July 21, 2026 • 46 mins
By the 1990s, cigarette makers had been hooking and killing off their customers for about a century. And they’d gotten good at both as well as covering up their harms. In 1994 they were still denying cigarettes were addictive. Then, the 50 Attorneys General of the US rode into town to take them on.
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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 this is stuff you
should Know. I think part of our ongoing corporate mouthfeas.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
In this edition, Yeah for sure. And the beginning of
this episode ties in a lot with we did an
episode about the history of the cigarette, sure, like just
the thing that you shouldn't put in your mouth, but
people do, right, And so we're going to talk a
little bit about that here at the beginning, because you
need to know a little bit about that as it
(00:42):
leads up to what were the you know this lawsuits
against big Tobacco. And we should start by saying that
it's been a long time that we've known that tobacco
and smoking was really bad for you and would kill you.
Like the nineteen twenties we knew for sure, the fifties
we really really knew. And in the nineteen sixties is
(01:06):
when John F. Kennedy finally came out via his Surgeon
General Luther Terry, and said, all right, everybody, it's nineteen
sixty four. I'm finally going to issue a government report
based on you know about a dozen studies with lots
of data about a million male smokers, and this stuff
is really bad for you. So we're going to have
(01:26):
to start putting warning labels on packages.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Yeah. The great thing about those warning labels, though, is
you were educated to imagine Sammy Davis Junior saying it
in your head.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
So the cigarette companies this is the beginning of their playbook,
and their playbook was basically, nah, yeah, prove it. You
can't prove it. This is the whole idea of settled science,
the idea that which is just a complete oxymoron, science
has never settled. It's a constant, ongoing process. But the
(02:03):
idea that you have to have one definitive proof before
you can even begin talking about whether something is harmful
or not, and really exploiting and manipulating the public through
really horrible means, this is where that all started. And
the first response that cigarette companies came up with was
to say, all right, how about we put filters on cigarettes, Because,
(02:26):
as everybody knows, cigarettes make your throat kind of scratchy.
Sometimes they can make you hoarse, and that's okay, that's
a part of smoking. These new filters are going to
help with all of that, and there you go. Cigarettes
are healthy everybody.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
That's right. In the sixties and seventies, that's when we
saw lighter cigarettes or low tar cigarettes. In the fifties,
they got really sort of organized and official about their
PR campaigns. I guess they're propaganda campaigns. When they formed
the Tobacco Industry Research Committee under the guise of studying
(03:03):
the health hazards of smoking, but it was very much
just a PR move. They put out an ad called
a Frank Statement the cigarette smokers early on, which said like, hey,
we're really like, your health is paramount to us as
we sell you cigarettes. It's hard not to laugh because
this is just so dumb to think about that people
would have bought this.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Yeah, but also just so cynical that they would need
for sure this too, you know.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
But they said, all right, we're really going to pledge
to research this everyone because we care about your health.
But also again, like, you can't really prove that it's
just a cigarettes, Like, how do you know that these
people dying of lung cancer didn't also get it from
all the other stuff that's going on in the world.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Yeah, And actually that would become kind of codified in
what's called the Roper proposal. There was a Tobacco Institute
vice president, so in addition to the Tobacco Industry Research Committee,
they also came up with the Tobacco and this Institute,
and then they renamed the TRC the Council for Tobacco Research.
(04:06):
No word of the industry in it, so it's even
more trustworthy, right, And Fred Panzer was vice president of
the Tobacco Institute, and he wrote a memo in nineteen
seventy two that said, essentially, here's what we should do.
We need to create doubt about the health charge without
actually denying it. And essentially it's a variation on the
(04:27):
theme that the case is not proved. And he said,
kind of what you were saying that like these are
like you can't really prove that it's cigarettes. So for example,
extroverts are more likely to smoke cigarettes, but they're also
more likely to get out in the world and drop out.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
Of a heart attack.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
So maybe it's just that extroverts smoke cigarettes, or that
there was one called the constitutional hypothesis that was people
who get sick from smoking are biologically predisposed to get
sick in general, so it's really them. This was all
just thrown about in nineteen seventy two to basically lie
to the public and confuse the public about whether or
(05:06):
not cigarettes were unhealthy or harmful.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Yeah, so they're pushing this campaign out behind the scenes.
