itself, the cigarillo kind
of hitchhiked to the fronts and it was like, hey,
what do you guys think about me? Pretty great?
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Huh yeah, I mean it's crazy. The rise of the
cigarette is tied directly to the various wars over the
years and the fact that soldiers wanted to smoke. It was,
you know, helped calm their nerves. I think it was
as was a comfort piece when you're I bet a
cigarette and kids don't ever try it, don't ever even
try it. But I bet when you're a war sitting
(09:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
I would think so too. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
So anyway, French and British soldiers discovered them in the
early eighteen hundreds during the Napoleonic Wars, and this is
where the French came up with the word cigarette instead
of cigarillo. And the Crimean War around the this century
came along a new generation of British and French soldiers
(10:05):
this you got these cigarettes with that pretty harsh Turkish tobacco.
They said, we love this stuff. They brought it home
and there was a tobacconist named Philip Morris that had
a shop on Bond Street in eighteen forty seven where
he was selling cigars and tobacco products, and he was like,
I'm going to start making cigarettes.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
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 like a shout out or something like that.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Oh I never looked that up, but I just assumed
that it was eventually became the big company.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
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
(11:09):
in America it went a totally different way when it
really became a thing in the United States. As we'll see,
it became associated essentially with juvenile delinquents. At first, it
was not a fanancy like a Bond Street type thing
to do. It was kids playing craps rather than going
to school. Were smoking cigarettes too, yeah, ne'er do wells, Yes,
(11:33):
ne'er do wells.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
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,
(11:59):
you know, way more wide had spread. One was the
invention of a rolling machine, like a machine that could
pump out, you know, eventually like two hundred and fifty
thousand a day for a company, and the American cigarette,
which used a combination sometimes of Turkish tobacco or sometimes
just straight up American tobacco that was a lot less
(12:19):
harsh and more palatable for I guess American appetite.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Smooth, mild. So yeah, there's a guy named James Duke
who was a Durham, North Carolina tobacco air and I
think I remember correctly when we went to Durham for
our show recently. I think both times they have like
a big Duke stencil on a like a smokestack at
some place.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Oh that's funny, I'm pretty sure. So on smokestack.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
He created W. Duke, Sons and Company in eighteen eighty
three to start making cigarette sorry eighteen eighty one. By
eighteen eighty three he was making two hundred and fifty
thousand a day thanks to the invention of James Bonsac,
who created that cigarette rolling machine that you mentioned earlier
(13:08):
that could roll two hundred cigarettes per minute.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Yeah, that's quite an increase from three or four over
there on Bond Street. So Duke said, hey, give me
a deal. I'll buy a few of those things if
you give me a good price on him and yeah, exactly,
and he said sure. And he said, all right, I'll
use cigarette rollers. You're out of business. And they said no,
you can't hire a machine to do work that humans do.
And he said, watch me, And so he put these
(13:34):
machines in. All of a sudden, they were a lot
cheaper to sell, to make, and to sell. They were
readily available, and like you said, they were smoother, and
they got popular at least with the juveniles. But that
would be the first step toward making them a little
more mainstream. But it is interesting that they were I
think in nineteen hundred and two percent of the market
(13:56):
was tobacco market with cigarettes. People were still really into
your tobacco at the time and dipping snuff.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Yeah, people love that kind of stuff. So by the
eighteen nineties, though, this was enough of the thing that
kids were smoking cigarettes that as early as the eighteen
nineties states started to pass bands on selling cigarettes to minors.
Isn't that interesting?
Speaker 1 (14:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
They're like, what are you doing out of the coal
mine right exactly? Uh, do you want to keep going
and talk about where the cigarette really broke out in America?
Or do you want to take a break first.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
I think it's break time, buddies.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Okay, we're going to take a break, everybody. We just
decided not a smoke break, just a break. So, just
(15:07):
like in Europe, Chuck War helped cigarettes just blow up.
Basically in World War One in particular, brought cigarettes to
America by introducing it to American troops. And, like you said,
the men fighting World War One and the trenches were like,
we need something. Somebody give us something to smoke. And
(15:28):
the US government was like, that's fine, but cigars are
kind of pricey, and I don't know if you guys
have been to a cigar shop lately. We can't really
give all of you cigars all the time. What about
these cigarettes that are being made that are pretty cheap.
And the men in the trenches said, whatever, we just
need to smoke something, so very quickly, a steady, never
(15:50):
ending stream of packs of cigarettes started being sent to
the boys on the front in Europe and also like business, individual, citizens,
the government, they were all paying for it. And they
just smoked, smoke, smoked out of the trenches in World
War One, and when they came back they were like, you, guys,
you gotta try these. They're amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
I mean it was kind of perfect for a foxhole
because it was much quicker than a cigar, Like, you know,
you can smoke a cigar for an hour, and you
didn't have that kind of time if you just wanted
a quick nicotine fix. The cigarette was kind of perfect
for wartime. And buddy, did they explode. Camel cigarettes in
(16:34):
nineteen thirteen sold about a million packs of cigarettes or
is that a million cigarettes?
Speaker 2 (16:39):
A million packs?
Speaker 1 (16:41):
A million packs of cigarettes. In nineteen fourteen they sold
four hundred and twenty five million packs, and by nineteen
nineteen they sold twenty one billion packs of cigarettes.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Yeah, which not coincidentally was after World War One ended
and all of those men fighting in World War One
came back with pretty healthy little cigarette habits. By then.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
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 2 (17:11):
I know, And that's just Cammebell cigarettes. That's not all cigarettes,
that's just one caramel. Yeah. Another thing World War One
did was kind of change the United States's view on
life and was like, Okay, a lot of people just died,
and maybe we should start thinking of life as a
little more valuable and precious and relax a little bit
and enjoy ourselves. And one of the exactly right one
(17:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
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 2 (18:03):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
This is also a very fun fact. Philip Morris. The
Marlboro cigarette, which I have always associated with.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Like Cowboy killed dude.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Don't forget Kramer was the Marlborough Man for a minute.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
That's right, he was. But the Marlboro cigarette had such
hard type of thing hard to say. It was launched
as a women's cigarette. It was known as mild As
May and I'm not sure when that switch, but that's
kind of a fun little fact.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
I vow to pick up mild as May is a
phrase I'm going to start rising.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
I like that.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
A lucky Strike was also like, hey, rather than reaching
for a suite, which will eventually disappoint your husband, reach
for a lucky strike instead. Just smoke anytime you have
a chocolate craving.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Uh yeah, and all those accessories that Hey, listen again,
kids don't smoke. But I'd be a liar if I
didn't say. In an old movie, when someone took out
one of those little slender cigarette cases and popped out
a cigarette from that neat row and tapped it on
the outside of that metal case, I don't know. That
(19:20):
was pretty cool. Looking to young Chuck.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Yeah, I recently read Rebecca by Daphne de Maurier. Have
you ever read that?
Speaker 1 (19:27):
No, is it the Rebecca Hitchcock movie Rebecca?
Speaker 2 (19:30):
I think Hitchcock may have made it. Yeah, and that
tracks because I think it was written in the early thirties.
Have you seen the movie? Was it about a woman
who is basically living in the shadow of her husband's
first wife. Yeah, so that's the book.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
But people great undervalued Hitchcock movie.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
By the way, it's a great book too, But people
bust out cigarette cases like every couple paragraphs in there
and offer cigarette and everyone smokes after tea and all
this stuff, so I you know exactly what you're talking about.
It just suck out to me. I think I guess
as a twenty first century person knowing what smoking does,
looking at people who were living at a time when
(20:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
Yeah, I mean I remember in college in Athens, it
was always one like classy co ed who like carried
her cigarettes in a case and maybe even had one
of those little cigarette holder extenders or whatever. Oh, yeah, yeah,
because you know, they were like, hey, look at me,
I'm different, and you know I'm an art major. So
this is what we did.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
I'm like friggin' Audrey Hepburn here.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
The other thing that happened was they started putting cigarette
lighters in cars in I think nineteen twenty five nineteen
twenty six is when they became standard and cars a
little push button cigarette lighter. So now they're saying, like,
smoke everywhere.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Yeah, and it just so happens. Nineteen twenty five nineteen
twenty six is when the first cars came up basically,
so right out of the gate they had cigarette lighters.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Yeah, you could get one hundred and fifty grand plus
a year's supply of Lucky Strikes if you're smoking was
sponsored by a Lucky Strike, which I think Joan Crawford, Spencer, Tracy,
Gary Cooper, they all had those deals with Lucky Strikes.