They're just throwing in the back file drawer every study
that they had that showed that nicotine was addictive, that
smoking was bad for you, Like, they're suppressing that information
as well as at the same time targeting children with,
(05:30):
you know, product placement in movies, specifically Superman two in
nineteen eighty one with Marlborough. Obviously we've talked about camel
Joe before in the history of the cigarette. That was
what I say, cammel Joe. Yeah, I like camel Joe. Okay,
I think we should leave all this in there except
the beep, although there's plenty of those episodes.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
Yeah, let's get the beep out.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
So that was in nineteen eighty eight. I like camel Joe.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
I like so called you.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
I always called them camel Joe. I didn't know that
wasn't the name.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
I'm sure there's some retired tobacco industry guy who was like, man,
we should have called him Camel Joe. That is way better.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
Here's a gen X stat for you, which is fairly
staggering but completely believable. Youth smoking, like kids and teenager smoking,
had been on the decline kind of through the seventies
and eighties for the most part, and then in the
nineties when gen X came around to like prime smoking age,
it really jumped. It hit an all time high in
(06:31):
nineteen ninety seven of thirty six point four percent of
youth were smoking. Adults were smoking at twenty four point
seven percent at the time, and that's just a staggering number.
I think it's at like three point something percent now.
So gen xers were smoking at a rate of thirty
six percent.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
And there's two things that they suggest had to do
with that huge jump in youth smoking. One was this
big campaign and push to target youth smokers. The tobacco
industry called them replacement smokers. They would replace the other
lifelong smokers that died off from smoking, right. And that's
(07:12):
the thing too, is like one of the things about smoking,
very few people start smoking as adults. We call them
total morons. Most people who smoke started smoking in adolescents.
So the tobacco industry had every incentive to go after kids.
They just knew that society would not allow them to
do that if they did it overtly, so they had
(07:32):
to do it, you know, kind of under the radar
with Camel Joe. The other thing is that there was
a price war that started in the mid nineties, and
that they think that the drop in the price of cigarettes, Yeah,
made it more likely for younger kids to smoke, because
younger kids are more price sensitive than older people who
(07:54):
are smokers.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Remember how cheap cigarettes were back then. Yeah, it's like
a buck buck twenty five a pack or something for sure. Yeah.
I mean I wasn't a regular smoker. I occasionally smoked,
as we talked about before, So I wasn't like buying packs,
but I sold them at the Golden Pantry in Athens,
Georgia on the East Side. And cigarettes were cheap, and
(08:15):
they're somebody told me the day that they were like
twelve to fifteen dollars in like twenty something bucks in
New York a pack.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
I believe that. I totally believe that.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Oly. Well, we'll see why here in a minute.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
So yeah, one of the other things too, that they're
doing at the same time, besides suppressing studies sewing doubt
and confusion among the public about the harm of cigarettes,
they're just out and out denying publicly that not only
your cigarettes not harmful, they're not even addictive. That as
recently as nineteen ninety four, Yeah, they were publicly saying,
(08:50):
like the head of Philip Morris was saying in interviews,
we do not believe cigarettes are addictive. In the nineties,
people had known, like all you had to do is
ask a smoker back in fifties if they were addicted
to cigarettes, and they could tell you that they probably were.
And like this, the industry in the nineties still wouldn't
fess up to that. Like that was their tactic. Just
(09:12):
a complete solid wall with zero cracks in it, over
and over again being reinforced publicly.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Yeah. Actually, in the nineteen fifties, I think they probably said, like, no,
I don't think they're addicted, but do you have a cigarette?
Can I have a cigarette?
Speaker 3 (09:25):
Right?
Speaker 1 (09:25):
I see a guy where they're smoking, you think he
has an extra cigarette for me?
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Right?