So they would out in public be smoking Lucky Strikes,
but during the reviews they'd also stop and be like, wow,
this Lucky Strike is so mild, smooth or whatever, like
(21:37):
they would talk about it like as if it were
you know how people try to place ads or they
used to, I don't know if they still do in
podcasts where suddenly we'd just be talking about a product
and it'd take you a second, yeah, to catch up.
That's what they used to do with Lucky Strikes.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
Yeah, and they're like, they send me a year supply,
So they sent me one thousand packs of cigarettes.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Exactly. It's nuts. So there's just tons of stars smoking.
They were literally really sponsored by tobacco companies, and even
if you weren't, you could still be pitching them in
regular ads. And there's a push today to I think,
retroactively and moving forward, give our ratings to movies that
have smoking in them, which I hadn't heard of, but
(22:17):
I ran across that recently.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Yeah, I heard about that much different back then. Obviously,
by the middle of the twentieth century, cigarettes had eighty
one percent of the tobacco market, so people really ditched
the jaw and the snuff for cigarettes generally speaking, and people,
you know, pregnant women were smoking. You smoke in the
movie theater, smoking planes on buses in the office. Your
(22:41):
doctor would smoke in front of you during an appointment.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
People reading the news on TV would be smoking while
they were giving you the news.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
It's crazy when you look back at old TV show
either not just episodes, but like Dick Cabot Show and
stuff like that, just like everybody was smoking all the time.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
Yeah, I mean they were ads that were doctors recommending
a certain kind of cigarette because they were smoother, they
made you cough less or something like that. Is just
absolutely crazy. But eventually people started getting hip to the
idea that these things might kind of be bad for us.
I think as far back as the seventeen sixties there
(23:19):
was a doctor named John Hill who wrote Cautions against
the Immoderate Use of Snuff because he'd noticed that people
who were using snuff tobacco, which is exactly what it
sounds like, powdered tobacco you sniff like it's a bump
of cocaine, that they were He had observed navel nasal
swellings and excreacences in snuff users and he's like, even
(23:41):
is that it's I think puffy pussy looks in their noses.
And he's like, I think those are probably cancerous. And
this is back in the seventeen sixties.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Yeah, so that's super early on. In nineteen hundred, they
finally put like tobacco extract They did like official scientific tests.
They put tobacco extracts. They applied it to guinea pigs,
of course, and they saw cellular activity associated with cancer development.
They linked it to cheek cancer as early as nineteen
(24:14):
twenty eight, and then about a decade after that they said,
you know what, if you smoke, you're not going to
live as long.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
No, And then I think by nineteen fifty they started
having enough studies that they could do meta analysis essentially
and say, if you smoke, you have a higher chance
of getting lung cancer than somebody who doesn't smoke. Four
years after that, the British Medical Journal published a study
that said that cigarettes were killing doctors in significant numbers too,
(24:44):
and the fact that doctors are now dying from smoking
cigarettes that kind of got people's attention.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
Yeah, and these were all unfiltered basically up until nineteen fifty.
In nineteen fifty, the Winston cigarette was the first one
to come out as a mass marketed filtered cigarette. And again,
you know, it helps a little bit. It's not like
the filter is completely useless, but it's not filtering out.
It was largely a ruse to say, hey, they're saying
(25:13):
smoking is bad for you, so now we've added a
thing to make it safe.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Yeah. I read that Initially it was an earnest attempt
to create a healthier, less deadly cigarette. And see they
were just like, well, we failed at this, but now
we've basically fooled people into thinking the filters are actually
doing something. We have to keep filters on forever. And yeah,
it very quickly just became a device rather than something
(25:40):
that actually worked. It can catch some particulate matter, but
it's doing nothing to the gases in the smoke. They're
just coming through fully toxic. But again, smokers were like, okay, great,
we've got that licked. We have filters. Now let's all
go back to smoking as much as we want. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
I think by year in nineteen sixty five, forty two
percent of American adults smoked. In nineteen eighty, it went
down to thirty three. By ninety five it was down
to twenty five twenty ten, nineteen percent, and just a
couple of years ago, in twenty twenty three, eleven percent.
But that's that's nuts. Like forty close to half of
(26:21):
American adults in the sixties were smoking.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Well, it's funny. It's based on old movies and TVs
and books and stuff like that, or TV shows and books.
That seems low to me.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Yeah, it looks like one hundred percent.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Yeah, it really does for sure.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
I would guess so too. And then also, I mean,
if back in the twenties they were like, you can
get my mouth and cheek cancer from it, it's probably
trickled out to some people more than others, you.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Know, for sure. So they add the filter. But a
lot of R and D and money was spent because
all of a sudden, you're adding this barrier between the
smoker and the smoke, and so they had to invest
a lot of money into making sure like the draw
was correct and that you weren't you know, what they
didn't want was for you to lose any of that
(27:23):
habit forming nicotine. So they put a lot of dough
into I guess, like you said, probably earnestly trying to
reduce some toxins but also make sure that experience stayed
the same to keep people smoking cigarette.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
Yeah, and they spent billions of dollars figuring this out,
because if you're a smoker and you have to, like
if you have a crushed filter, it makes it hard
to draw through, and it's essentially a ruined cigarette because
you don't, like, you don't want to have to have
to exert any kind of effort in smoking, and if
you do, it's just it's not worth it. So they
(27:57):
could not mess with the smoking experience to make it
as good or better while also preserving all the best
parts of an unfiltered cigarette. What they essentially came up
with was to use more porous paper then actually poke
like little tiny holes in the seam where the tobacco
comes up against the filter, which is sealed, as you
(28:19):
talked about, by that tipping paper. But they poked little
holes in that end of the tipping paper so that
more outside air could be sucked in and mixed with
the smoke. So it was a milder smoke. And from
what I can tell, light cigarettes that's it. They have
more tiny holes than non light irregular cigarette. That's the
(28:41):
only difference.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Yeah, it's not like lighter chemical additives or lesser chemical
additives and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
But the big tobacco companies are very happy for you
to walk around thinking that that's what it means. But
all it means is it just hits you lighter because
it has more little micro holes in that tipping at
the end.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Should we take another break? Yes, all right, we'll be
right back right after this. So there are different, you know,
(29:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Yeah. I worked at a last chance gas station and
liquor store and we sold cigarettes for a dollar twenty
five a pack, which is far and away the cheapest
cigarettes and all of Athens. So we had a lot
of people come in there too.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
What was the cheapest brand? Totally? Remember the ones that
we had.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
I don't remember what they were back then.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
The cheapest cigarettes, and these are the people. This is
the stuff I always felt the worst about was when
people were like, I can only afford to buy the
bare bones swept off the floor tobacco cigarette brand. That
was just more depressing to me, even in our store.
They were Bucks.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
I don't remember those at all.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
Had a big antler deer on the front of it,
and Bucks were really cheap compared to the other one.
So I can't imagine what was in those.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
That sounds very scary.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
But there are different links, different kinds of filters. I
remember the parliaments had the recess s filter occasionally when
I had cigarettes here and there in New Jersey. That's
a lot of people smoke parliaments. You can have those
long one twenties they're called extra longs and different diameters,
including something I tried in college occasionally. It was the
old camel wide.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Oh, I forgot about those.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
Remember those plugs?
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Yep? I went the opposite direction. I smoked Capri Ultra
slim one twenties for a little while. Are you serious?
They were essentially as big around as like a popsicle
or a sucker stick.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Yeah, Oh yeah. I remember my friend Justin's mother smoked those,
and I had never saw anyone that wasn't a mom
smoke use.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
Yeah, I took a lot of crap back in the
day because I would smoke those. I smoked Virginia Slims
for a while.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
That's really funny.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
I don't remember how either of those came to be
my brand, but I would guess that I started smoking
Capris because I like the watercolor design on the box.