Speaker 1 (09:29):
All right? So in the nineteen fifties, we need to
start with sort of lawsuit talk. There were a lot
of lawsuits all unsuccessful. By the mid nineties, when they
were still saying that it wasn't addictive, there were at
least four hundred lawsuits that they never lost, they never settled.
They had one hundred percent record.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
That's crazy, which is.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Staggering to learn. They had obviously a ton of money
to form like the best legal representation they could, but
they were also actively low being state governments about making
it harder to sue about tort reform because like, hey,
tobacco's a natural product, so cigarettes fall into that category,
like despite all the other stuff that's in there, so
(10:13):
you can't sue somebody for packaging a natural thing and
selling it to people.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
That was the other thing they were doing, too, is
they were really lobbying government really effectively.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Like they spent a lot of money on.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Lobbyists, right, not like now.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
So yeah, they were like the teflon down of industries.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
I guess, yeah, tobacco industry.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Was what did you just say, not like now, because
I picked up like atastic, Yeah, what were you mentioning?
Speaker 1 (10:45):
I'm sure they're still pouring tons of money into the lobby.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Oh sure, sure, yeah, I'm sure too. But so they
were they were just completely untouchable, Like, I mean, if
you have one hundred percent record, that in and of
it self will prevent people from filing suit against you.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Right, yeah, because it's expensive, it is, right.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
And you're just like, I'm not gonna win, or the
chances of me winning are so low, I might not
even file suit. So the state also, we should mention
Congress is doing almost nothing about this at this point.
So the state attorneys general, William Safire just smiled from heaven.
Led by a guy named Michael Moore, he was the
(11:28):
attorney general from Mississippi. They got together and they said, well,
if the federal government's I can't do anything about it,
we're going to Yeah, and one state might not be
able to take on the tobacco industry, but every state,
territory and DC together definitely can take on the tobacco industry.
Not only can we take them on, we can seriously
(11:50):
threaten to bankrupt the entire tobacco industry right out of
existence if we really try.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Yeah, and they play their cards right, because they were like,
how can we best go at them? Maybe medicaid is
the way to do it, because we have these medicaid
programs through our individual states that are not going bankrupt,
but they're they're in bad shape in a lot of
cases because they're treating all these smokers who are really
expensive to get through, like you know, lung cancer treatment,
(12:21):
and they have deceived us for all these years. So
let's go after him for RICO status like fraud and racketeering.
And that'll send a shiver even through the spine of
a teflon don. And they were turning up, like Livia says,
like literal truckloads of documents from the industry about them
(12:43):
selling to teenagers, bearing studies covering up what they knew
about how addictive everything was. And there were I mean,
this would be a good sort of thriller movie, almost
like a Soderberg kind of thing. You probably do a
great job with it. Where like they're racing like documents
out of offices while they're trying to actively like bury
(13:04):
these documents, Like I think the guy from Texas was
literally trying to put papers on a private jet so
they could be taken to a district judge before the
state court could seal them up because once the Feds
are investigating, it can't be sealed at the state.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Level, right or even if they do steal it at
the state level. This federal district judge is like, that
doesn't apply to me, so I can I can make
these public are part of a court case, right, So yeah,
I mean yeah, that is like a thriller. And there
is something that kind of touched on this. It was
the Insider with who is the Australian actor he used
to get in fights all the time?
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Russell Crowe?
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Yeah, Russell Crowe is Jeffrey Wiggand I think yeah, who
was like this whistleblower a movie back on Industry?
Speaker 3 (13:46):
It was great.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
I think that was a Michael Man movie.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Michael Mann, Man, I nailed it. You should nailing all
of it.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
I should be a guest on movie Crush.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Oh man, if only.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
But one of the other things you kind of touched
on their strategy, like the focusing on lying to the
public and targeting teens. That was a really smart strategy
because if they were just like cigarettes are harmful and
we need to get rid of them, a lot of
adults are like, you don't need to tell me whether
I should smoke or not. I can kill myself if
(14:19):
I want to. So they left that part alone and
they went after the fact that they were targeting teens
and lying to the public, because the public sentiment can
get behind those two things like yeah, kids are out
of bounds, we don't want them smoking, and you know
we were lied to all these years by these same people. Yeah,
go get them. So that was a really smart strategy
(14:40):
that these attorneys general like took on, like it was amazing,
an amazing court angle, I think is what they call them,
what a court angle?