That's probably what I first caught my attention.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
You always marched, have marched to the beat of your
own drum, so I could see Ess Clark doing that
just to be different.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Yeah, yeah, we're good though. I liked them. I wait,
let me rephrace that. Kids. Kids, please don't listen to
any kind of nostalgic tone in anything I'm saying, because
if I could go back and do it again, I never, ever,
sure ever was smoked. Quitting smoking was the single hardest
thing I've ever done in my entire life far. It
(32:01):
is definitely not worth it.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Yeah, totally. I was the dreaded social smoker who all
my smoker friends hated because I could always take it
or leave it. Oh yeah, it never got it, It
never got its hooks to me. As as far as
an addiction.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
I just that just did not compute with me. But
I was always in awe of people like you.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Yeah. I was the one who would bum the cigarettes
off my smoker friends, and they're always nice about it.
I was not the guy at the party who let
the filter it in because I had too much to drink.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
I was the guy who would smoke with the flu.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
Or the guy that if you if the cigarette broke
the tobacco and broke a little bit, you would hold
your finger around that part just so you can still
not waste that, sire. But again, we're not waxing nostalgic everybody.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
So where are we, Chuck? Oh, we were talking about
some innovations at the time.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
I guess, uh, yeah, I mean one innovation, and by
innovation we means terrible things cigarette companies did to make
them worse and more addictive. Basically, so like innovation for
them was what's called puffed or expanded tobacco. And that's
when they soak tobacco leaves in ammonia and free on
(33:14):
to make them puff out and increase their volume. They
swell up some and then they freeze dry that and
they do that so then get more cigarettes out of
less of a tobacco purchase or hardvest.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Yeah, it's just a space filler. And yeah, from what
I saw free on, they only use that only for
about thirty years. That just continue a couple decades ago.
But ammonia is still very very much an ingredient in cigarettes.
One of the big things ammonia does is it allows
you to absorb free based nicotine more easily, so you
(33:45):
get more nicotine out of each puff of cigarette, which
a lot of observers point to is clear evidence that
tobacco companies went out of their way to make their
products more addictive.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Yeah, for sure. Also we should mention while we were
kind of talking about what kinds of people smoke what cigarettes,
and if you work at a convenience story, you kind
of see repeated patterns. It's clear if you've ever sold
cigarettes that African Americans tend to prefer menthol cigarettes. I
think more than eighty five percent of black smokers smoke menthols.
(34:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
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
(34:54):
essentially I guess, targeted happenstance, the tobacco companies started heavily
advertising ment in the black press, and so that eventually
came to be the favorite kind of cigarette among black
people in America. And I read an article by a
guy named Alan Blum, who is the director of the
Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society, and he
(35:15):
kicked out an estimate that about a third of the
ads in some issues of Ebony and Jet magazines, black
oriented national magazines in the US were for tobacco products,
mostly cigarettes, mostly menthol cigarettes.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
Yeah, I mean, that's that's crazy. A third. And then
in nineteen ninety, some people say, like peak targeted advertising
and branding came when R. J. Reynolds was going to
release their Uptown menthol cigarette, the first cigarette made like
specifically targeted toward Black Americans. They did a bunch of
(35:52):
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
(36:13):
the bottom so they could grab the tobacco in to
avoid crushing that filter and order to keep their fingers
for being on it because that's the part that went
into their mouth. So they literally flipped how they packaged
cigarettes to appeal to black customers.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
Yes, and this did not land well with people in
the United States. There happened to be a black Health
and Human Services Secretary at the time named Lewis Sullivan,
and he buck tradition and directly targeted Uptown Cigarettes and RJ.
Reynolds has basically a vile product that needed to be
(36:49):
removed from the shelves. It hadn't been released yet. Their
release was targeted for February of nineteen ninety, not coincidentally
Black History Month, and enough of a protest erupted in
the US led by Lewis Sullivan that R. J. Reynolds
withdrew it before they could ever roll a mountain and
sell up town cigarettes.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
Hurrah for them.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
But the upshot of this is is that, like you said,
eighty five percent of black smokers smoke menthols, and because
of the apparent feeling of menthols, it feels nothing like
you're killing yourself. In fact, it almost feels refreshing. In
some cases, the black press relying so much on tobacco
advertising that they didn't tend to cover the dangers of smoking.
(37:38):
Mainstream press heavily targeted advertising in black communities. By nineteen ninety,
black Americans had a fifty eight percent higher rate of
lung cancer than white people, and it still goes on today.
There's a national ban on flavored cigarettes, but menthol got
exempted because black led community organizations tend to lobby the
(38:00):
White House to prevent menthols being taken out of circulation,
because those groups tend to be funded by tobacco companies,
so essentially they're fronts for the tobacco company lobby. And
this one twenty twelve study found that nearly forty percent
of black smokers said they would quit if there weren't
menthols any longer. So the tobacco companies have a lot
(38:22):
to lose and half of an entire market if menthols
are done away with, Like all the other flavors, it's
the only flavor still allowed in the US.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Pretty despicable stuff. So you're probably wondering, like, hey, if
smoking so terrible, surely it started to wane. And I
gave you some stats earlier, and it has. And that's
because in the nineteen sixties we started slow rolling a
little bit more warnings, Surgeon General warnings. On sixty four,
(38:53):
the Surgeon General released smoking in Health. This is a
report that basically said, it's the single largest contributor to
lung cancer in men, it's linked to premature birth, it'll
increase your risk of a fatal heart attack by seventy percent.
In sixty five. Just a year later, they started mandating
(39:14):
warning labels on packs. In nineteen seventy they said you
can't advertise on TV and radio, even though in print
you still could. And then in nineteen seventy two, finally
the Surgeon General said, and this was really the beginning
of the change of how they were reviewed, and like
public smoking in seventy two, they said involuntary smoking, which
(39:35):
is a second hand smoke, it's also really bad for you.
We're just gonna leave it there. And fourteen years later,
in the mid eighties, they said it can actually give
you lung cancer. Like you cannot smoke at all and
be around smokers and get lung cancer.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Yeah, that happened to Screech from Saved by the Bell.
Dustin Diamond died of lung cancer and he never smoked
a cigarette in his life. Apparently he attributed it to
staying in cheap hotels where you could smoke.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
Still, Oh interesting. I mean I remember my parents never
smoked or anything. But I remember having friends whose parents
smoked in the car with the windows rolled up.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
Yeah that's nuts. I lived in college with a guy
who did that. I was just I, even as a smoker,
I was like, this is wrong. There's something really wrong with.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
Yes, oh got in the car, like, good luck selling them.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
But yeah, also your kids in the back seat, Like
that was definitely a thing.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
Yeah. I mean, well, the other thing we should mention
that I never really thought about until this is that
smoke is in even going through a filter. So what
little work the filter is doing that side stream smoke
is just going right into your lung.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
Yeah, and even your exhaled smoke contains a lot of
toxins that are just getting right back out that are
part of secondhand smoke too, So yes, yeah, for sure,
it definitely changed the calculus of how people viewed smoking.
It wasn't like you're killing yourself thing anymore. It was
a you're killing all of us thing now, and that
definitely to bands in restaurants, movie theaters all over the place.
(41:03):
I remember I was, I think I've said before, I
was one of the last smokers on an international flight. Yeah,
in the nineties, on the way to the Netherlands. That
just seems bizarre to me now too, that especially that
it was that recent. But finally America came around and
was like, you can't smoke indoors anymore in public places.
And another thing simultaneously was people started banning smoking in
(41:26):
their own homes. That was simultaneous to government mandated smoking
bands in public places. People were making that choice as well,
So smokers were getting pushed further and further out of
the mainstream essentially.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
Yeah, like literally outside, like you had to start telling
people like I'm sorry, there's a non smoking house. Yeah.
The idea of somebody walking into my house and lighting
up a cigarette is so bizarre sounding, like it seems
like a hundred years ago that people were doing that,
but we lived through it, Like I remember all that.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
Yeah, oh for sure, I had a house that we
smoked him and it was It's crazy how much things
have changed in just a couple of decades. Yeah, because
now if somebody did that, it's like a hostile act,
like they're just slapping you in the face like they
mean to be starting something. As Michael Jackson said.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
Yeah, I'm going to screw up your house right now.
Speaker 2 (42:19):
Yeah, what are you can do about it?