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Look at that, Yeah, for sure. And the writing was
on the wall for investors because we're talking about hundreds
of billions of dollars at stake, and they were like, hey,
this is this is going to look really bad and
our stock prices are going to really go in the tank.
And so you got to cut a deal here, which
the tobacco company never had thought about, you know, because
(15:12):
they had not only lost, never lost, they never settled anything.
So finally in April of ninety seven, they were set
to go to trial in a few months and they're like,
all right, let's get a meeting set up with this
Michael Moore character from Mississippi, not the movie guy obviously,
and an attorney for Tobacco Free Kids who was working
with the States about all the marketing toward you know,
(15:34):
kids with Joe, Cammel Joe and everybody. So they started negotiating, like,
all right, out of the gate, let's just say we'll
get rid of Camel Joe. We love him, kids love him,
but we'll get rid of him and the marble or
man if that makes you happy. And then a few
months later in June, they said, all right, we got
to start talking, like hash out the money part. So
(15:56):
how does three hundred and sixty eight and a half
billion dollars sound over twenty five years as just an
opening salvo?
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Yeah, And the States were like, I was not expecting
that actually, but they so they were like, okay, here's
the problem though, These are like we need to bring
the Feds in, like that Congress has to approve of
this deal the way that we've set it up. And
there were some federal aspects to it. One was that
the FDA would start regulating tobacco products. Another one was
(16:26):
that the companies, these tobacco companies would be protected against
any further civil and class action lawsuits.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
This is the big one.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
In exchange, they would create a fund to pay some
of those people off, and then there would also be
federal restrictions on indoor smoking. And this did not go
very far because of that protection of the companies.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Right, yeah, I mean that was the sticking point. I
think they could have not too happily lived with the
rest of it, but that was a big one as
far as Congress, and soon enough the American people were like,
uh uh, we can't have that. No, So Congress had
a build to ratify or at least considering a bill
to ratify it, Universal Tobacco Settlement Act S fourteen fourteen.
(17:14):
They were debating it, all this disclosure comes out and
they're like, man, they were really awful companies and it's
worse than we thought even and the idea of them
being protected moving forward, like is it going to fly?
So the late Senator John McCain said, all right, how
about S fourteen fifteen where there's more money, like had
(17:35):
this five hundred and twenty billion sound and we're not
going to protect you from now on like you you
can be sued moving forward too.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
The industry lobbied like they've never lobbied before to keep
this from getting passed through. And again you mentioned the
stock prices when all these stuff, the stuff is going on,
their stocks are tanking. When you know there would be
a win for in the negotiations for the tobacco companies,
their stock prices would go back up. It's all very cynical.
And this stock price went back up after McCain's bill
(18:07):
did not get passed. And one of the reasons it
wasn't passed is because other senators added like riders that
had nothing to do with tobacco, and I'm guessing unpopular writers,
probably at the behest of the tobacco companies. I could
not find the writers to save my life, to basically
sink this bill. You know, like, imagine if you had
(18:28):
this great bill and then somebody's like, I'm also adding
a rider to repeal the requirement for child sexual predators
from having to register and they can live by schools. Now,
your bill's not going to pass. And I get the
impression that that's kind of what happened to McCain's bill.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Yeah, for sure, there was another thing we just sort
of should mention in passing at least, so it was
another suit in October of ninety seven. This is why
they're debating these original bills in Congress where they did settle.
It was a separate class action suit that was filed
ninety one by flight attendants in the United States saying like, hey,
(19:07):
smoking sections and planes are like killing us and it's
pretty awful. So it was a husband and wife team
named Stanley and Susan Rosenblatt who filed this one, and
they ended up settling for three hundred million dollars to
fund medical research. And they said this was a big
sort of turning point, and that's the first time they
(19:27):
officially caved. And again this is while they're debating these
bills in the Congress.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Right, Chuck, I feel like we set things up pretty
well for a break, Like we deserve an.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Ad we deserve a break today.