Speaker 1 (42:21):
I'm gonna smoke next to your cat or.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
Cat, although I'll bet cats smoke if they could.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
That's true. You're probably right. The other thing that came
in the early nineties when everyone said, when the all
the health experts said, hey, you know, you need to
quit smoking if you want to live, is all of
a sudden, there were nicotine patches and nicorette gum and
stuff like that, all kinds of quitting aids that hit
the market that were also big money.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
Yeah, something else I found and that stuff worked, and
what also worked. I really wanted to do an episode
just on this was that big tobacco settlement among the
state's attorney's in the US that just, yeah, we should
crippled the tobacco industry and really helped lead to its
downfall because they had to keep handing over all these
(43:11):
documents they had that were so damning, and then the
press would just run story after story about this stuff,
and it really turned a lot of people off on tobacco.
But I remember when vaping started to be a thing,
and I was like, no, how did this happen? Like
we like the anti tobacco forces won. They won, They
beat big tobacco. One of the most powerful groups in
(43:33):
the world got beaten by the people who were like, no,
we shouldn't be smoking. And then vaping came along. So
Julia turned up the statistic that I found very heartening.
She said that in twenty nineteen, twenty eight percent of
high school students in the US vape cigarettes. Essentially three
years later it was ten percent. So it was that's great, Yeah,
(43:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
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
(44:32):
nineteen sixty five, forty two percent smoked. In nineteen eighty
it was thirty three percent. But there were more cigarettes
sold in the early eighties. In nineteen sixty five, at
forty two percent smoking, they sold five hundred and twenty
one billion cigarettes. That dropped to thirty three percent of
the population smoking, but they sold six hundred and thirty
seven billions, so fewer people seemingly smoking more cigarettes.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
I would guess that in that interim the tobacco companies
figured out out how to make their product more addictive.
Then that's when it would have happened. That'd be my guess.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
Yeah, probably so.
Speaker 2 (45:08):
Well. I can't wait to tee off on that tobacco
settlement episode whenever we do it. But this is this
is a good one. I thought this was a good idea, Chuck,
I'm glad you selected it.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Thanks. I mean, they're not hurting. Twenty twenty three, Philip
Morris raked in thirty five almost thirty six billion dollars.
So they're doing okay. And people in different countries is different.
I think Americans smoke less. I mean when I've traveled
through Europe, a lot of people smoke. I know in
Asian countries there's a lot of smoking.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
Yeah, it's everywhere. Yeah, right after I quit, when we
went to Japan and it was they smoked. They smoked
during a funeral. Yeah, and I was sitting there like,
I want one of those so bad.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
Yeah. When we were in Vegas collecting our Lifetime Achievement
and word a couple of years ago. Yes, I went
to a dinner at a really nice Chinese restaurant in
one of the casinos. Unfortunately it was a smoking casino.
And you know, the restaurants aren't like walled off, it's
just kind of part of the casino. There was a
group of young Japanese men, probably in their late teens
(46:11):
to early twenties, like thirteen of them standing just on
the other side of where our table was, and just
chain smoking wow, over and over and over to the
point where I was like, man, this is legitimately ruined
this awesome meal.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
Yeah, that sucks it definitely. Can he can just one
person smoking can ruin the meil? I can't imagine thirteen.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
Yeah, but oh boy, they were loving them. They were
pretty happy smoking those cigarettes.
Speaker 2 (46:39):
You got anything else?
Speaker 1 (46:40):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 2 (46:41):
All right, Well that's it for cigarettes, everybody, Thanks for listening.
And since I said thanks for listening, and Chuck's got
nothing else, you put those two together and we've just
unlocked the listener.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
Mail correction for Josh during our Boy listener Mail, a
couple of this isn't a big one. Hey, guys, long
time listener, first time writer. Reference to the listener mail
and the USAID episode, Josh mentioned redtail Or Redhawk beer
and said it was from Adesto, but the beer is Mendocino.
Speaker 2 (47:13):
Yeah, I remember.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
Now, given the seminary and those names as easy to
confuse these very different California towns, I can personally confirm
Mendocino Brewing Company was and now still is a great brewery.
They seized operation in twenty eighteen, but were purchased and
are now back in production. And hop Land, which is
in Mendocino County. Thanks for everything you do. You guys.
That's from Devon in California.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
Very nice, Devin, Thank you for that. And yeah, it's
still a good beer even if it is from Mendocino
rather than my Desto.
Speaker 1 (47:44):
Yeah, we just want to shout out the right town.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
Yeah, but thank you for being gentle. I appreciate it
and not calling me a dipstick or anything.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
No, that's not dipstick. Cordy.
Speaker 2 (47:53):
Who was it again? I know I just said their name.
Speaker 1 (47:55):
That's Devon, Devin.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
Thanks a lot, Devin. If you want to be like Devon,
you can send us an email to send it off
to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:08):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just smoking smoking,
feel all right? Just keep on choking.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
And this is Segnestion, uh Boston. Yeah, okay, yep, that's right.
I was in my head, I was getting there. I
thought you were going to go with smoking in the
boys room.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
No. I always thought that was just kind of a lame.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Yeah, that was a remake. You know, Motley Crue covered it.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
I don't remember who did the original, do you?
Speaker 1 (00:43):
No, I don't remember.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
You don't need to email in and tell us. That's
all right. If we're curious enough, we'll go.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Look it up where you can feel free. Okay, who Okay,
tell someone not to email now.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
I do want to know. I'm gonna look while you talk.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Well, I think you should wait for the email. Maybe
the writer of that song.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Is listening Brownsville Station.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Okay, there you go.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
I never in a million years would it come with that,
because I've never heard those two words together as a
band name.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Oh well, you've never taken the train there? Then?
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Have you ever heard of Brownsfield Station.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Just when I took a train to Brownsfield Station.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
That's gross, I think, I know what you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Oh God, all right, let's get off this and get
on something even grosser, which is cigarettes.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
And this was from our pal Julia, and I just
sort of I commissioned this one because I was like,
you know what, let's just do one on the cigarette itself,
not like smoking, and not the lawsuits and all that
stuff or lung cancer, but just on the thing, the object.
And Julia sen us an article called the Cigarette Itself,
appropriately titled. And I learned a lot in this one,
(01:52):
chiefly that the cigarette was born in Spain in the
early sixteenth sixteenth century when cigar smokers. Cigars were around,
and it was sort of a luxury item for the
wealthy at the time because they were you know, hand
rolled and imported from Mexico and South America. But when
they would you know, stub out that last you know,
half inch of a cigar or whatever, people that didn't
(02:15):
have as much money would come along grab that thing
and take out the tobacco, you know, grind it up
and pick it apart a little bit and wrap it
in paper and smoke it, and that was a little
cigar or a cigaretllo.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
H isn't that amazing?
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Yeah? I mean I never thought about the word cigarette
being a play on cigar. Oh really like a tiny cigar, like,
because I always started cigarello. But like a kitchenette, a
cigarette is just like the same sort of version of that.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Eight.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
So they're about eighty four millimeters long a standard cigarette,
and for a reference, that's about the length of a cigarette.
They're sold in packs of twenty. And if you really
want to get technical about a cigarette, next time you're
at a party and you're bumming one from somebody or
castigating somebody for smoking, even better, you can say that
(03:22):
a cigarette is also technically known as a heated tobacco product.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
That's right. As we'll see a Camel's first started putting
them in packs of twenty, and I could not find
out if I think they did that to match the
number of matches in a matchbook. Which is twenty. Oh really,
I'm pretty sure that's the story.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
I wish somebody would have told the hot dog makers that,
because you know, you got the bug eight or a
pack of eight hot dogs and buns of six. I
can never keep up these days with witches.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Well yeah, that just still doesn't make any sense at all.