Speaker 4 (19:42):
Let's do it, okay, Okay.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
So things are just kind of not going quite well
because the whole thing was handed over from the states
to Congress, and Congress just fumbled it.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
As they do.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
So some of the states went on and we're like,
we're gonna just keep going and negotiating our own agreements
with the tobacco companies Florida, Minnesota, Mississippi, who had led
the charge originally in the first place, and Texas. They
all came up with their own settlements and like pretty
(20:38):
eye popping amounts, Texas got more than seventeen and a
half billion dollars out of their agreement. Minnesota got a
nice chunk of change. But they also had the foresight
to say, not only are you going to settle with money,
part of this is that you have to disclose public records.
All internal documents that are part of discovery in this
(21:02):
process are going to be made public after this, and
the tobacco companies had to agree with that. So that
was where a lot of these disclosures came from. That
they had just been lying, lying, lying, because these troves
of documents that came up in discovery during these cases,
just journalists went crazy. It was like a feeding frenzy
(21:24):
on them.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Oh yeah, for sure. They saw the writing on the
wall once again. So they got together with the other
remaining states who were all plaintiffs at this point in
November of nineteen ninety eight and agreed to what would
end up being the Tabasco Tabasco, the Tobacco Oh man,
the Tabasco Settlement. Can you imagine the numbers? The Tobacco
(21:49):
Master Settlement Agreement, the MSA, which would include two hundred
and six billion dollars paid out over twenty five years
to forty six states, five territories in DC. Yeah, and
they would allocate it according to like how many smokers
they estimated each state had and how much It was
still based on the medicaid thing, so how much they had,
(22:09):
you know, had to pay out and Medicaid for all
these related costs. They said, Well, also stop targeting miners,
even though they really like to smoke, as it turns out,
and they love cartoon camels, So no more cartoon characters
and our ads. We're not going to give away free
cigarettes to miners at recess, which is crazy. We are
(22:32):
going to shut down these you know, sort of shell
research companies that are really just PR firms for US,
dissolving those We're going to release all these documents, and
we're going to create a national foundation to address underage
tobacco use and addiction. And we promised to care this time.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
Yeah, we're a newer, gentler loving tobacco company.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
They also created what's now known as the Truth Initiative,
which is this whole teen anti smoking campaign that was
funded originally by the tobacco companies.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Those commercials were great.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
Yeah, they're still around. The Truth Initiative is they seem
to have migrated online.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Surprisingly, Yeah, I'm sure.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
I mean, I guess that's where kids are these days
or something.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
That's where the kids are.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
And so initially this agreement was just before or between
these forty six states and territories in DC and the
four largest tobacco companies which represented the vast majority of
the market share of the tobacco industry in the United States,
Philip Morris, R. J. Reynolds, Brown and Williamson and Laurellard.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
I'd only heard of two of those.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Yeah, for sure, I've heard of the other ones, but
I cannot tell you what they make.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Okay, Yeah, no idea, let's just leave it at that.
Maybe they make a Bucks I remember, Yeah, I remember.
I think we talked about Bucks in the cigarettes episodes
were at the Golden Pantry. Those were the Those are
the ones that I think the rumor was, at least
they were just made from the sweepings, the trimmings and
sweepings up of factories. They would just package them as Bucks.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
I'm quite sure that that is true to some degree.
There's a kernel of truth in there, and there's probably
kernels of something in those buck.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
Cigarettes just about to say that.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
So a bunch of manufacturers were like, we don't need
to take part in this. We didn't do that much damage.
They're called non participating manufacturers. They were typically smaller players.
I mean, if you weren't one of the big four,
you were basically by definition, one of the smaller players.