But yeah, I'm pretty sure that they put it in
a pack up twenty eventually to match the matches in
a matchbook. But that may also be apocryphal.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Who knows, it's a good one.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
What cigarettes are for is to deliver nicotine to your body,
which is a feel good chemical that is naturally occurring
in tobacco. And the whole point is to with a pipe,
cigar or cigarette or anything like that an esig is
to get you that nicotine, to get you addicted to it,
to eventually kill you from it.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
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
(04:48):
we live in the age of mass produced cigarettes, and
these things are exquisitely engineered products that so much time
and money and effort has gone into, and so much
research that most of what we know about cigarettes, what
cigarettes due to the human body, how addictive they are,
comes from the research the tobacco companies did over the
(05:12):
decades that they kept that eventually had to be handed
over to the state attorneys general who sued them back
in the nineties.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Yeah, it's crazy how it all panned out. If you're
looking at you know, and Julia kind of breaks it
down with the white end and the brown end, but
there are plenty of cigarettes that are white through and through,
meaning the filter end is the same color, but the
tobacco end is a filler of cut tobacco leaves. And
then plenty of additives. I think how many did they admit?
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Five hundred and ninety nine.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Yeah, they wanted to get to six hundred so bad.
But they finally in nineteen ninety four released their additives
and it was a list five ninety long, which is
crazy to think about it.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
I think they had six hundred, but some very sharp
eyed tobacco lobbyists like, uh, you got arsenic in here twice, so.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
It says cut tobacco leaves. It's held in a porous
wrapped paper that is sealed by an adhesive. And if
you'll look closely, there is a printed there's printed information
on that paper that you're also smoking and you're gonna
be burning when you're smoking that tobacco, that paper, those additives,
that ink, that adhesive and everything, and the smoke that
(06:26):
comes out and these are words I did not know.
The smoke that comes just from a burning cigarette sitting
there is called side stream smoke. The stuff that you
inhale is called mainstream smoke.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Yeah, the mainstream smoke comes out of the filter. You
draw through the filter, and the smoke that comes out
that's the mainstream smoke. The filters we'll see it does
something a little bit here there, but not really. It's
essentially to give smokers the illusion that they're preventing some
sort of harm to themselves when they actually aren't. Another
(06:59):
illusion is that these cigarette butts, which are the most
littered item in the entire world. I saw as something
like four point one trillion cigarette butts are littered, not
thrown away, littered every year around the world. And a
common misconception amongst smokers, is that they're biodegradable. They're not.
(07:20):
They're photodegradable, not biodegradable, which is a real problem because
they kind of well, they litter all over the place
and their type of plastic.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Yeah, those filters are cellulose acetate, and there are companies
that put charcoal in there, but because charcoal is a
great filter generally naturally, but there aren't any studies that
show that charcoal in a filter helps it all. Yeah,
as far as health outcomes or anything like that. There
are two paper wraps on the filter in there's a
plug rap around the actual filter, and then there is
(07:53):
if it's a brown filter, there's the brown it's called
tipping paper around the plug rap, and that is also
sealed up so that you know, you don't want that
smoke coming out of the side of the filter, right,
you want it going into your mouth. And then that
filter is also treated. They changed the pH on that
filter to purposefully turn it brown as you smoke, so
(08:15):
you look and you see, man, look at all that
brown stuff that's not getting into my lungs.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
It fooled me for twenty years up until a couple
of days ago. I had no idea that that was
the case.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Yeah, just one of the dirty tricks that cigarette manufacturers
used and still used.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
It's you know, nuts. So let's go back to the cigarillo,
shall we.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Let's do it.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
So the cigarello, I think you said it was the
early sixteenth century, so the early fifteen hundreds, right after
the Age of Discovery kicked off, right, And it took
all the way to the late seventeen hundreds before it
really started to spread outward into Italy and Portugal, which
are not that far away. So apparently people didn't think
that much of the cigarello by then. But as Europe
(09:00):
started to go to war with itself, the cigarillo kind
of hitchhiked to the fronts and it was like, hey,
what do you guys think about me? Pretty great?
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Huh yeah, I mean it's crazy. The rise of the
cigarette is tied directly to the various wars over the
years and the fact that soldiers wanted to smoke. It was,
you know, helped calm their nerves. I think it was
as was a comfort piece when you're I bet a
cigarette and kids don't ever try it, don't ever even
try it. But I bet when you're a war sitting
(09:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
I would think so too. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
So anyway, French and British soldiers discovered them in the
early eighteen hundreds during the Napoleonic Wars, and this is
where the French came up with the word cigarette instead
of cigarillo. And the Crimean War around the this century
came along a new generation of British and French soldiers
(10:05):
this you got these cigarettes with that pretty harsh Turkish tobacco.
They said, we love this stuff. They brought it home
and there was a tobacconist named Philip Morris that had
a shop on Bond Street in eighteen forty seven where
he was selling cigars and tobacco products, and he was like,
I'm going to start making cigarettes.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
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 like a shout out or something like that.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Oh I never looked that up, but I just assumed
that it was eventually became the big company.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
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
(11:09):
in America it went a totally different way when it
really became a thing in the United States. As we'll see,
it became associated essentially with juvenile delinquents. At first, it
was not a fanancy like a Bond Street type thing
to do. It was kids playing craps rather than going
to school. Were smoking cigarettes too, yeah, ne'er do wells, Yes,
(11:33):
ne'er do wells.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
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,
(11:59):
you know, way more wide had spread. One was the
invention of a rolling machine, like a machine that could
pump out, you know, eventually like two hundred and fifty
thousand a day for a company, and the American cigarette,
which used a combination sometimes of Turkish tobacco or sometimes
just straight up American tobacco that was a lot less
(12:19):
harsh and more palatable for I guess American appetite.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Smooth, mild. So yeah, there's a guy named James Duke
who was a Durham, North Carolina tobacco air and I
think I remember correctly when we went to Durham for
our show recently. I think both times they have like
a big Duke stencil on a like a smokestack at
some place.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Oh that's funny, I'm pretty sure. So on smokestack.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
He created W. Duke, Sons and Company in eighteen eighty
three to start making cigarette sorry eighteen eighty one. By
eighteen eighty three he was making two hundred and fifty
thousand a day thanks to the invention of James Bonsac,
who created that cigarette rolling machine that you mentioned earlier
(13:08):
that could roll two hundred cigarettes per minute.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Yeah, that's quite an increase from three or four over
there on Bond Street. So Duke said, hey, give me
a deal. I'll buy a few of those things if
you give me a good price on him and yeah, exactly,
and he said sure. And he said, all right, I'll
use cigarette rollers. You're out of business. And they said no,
you can't hire a machine to do work that humans do.
And he said, watch me, And so he put these
(13:34):
machines in. All of a sudden, they were a lot
cheaper to sell, to make, and to sell. They were
readily available, and like you said, they were smoother, and
they got popular at least with the juveniles. But that
would be the first step toward making them a little
more mainstream. But it is interesting that they were I
think in nineteen hundred and two percent of the market
(13:56):
was tobacco market with cigarettes. People were still really into
your tobacco at the time and dipping snuff.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Yeah, people love that kind of stuff. So by the
eighteen nineties, though, this was enough of the thing that
kids were smoking cigarettes that as early as the eighteen
nineties states started to pass bands on selling cigarettes to minors.
Isn't that interesting?
Speaker 1 (14:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
They're like, what are you doing out of the coal
mine right exactly? Uh, do you want to keep going
and talk about where the cigarette really broke out in America?
Or do you want to take a break first.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
I think it's break time, buddies.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Okay, we're going to take a break, everybody. We just
decided not a smoke break, just a break. So, just
(15:07):
like in Europe, Chuck War helped cigarettes just blow up.
Basically in World War One in particular, brought cigarettes to
America by introducing it to American troops. And, like you said,
the men fighting World War One and the trenches were like,
we need something. Somebody give us something to smoke. And
(15:28):
the US government was like, that's fine, but cigars are
kind of pricey, and I don't know if you guys
have been to a cigar shop lately. We can't really
give all of you cigars all the time. What about
these cigarettes that are being made that are pretty cheap.
And the men in the trenches said, whatever, we just
need to smoke something, so very quickly, a steady, never
(15:50):
ending stream of packs of cigarettes started being sent to
the boys on the front in Europe and also like business, individual, citizens,
the government, they were all paying for it. And they
just smoked, smoke, smoked out of the trenches in World
War One, and when they came back they were like, you, guys,
you gotta try these. They're amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
I mean it was kind of perfect for a foxhole
because it was much quicker than a cigar, Like, you know,
you can smoke a cigar for an hour, and you
didn't have that kind of time if you just wanted
a quick nicotine fix. The cigarette was kind of perfect
for wartime. And buddy, did they explode. Camel cigarettes in
(16:34):
nineteen thirteen sold about a million packs of cigarettes or
is that a million cigarettes?
Speaker 2 (16:39):
A million packs?
Speaker 1 (16:41):
A million packs of cigarettes. In nineteen fourteen they sold
four hundred and twenty five million packs, and by nineteen
nineteen they sold twenty one billion packs of cigarettes.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Yeah, which not coincidentally was after World War One ended
and all of those men fighting in World War One
came back with pretty healthy little cigarette habits. By then.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
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 2 (17:11):
I know, And that's just Cammebell cigarettes. That's not all cigarettes,
that's just one caramel. Yeah. Another thing World War One
did was kind of change the United States's view on
life and was like, Okay, a lot of people just died,
and maybe we should start thinking of life as a
little more valuable and precious and relax a little bit
and enjoy ourselves. And one of the exactly right one
(17:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
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 2 (18:03):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
This is also a very fun fact. Philip Morris. The
Marlboro cigarette, which I have always associated with.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Like Cowboy killed dude.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Don't forget Kramer was the Marlborough Man for a minute.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
That's right, he was. But the Marlboro cigarette had such
hard type of thing hard to say. It was launched
as a women's cigarette. It was known as mild As
May and I'm not sure when that switch, but that's
kind of a fun little fact.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
I vow to pick up mild as May is a
phrase I'm going to start rising.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
I like that.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
A lucky Strike was also like, hey, rather than reaching
for a suite, which will eventually disappoint your husband, reach
for a lucky strike instead. Just smoke anytime you have
a chocolate craving.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Uh yeah, and all those accessories that Hey, listen again,
kids don't smoke. But I'd be a liar if I
didn't say. In an old movie, when someone took out
one of those little slender cigarette cases and popped out
a cigarette from that neat row and tapped it on
the outside of that metal case, I don't know. That
(19:20):
was pretty cool. Looking to young Chuck.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Yeah, I recently read Rebecca by Daphne de Maurier. Have
you ever read that?
Speaker 1 (19:27):
No, is it the Rebecca Hitchcock movie Rebecca?
Speaker 2 (19:30):
I think Hitchcock may have made it. Yeah, and that
tracks because I think it was written in the early thirties.
Have you seen the movie? Was it about a woman
who is basically living in the shadow of her husband's
first wife. Yeah, so that's the book.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
But people great undervalued Hitchcock movie.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
By the way, it's a great book too, But people
bust out cigarette cases like every couple paragraphs in there
and offer cigarette and everyone smokes after tea and all
this stuff, so I you know exactly what you're talking about.
It just suck out to me. I think I guess
as a twenty first century person knowing what smoking does,
looking at people who were living at a time when
(20:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
Yeah, I mean I remember in college in Athens, it
was always one like classy co ed who like carried
her cigarettes in a case and maybe even had one
of those little cigarette holder extenders or whatever. Oh, yeah, yeah,
because you know, they were like, hey, look at me,
I'm different, and you know I'm an art major. So
this is what we did.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
I'm like friggin' Audrey Hepburn here.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
The other thing that happened was they started putting cigarette
lighters in cars in I think nineteen twenty five nineteen
twenty six is when they became standard and cars a
little push button cigarette lighter. So now they're saying, like,
smoke everywhere.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Yeah, and it just so happens. Nineteen twenty five nineteen
twenty six is when the first cars came up basically,
so right out of the gate they had cigarette lighters.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Yeah, you could get one hundred and fifty grand plus
a year's supply of Lucky Strikes if you're smoking was
sponsored by a Lucky Strike, which I think Joan Crawford, Spencer, Tracy,
Gary Cooper, they all had those deals with Lucky Strikes.
So they would out in public be smoking Lucky Strikes,
but during the reviews they'd also stop and be like, wow,
this Lucky Strike is so mild, smooth or whatever, like
(21:37):
they would talk about it like as if it were
you know how people try to place ads or they
used to, I don't know if they still do in
podcasts where suddenly we'd just be talking about a product
and it'd take you a second, yeah, to catch up.
That's what they used to do with Lucky Strikes.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
Yeah, and they're like, they send me a year supply,
So they sent me one thousand packs of cigarettes.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Exactly. It's nuts. So there's just tons of stars smoking.
They were literally really sponsored by tobacco companies, and even
if you weren't, you could still be pitching them in
regular ads. And there's a push today to I think,
retroactively and moving forward, give our ratings to movies that
have smoking in them, which I hadn't heard of, but
(22:17):
I ran across that recently.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Yeah, I heard about that much different back then. Obviously,
by the middle of the twentieth century, cigarettes had eighty
one percent of the tobacco market, so people really ditched
the jaw and the snuff for cigarettes generally speaking, and people,
you know, pregnant women were smoking. You smoke in the
movie theater, smoking planes on buses in the office. Your
(22:41):
doctor would smoke in front of you during an appointment.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
People reading the news on TV would be smoking while
they were giving you the news.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
It's crazy when you look back at old TV show
either not just episodes, but like Dick Cabot Show and
stuff like that, just like everybody was smoking all the time.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
Yeah, I mean they were ads that were doctors recommending
a certain kind of cigarette because they were smoother, they
made you cough less or something like that. Is just
absolutely crazy. But eventually people started getting hip to the
idea that these things might kind of be bad for us.
I think as far back as the seventeen sixties there
(23:19):
was a doctor named John Hill who wrote Cautions against
the Immoderate Use of Snuff because he'd noticed that people
who were using snuff tobacco, which is exactly what it
sounds like, powdered tobacco you sniff like it's a bump
of cocaine, that they were He had observed navel nasal
swellings and excreacences in snuff users and he's like, even
(23:41):
is that it's I think puffy pussy looks in their noses.
And he's like, I think those are probably cancerous. And
this is back in the seventeen sixties.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Yeah, so that's super early on. In nineteen hundred, they
finally put like tobacco extract They did like official scientific tests.
They put tobacco extracts. They applied it to guinea pigs,
of course, and they saw cellular activity associated with cancer development.
They linked it to cheek cancer as early as nineteen
(24:14):
twenty eight, and then about a decade after that they said,
you know what, if you smoke, you're not going to
live as long.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
No, And then I think by nineteen fifty they started
having enough studies that they could do meta analysis essentially
and say, if you smoke, you have a higher chance
of getting lung cancer than somebody who doesn't smoke. Four
years after that, the British Medical Journal published a study
that said that cigarettes were killing doctors in significant numbers too,
(24:44):
and the fact that doctors are now dying from smoking
cigarettes that kind of got people's attention.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
Yeah, and these were all unfiltered basically up until nineteen fifty.
In nineteen fifty, the Winston cigarette was the first one
to come out as a mass marketed filtered cigarette. And again,
you know, it helps a little bit. It's not like
the filter is completely useless, but it's not filtering out.
It was largely a ruse to say, hey, they're saying
(25:13):
smoking is bad for you, so now we've added a
thing to make it safe.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Yeah. I read that Initially it was an earnest attempt
to create a healthier, less deadly cigarette. And see they
were just like, well, we failed at this, but now
we've basically fooled people into thinking the filters are actually
doing something. We have to keep filters on forever. And yeah,
it very quickly just became a device rather than something
(25:40):
that actually worked. It can catch some particulate matter, but
it's doing nothing to the gases in the smoke. They're
just coming through fully toxic. But again, smokers were like, okay, great,
we've got that licked. We have filters. Now let's all
go back to smoking as much as we want. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
I think by year in nineteen sixty five, forty two
percent of American adults smoked. In nineteen eighty, it went
down to thirty three. By ninety five it was down
to twenty five twenty ten, nineteen percent, and just a
couple of years ago, in twenty twenty three, eleven percent.
But that's that's nuts. Like forty close to half of
(26:21):
American adults in the sixties were smoking.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Well, it's funny. It's based on old movies and TVs
and books and stuff like that, or TV shows and books.