But the States are like, not so fast. You still
are going to have to pay money to us for
(24:38):
each cigarette that you sell. And those smaller players, most
of them were like, well, maybe we'll sign this master
settlement after all the mask So they really lasted, like
a lot of tobacco manufacturers into this, this whole agreement.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
Yeah, if you're wondering about DIP, they had a different agreement,
but it was still an agreement kind of under the
spanner with US Tobacco Company, which makes Skull and Copenhagen.
Did you ever dip at all?
Speaker 3 (25:07):
Yes? I did.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
One thing I never really did was chew. That was
I tried it once and turned as green as you
can get.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
Yeah, I chewed tobacco early on. We might have spoken
about this when I was a youth group member at
my church. It was pretty popular. So I chewed like
Redman and Levi Garrett occasionally and then here and there.
In college, I would dip with friends who dipped, but
it never, like all nicotine never got its hooks and
me thankfully.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Oh that is thankful, for sure, because once it does,
it's hard to get rid of.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Yeah, for sure. But one difference with the dip companies
is they were given out and I remember this is
a big deal. They used to just give out reams
of dip to minor league baseball and major league baseball.
That's why baseball was and other sports too, but baseball
was always associated with dipping. But they were like, you
can't give this stuff away to like high school and
(26:00):
college baseball teams anymore. In minor league baseball teams.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
Yeah, I think any sports team because like kids look
up to them, right, which is a big part of
why they were doing this. So the sunflower seed companies.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
Rejoiced, oh for sure.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
So there was.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Another thing that came up that was fairly unpopular. But
also I think people were just kind of what's not ambivalent,
but where you're of two minds and you're kind of
tussling over it internally, Yeah, the internal tussley we'll call it.
Five point one five billion dollars went to the National
(26:37):
Tobacco Growers Settlement Trust Fund to compensate tobacco farmers because
they were going to sell a lot less tobacco.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Because of this.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
And it's interesting to think about.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Yeah, because you're like, on the one hand, like, who cares,
it's tobacco, and then on the other hand, you're like,
these are often family farmers who have been doing this
for generation. So I kind of to yeah, I'm tussling
internally over it.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
What word is it? I know what you're talking about. Yeah,
I don't know. I don't know somewhere right.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
In And then one other thing about this too that
was part of the provision was people were like, well,
what about the federal government because Medicaid is this joint
state federal partnership and the feds fund a lot of this,
And the Feds were like, no, we're leaving ourselves out.
We're waiving any right to any of that money. This
was the state's game, and they did a great job
with it.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Yeah, a lot of public health officials were like not
super happy about that because they were like, hey, listen,
unless we have the Feds overseeing this, How do we
know what the states are going to use this money for?
And you know, not to tease too aggressively, but I
think we'll see an Act three that that was very
much a valid concern.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Yeah, for sure. The Feds did come after them though
they I think this was they were secretly going to
do this, and they're like, no, no, We're just going
to leave it to the states. And the tobacco companies
are like, whoa, and the Feds are like, we have
our own thing we're about to do. There was us
versus Philip Morris at all, and they saw billions and
(28:13):
billions of dollars in compensation for healthcare money that they
had spent out I guess basically what they had shelled
out as part of the Medicaid program. They also went
after them for RICO as racketeers and as being if
you're convicted of racketeering as an organization and you're allowed
to continue on as an organization, the Feds can basically
(28:36):
garnish your profits for a very long time, or they
can go back and seek previous profits, and they did.
They looked for they wanted a portion of the company's
profits from the past forty five years in this case
that was launched in nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Yeah, and in the meantime, Phil Morris was like, hey
Phil Morris at all, thanks a lot, Like why why
has it always got to be us? They're like, you
got a great name, Phil. So the companies did not
settle this time. They're like, all right, we're getting bled
dry by the States. Now the Feds are coming after us.
(29:15):
So we were going to actually fight this thing, and
they lost. In two thousand and six, the District judge
for the United States a rule for the DOJ said no,
you guys are racketeers. I'm going to greatly reduce that
financial penalty down to million I'm sorry, ten billion dollars, yeah,
from the hundreds they were asking for. But you know what,
(29:35):
you got to admit to fraud. You have to issue
what are called corrective statements. And we got to see
all those documents because we know there are still more
documents in your coffers.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
I think there's something like fourteen million documents that were
eventually released internal documents.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
And then finally, remember back as part of like that
first settlement agreement.
Speaker 3 (29:58):
That they tried to kick to the FED to ratify that.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Part of it was having the fdah, yeah, start regulating tobacco.
Speaker 3 (30:06):
That was in nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Yeah, in two thousand and nine, the federal government finally
got around to having the FDA regulate the tobacco industry.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Yeah, all right, let's take our second break, and we'll
come back and talk about what this all meant and
means right after this, all right, we promise talk of
(30:47):
what it all meant and means. And it kind of
depends on who you ask or when you ask as well,
because when it happened and Act, the Effective National Action
to Control Tobacco Group said you know what, and I
think other people too, like the American Cancer Society, the
American Psychological Association, they all got together and said, you
(31:08):
know what, this isn't so great, Like that McCain bill
really had teeth and that didn't pass, and we really
wanted it to. So this is sort of a win
for the cigarette companies. It had a lot of like
obvious immediate impacts. And you know, I talked about, you
know why cigarettes are so expensive, now this is partially
why because they're what's not going to happen is the
(31:30):
investors aren't going to lose any money, so they're going
to say, like, well, just start jacking up cigarette costs,
and a lot less people are smoking, so let's jack
them up even more because we're not going to take
a loss on this.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
Yeah, what are they gonna do? Quit?
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Yeah, So that started almost immediately. As far as price hiking,
like forty five to fifty cents a pack right out
of the gate was just the tip of the iceberg.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Yeah, I mean, did you say twenty dollars a pack?
I believe it, but that's still ipop.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
I think a smoker told me they were like twenty
bucks in New York, but I haven't verified that.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
So one of the things that really happened that people
point to the MSA as being directly responsible for is that,
like the youth smoking just dropped precipitously.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Once they removed the ability for tobacco companies to market
directly to kids and they simultaneously had anti smoking campaigns
targeted towards kids.
Speaker 3 (32:31):
Like it really had an effect.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
Like you said, went from like thirty four percent to
three point eight percent in twenty twenty one. I think
it's even lower than that.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
Now.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
The problem is we didn't learn anything that or we
didn't leave it open enough to apply to future kinds
of tobacco that hadn't been around. So companies like Jewel
and other e cigarette and vape companies they don't face
these same regulations and basically marketed kids. They can use
(33:01):
celebrity endorsers, and they do, but they still get sued
a lot. I think Jewel paid out four hundred and
sixty two million to six different states in twenty twenty three,
So it's still going on. But that's been a huge
dent in the incredible success of the curbing teen smoking.
(33:24):
It's gone back up if you include vaping and hookahs
and stuff like that. But I have also the impression
that kids are a little smarter than we were at
that age. Yeah, and they are seeing through a lot
of this and it's not working quite as well as
it did on us in the nineties.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Yeah, and you know, more parental oversight and just there's
a lot of factors for sure. On the egs. I
think their day has come a little bit, but I
think that it's really there and for some bad stuff
moving forward because of just all the all the stuff
that goes into that juice you know.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Yeah, Yeah, we took a pretty solid stand or position
on vaping. I think we were if I remember correctly,
we were opposed to it in our episode on vaping.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
That's right. The other thing that the settlements led to
was just a turning of the tide, not just with
kids smoking, but smoking in general, which was what they
were after, was like, let's just try and get smoking
way down overall, and individual states started enacting bands. I
think in ninety eight, Utah and California were the first
and only ones to say, like, hey, you can't smoke
(34:35):
in restaurants anymore, you can't smoke in public places. Second
hand smoke is a real thing, and most states had
these bands in place now and people just generally look
at smoking differently, like, you know, when someone lights up
in public, I guess unless you're in Philadelphia, there are
a lot of people now that will look sort of like,
what are you doing dude?
Speaker 3 (34:56):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (34:56):
Like who still does that exactly? Or when you a
cigarette filter out the window when you're done with it.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
JESU, so sorry, I just went to a dark place.