That seems low to me.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Yeah, it looks like one hundred percent.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Yeah, it really does for sure.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
I would guess so too. And then also, I mean,
if back in the twenties they were like, you can
get my mouth and cheek cancer from it, it's probably
trickled out to some people more than others, you.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Know, for sure. So they add the filter. But a
lot of R and D and money was spent because
all of a sudden, you're adding this barrier between the
smoker and the smoke, and so they had to invest
a lot of money into making sure like the draw
was correct and that you weren't you know, what they
didn't want was for you to lose any of that
(27:23):
habit forming nicotine. So they put a lot of dough
into I guess, like you said, probably earnestly trying to
reduce some toxins but also make sure that experience stayed
the same to keep people smoking cigarette.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
Yeah, and they spent billions of dollars figuring this out,
because if you're a smoker and you have to, like
if you have a crushed filter, it makes it hard
to draw through, and it's essentially a ruined cigarette because
you don't, like, you don't want to have to have
to exert any kind of effort in smoking, and if
you do, it's just it's not worth it. So they
(27:57):
could not mess with the smoking experience to make it
as good or better while also preserving all the best
parts of an unfiltered cigarette. What they essentially came up
with was to use more porous paper then actually poke
like little tiny holes in the seam where the tobacco
comes up against the filter, which is sealed, as you
(28:19):
talked about, by that tipping paper. But they poked little
holes in that end of the tipping paper so that
more outside air could be sucked in and mixed with
the smoke. So it was a milder smoke. And from
what I can tell, light cigarettes that's it. They have
more tiny holes than non light irregular cigarette. That's the
(28:41):
only difference.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Yeah, it's not like lighter chemical additives or lesser chemical
additives and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
But the big tobacco companies are very happy for you
to walk around thinking that that's what it means. But
all it means is it just hits you lighter because
it has more little micro holes in that tipping at
the end.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Should we take another break? Yes, all right, we'll be
right back right after this. So there are different, you know,
(29:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Yeah. I worked at a last chance gas station and
liquor store and we sold cigarettes for a dollar twenty
five a pack, which is far and away the cheapest
cigarettes and all of Athens. So we had a lot
of people come in there too.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
What was the cheapest brand? Totally? Remember the ones that
we had.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
I don't remember what they were back then.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
The cheapest cigarettes, and these are the people. This is
the stuff I always felt the worst about was when
people were like, I can only afford to buy the
bare bones swept off the floor tobacco cigarette brand. That
was just more depressing to me, even in our store.
They were Bucks.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
I don't remember those at all.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
Had a big antler deer on the front of it,
and Bucks were really cheap compared to the other one.
So I can't imagine what was in those.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
That sounds very scary.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
But there are different links, different kinds of filters. I
remember the parliaments had the recess s filter occasionally when
I had cigarettes here and there in New Jersey. That's
a lot of people smoke parliaments. You can have those
long one twenties they're called extra longs and different diameters,
including something I tried in college occasionally. It was the
old camel wide.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Oh, I forgot about those.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
Remember those plugs?
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Yep? I went the opposite direction. I smoked Capri Ultra
slim one twenties for a little while. Are you serious?
They were essentially as big around as like a popsicle
or a sucker stick.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Yeah, Oh yeah. I remember my friend Justin's mother smoked those,
and I had never saw anyone that wasn't a mom
smoke use.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
Yeah, I took a lot of crap back in the
day because I would smoke those. I smoked Virginia Slims
for a while.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
That's really funny.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
I don't remember how either of those came to be
my brand, but I would guess that I started smoking
Capris because I like the watercolor design on the box.
That's probably what I first caught my attention.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
You always marched, have marched to the beat of your
own drum, so I could see Ess Clark doing that
just to be different.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Yeah, yeah, we're good though. I liked them. I wait,
let me rephrace that. Kids. Kids, please don't listen to
any kind of nostalgic tone in anything I'm saying, because
if I could go back and do it again, I never, ever,
sure ever was smoked. Quitting smoking was the single hardest
thing I've ever done in my entire life far. It
(32:01):
is definitely not worth it.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Yeah, totally. I was the dreaded social smoker who all
my smoker friends hated because I could always take it
or leave it. Oh yeah, it never got it, It
never got its hooks to me. As as far as
an addiction.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
I just that just did not compute with me. But
I was always in awe of people like you.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Yeah. I was the one who would bum the cigarettes
off my smoker friends, and they're always nice about it.
I was not the guy at the party who let
the filter it in because I had too much to drink.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
I was the guy who would smoke with the flu.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
Or the guy that if you if the cigarette broke
the tobacco and broke a little bit, you would hold
your finger around that part just so you can still
not waste that, sire. But again, we're not waxing nostalgic everybody.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
So where are we, Chuck? Oh, we were talking about
some innovations at the time.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
I guess, uh, yeah, I mean one innovation, and by
innovation we means terrible things cigarette companies did to make
them worse and more addictive. Basically, so like innovation for
them was what's called puffed or expanded tobacco. And that's
when they soak tobacco leaves in ammonia and free on
(33:14):
to make them puff out and increase their volume. They
swell up some and then they freeze dry that and
they do that so then get more cigarettes out of
less of a tobacco purchase or hardvest.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Yeah, it's just a space filler. And yeah, from what
I saw free on, they only use that only for
about thirty years. That just continue a couple decades ago.
But ammonia is still very very much an ingredient in cigarettes.
One of the big things ammonia does is it allows
you to absorb free based nicotine more easily, so you
(33:45):
get more nicotine out of each puff of cigarette, which
a lot of observers point to is clear evidence that
tobacco companies went out of their way to make their
products more addictive.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Yeah, for sure. Also we should mention while we were
kind of talking about what kinds of people smoke what cigarettes,
and if you work at a convenience story, you kind
of see repeated patterns. It's clear if you've ever sold
cigarettes that African Americans tend to prefer menthol cigarettes. I
think more than eighty five percent of black smokers smoke menthols.
(34:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
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
(34:54):
essentially I guess, targeted happenstance, the tobacco companies started heavily
advertising ment in the black press, and so that eventually
came to be the favorite kind of cigarette among black
people in America. And I read an article by a
guy named Alan Blum, who is the director of the
Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society, and he
(35:15):
kicked out an estimate that about a third of the
ads in some issues of Ebony and Jet magazines, black
oriented national magazines in the US were for tobacco products,
mostly cigarettes, mostly menthol cigarettes.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
Yeah, I mean, that's that's crazy. A third. And then
in nineteen ninety, some people say, like peak targeted advertising
and branding came when R. J. Reynolds was going to
release their Uptown menthol cigarette, the first cigarette made like
specifically targeted toward Black Americans. They did a bunch of
(35:52):
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
(36:13):
the bottom so they could grab the tobacco in to
avoid crushing that filter and order to keep their fingers
for being on it because that's the part that went
into their mouth. So they literally flipped how they packaged
cigarettes to appeal to black customers.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
Yes, and this did not land well with people in
the United States. There happened to be a black Health
and Human Services Secretary at the time named Lewis Sullivan,
and he buck tradition and directly targeted Uptown Cigarettes and RJ.
Reynolds has basically a vile product that needed to be
(36:49):
removed from the shelves. It hadn't been released yet. Their
release was targeted for February of nineteen ninety, not coincidentally
Black History Month, and enough of a protest erupted in
the US led by Lewis Sullivan that R. J. Reynolds
withdrew it before they could ever roll a mountain and
sell up town cigarettes.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
Hurrah for them.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
But the upshot of this is is that, like you said,
eighty five percent of black smokers smoke menthols, and because
of the apparent feeling of menthols, it feels nothing like
you're killing yourself. In fact, it almost feels refreshing. In
some cases, the black press relying so much on tobacco
advertising that they didn't tend to cover the dangers of smoking.
(37:38):
Mainstream press heavily targeted advertising in black communities. By nineteen ninety,
black Americans had a fifty eight percent higher rate of
lung cancer than white people, and it still goes on today.
There's a national ban on flavored cigarettes, but menthol got
exempted because black led community organizations tend to lobby the
(38:00):
White House to prevent menthols being taken out of circulation,
because those groups tend to be funded by tobacco companies,
so essentially they're fronts for the tobacco company lobby. And
this one twenty twelve study found that nearly forty percent
of black smokers said they would quit if there weren't
menthols any longer. So the tobacco companies have a lot
(38:22):
to lose and half of an entire market if menthols
are done away with, Like all the other flavors, it's
the only flavor still allowed in the US.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Pretty despicable stuff. So you're probably wondering, like, hey, if
smoking so terrible, surely it started to wane. And I
gave you some stats earlier, and it has. And that's
because in the nineteen sixties we started slow rolling a
little bit more warnings, Surgeon General warnings. On sixty four,
(38:53):
the Surgeon General released smoking in Health. This is a
report that basically said, it's the single largest contributor to
lung cancer in men, it's linked to premature birth, it'll
increase your risk of a fatal heart attack by seventy percent.
In sixty five. Just a year later, they started mandating
(39:14):
warning labels on packs. In nineteen seventy they said you
can't advertise on TV and radio, even though in print
you still could. And then in nineteen seventy two, finally
the Surgeon General said, and this was really the beginning
of the change of how they were reviewed, and like
public smoking in seventy two, they said involuntary smoking, which
(39:35):
is a second hand smoke, it's also really bad for you.
We're just gonna leave it there. And fourteen years later,
in the mid eighties, they said it can actually give
you lung cancer. Like you cannot smoke at all and
be around smokers and get lung cancer.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Yeah, that happened to Screech from Saved by the Bell.
Dustin Diamond died of lung cancer and he never smoked
a cigarette in his life. Apparently he attributed it to
staying in cheap hotels where you could smoke.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
Still, Oh interesting. I mean I remember my parents never
smoked or anything. But I remember having friends whose parents
smoked in the car with the windows rolled up.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
Yeah that's nuts. I lived in college with a guy
who did that. I was just I, even as a smoker,
I was like, this is wrong. There's something really wrong with.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
Yes, oh got in the car, like, good luck selling them.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
But yeah, also your kids in the back seat, Like
that was definitely a thing.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
Yeah. I mean, well, the other thing we should mention
that I never really thought about until this is that
smoke is in even going through a filter. So what
little work the filter is doing that side stream smoke
is just going right into your lung.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
Yeah, and even your exhaled smoke contains a lot of
toxins that are just getting right back out that are
part of secondhand smoke too, So yes, yeah, for sure,
it definitely changed the calculus of how people viewed smoking.
It wasn't like you're killing yourself thing anymore. It was
a you're killing all of us thing now, and that
definitely to bands in restaurants, movie theaters all over the place.
(41:03):
I remember I was, I think I've said before, I
was one of the last smokers on an international flight. Yeah,
in the nineties, on the way to the Netherlands. That
just seems bizarre to me now too, that especially that
it was that recent. But finally America came around and
was like, you can't smoke indoors anymore in public places.
And another thing simultaneously was people started banning smoking in
(41:26):
their own homes. That was simultaneous to government mandated smoking
bands in public places. People were making that choice as well,
So smokers were getting pushed further and further out of
the mainstream essentially.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
Yeah, like literally outside, like you had to start telling
people like I'm sorry, there's a non smoking house. Yeah.
The idea of somebody walking into my house and lighting
up a cigarette is so bizarre sounding, like it seems
like a hundred years ago that people were doing that,
but we lived through it, Like I remember all that.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
Yeah, oh for sure, I had a house that we
smoked him and it was It's crazy how much things
have changed in just a couple of decades. Yeah, because
now if somebody did that, it's like a hostile act,
like they're just slapping you in the face like they
mean to be starting something. As Michael Jackson said.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
Yeah, I'm going to screw up your house right now.
Speaker 2 (42:19):
Yeah, what are you can do about it?
Speaker 1 (42:21):
I'm gonna smoke next to your cat or.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
Cat, although I'll bet cats smoke if they could.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
That's true. You're probably right. The other thing that came
in the early nineties when everyone said, when the all
the health experts said, hey, you know, you need to
quit smoking if you want to live, is all of
a sudden, there were nicotine patches and nicorette gum and
stuff like that, all kinds of quitting aids that hit
the market that were also big money.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
Yeah, something else I found and that stuff worked, and
what also worked. I really wanted to do an episode
just on this was that big tobacco settlement among the
state's attorney's in the US that just, yeah, we should
crippled the tobacco industry and really helped lead to its
downfall because they had to keep handing over all these
(43:11):
documents they had that were so damning, and then the
press would just run story after story about this stuff,
and it really turned a lot of people off on tobacco.
But I remember when vaping started to be a thing,
and I was like, no, how did this happen? Like
we like the anti tobacco forces won. They won, They
beat big tobacco. One of the most powerful groups in
(43:33):
the world got beaten by the people who were like, no,
we shouldn't be smoking. And then vaping came along. So
Julia turned up the statistic that I found very heartening.
She said that in twenty nineteen, twenty eight percent of
high school students in the US vape cigarettes. Essentially three
years later it was ten percent. So it was that's great, Yeah,
(43:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
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
(44:32):
nineteen sixty five, forty two percent smoked. In nineteen eighty
it was thirty three percent. But there were more cigarettes
sold in the early eighties. In nineteen sixty five, at
forty two percent smoking, they sold five hundred and twenty
one billion cigarettes. That dropped to thirty three percent of
the population smoking, but they sold six hundred and thirty
seven billions, so fewer people seemingly smoking more cigarettes.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
I would guess that in that interim the tobacco companies
figured out out how to make their product more addictive.
Then that's when it would have happened. That'd be my guess.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
Yeah, probably so.
Speaker 2 (45:08):
Well. I can't wait to tee off on that tobacco
settlement episode whenever we do it. But this is this
is a good one. I thought this was a good idea, Chuck,
I'm glad you selected it.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Thanks. I mean, they're not hurting. Twenty twenty three, Philip
Morris raked in thirty five almost thirty six billion dollars.
So they're doing okay. And people in different countries is different.
I think Americans smoke less. I mean when I've traveled
through Europe, a lot of people smoke. I know in
Asian countries there's a lot of smoking.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
Yeah, it's everywhere. Yeah, right after I quit, when we
went to Japan and it was they smoked. They smoked
during a funeral. Yeah, and I was sitting there like,
I want one of those so bad.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
Yeah. When we were in Vegas collecting our Lifetime Achievement
and word a couple of years ago. Yes, I went
to a dinner at a really nice Chinese restaurant in
one of the casinos. Unfortunately it was a smoking casino.
And you know, the restaurants aren't like walled off, it's
just kind of part of the casino. There was a
group of young Japanese men, probably in their late teens
(46:11):
to early twenties, like thirteen of them standing just on
the other side of where our table was, and just
chain smoking wow, over and over and over to the
point where I was like, man, this is legitimately ruined
this awesome meal.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
Yeah, that sucks it definitely. Can he can just one
person smoking can ruin the meil? I can't imagine thirteen.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
Yeah, but oh boy, they were loving them. They were
pretty happy smoking those cigarettes.
Speaker 2 (46:39):
You got anything else?
Speaker 1 (46:40):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 2 (46:41):
All right, Well that's it for cigarettes, everybody, Thanks for listening.
And since I said thanks for listening, and Chuck's got
nothing else, you put those two together and we've just
unlocked the listener.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
Mail correction for Josh during our Boy listener Mail, a
couple of this isn't a big one. Hey, guys, long
time listener, first time writer. Reference to the listener mail
and the USAID episode, Josh mentioned redtail Or Redhawk beer
and said it was from Adesto, but the beer is Mendocino.
Speaker 2 (47:13):
Yeah, I remember.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
Now, given the seminary and those names as easy to
confuse these very different California towns, I can personally confirm
Mendocino Brewing Company was and now still is a great brewery.
They seized operation in twenty eighteen, but were purchased and
are now back in production. And hop Land, which is
in Mendocino County. Thanks for everything you do. You guys.
That's from Devon in California.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
Very nice, Devin, Thank you for that. And yeah, it's
still a good beer even if it is from Mendocino
rather than my Desto.
Speaker 1 (47:44):
Yeah, we just want to shout out the right town.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
Yeah, but thank you for being gentle. I appreciate it
and not calling me a dipstick or anything.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
No, that's not dipstick. Cordy.
Speaker 2 (47:53):
Who was it again? I know I just said their name.
Speaker 1 (47:55):
That's Devon, Devin.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
Thanks a lot, Devin. If you want to be like Devon,
you can send us an email to send it off
to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:08):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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