Speaker 3 (35:08):
Now, I'm with you, I understand.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
So upsetting, Yeah, especially when one flicks off your windshield
and you see a spark bounce.
Speaker 3 (35:13):
Well that's kind of.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Well, just briefly, Yes.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
So there was a lot of a lot of success
directly from the Master Settlement Agreement. Let's talk about the
problems with the Master Settlement Agreement, because a lot of
people are like, this could have been done better, we
should have done the McCain bill right. And then really importantly,
there were only a couple of states that had the
foresight to designate the payments from the Master Settlement Agreement
(35:44):
from the tobacco companies that are made annually in perpetuity.
I hadn't realized this. There's no end date to these
payments as far as I know, which I don't fully
understand because I think they settled on like an actual number, right,
So that doesn't quite make sense to me. But I've
seen in multiple places that these are imperpetuity payments.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
Yeah. The only thing I can figure out there is
they're like, hey, you're still selling cigarettes and this is
still a problem for medicaid. So it's not like that's
ever going to stop. That's the only thing I can
figure out.
Speaker 3 (36:16):
Yeah, I've got that. I get that too.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
I think that that's probably it that's the best argument
for it. But then does that mean that their ultimate
payouts are going to exceed that the hundreds of billions
of dollars that they agreed to pay out to the
states over twenty five years. Like, that's the part I
don't get. But the problem is that the states, very
few states actually said this money is designated for anti
(36:39):
smoking programs, to pay for health care for smokers, or
to repay public costs for healthcare that we spend on smokers.
A lot of states don't do that, and in fact,
most of the states use it to like fill budget
gaps to build new roads. If there's rap, they do
(37:00):
something called securitization, where they sell bonds against their future
annual payment from the tobacco companies.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
Did you see that?
Speaker 1 (37:08):
Yeah, yeah, that's kind of you know, it's a shell
game with the government in a way, In a lot
of ways, I think.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Yeah, because not only are they I mean, it's just
unseemly in the first place, but secondly, when those bonds
come due, when they get that Master Settlement Agreement annual
payment to the state, they have to pay out not
just the face value of the bonds that they sold,
they have to use some of that money to pay
the interest too, So the state's getting less than it
(37:35):
would have if it didn't sell those bonds ahead of time. Right,
So I think that's a sign of poor management of
a state typically if you.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Ask me, Yeah, for sure. I think in the end,
less than three percent of these funds have gone to
smoking prevention and cessation programs, which was a lot of
the reason they initially said they were going to do this.
And I think no state has funded anti tobacco programs
(38:04):
at CDC recommended levels at all.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
Right, and some states even used them to help the
tobacco industry. I know North Carolina, Oh man, they spent
forty five billion dollars, I think on modernizing tobacco farms,
not hey, here's money for your losses. And I think
I said, forty forty two million, not like, here's some
(38:29):
money to compensate you for your losses. Here's some money
to get better at tobacco farming for the future. That's
what That's what North Carolina spent some of its money on.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
Yeah, I think North Carolina big tobacco state. Obviously, they
use seventy five percent of their settlement funds for tobacco production.
It's crazy some of that to private tobacco producers like
you talked about that had taken a hit. But also yeah,
like you said, like, hey, you want a tobacco museum,
(39:00):
will build it with that money.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Right, And if we build it, they will come to
the tobacco company.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Oh man, that's hard to believe on that one.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
There's another thing too, The tobacco companies haven't exactly paid
out all this money. They were supposed to pay out
the couple hundred I think what it was, three hundred
something billion dollars over twenty five years as part of
the settlement in nineteen ninety eight. They have paid out,
according to a press release from Vermont's Attorney General office,
one hundred and seventy five billion, So I think less
(39:29):
than half of what they said. And it's been a
lot longer than twenty five years now, right. And one
of the reasons why is because as part of the
agreement the tobacco companies, there are two calculations that have
to be taken into account. There has to be an
inflation calculation that it's just for inflation, so that the
(39:50):
states are getting their actual value of the dollars that
the tobacco companies agreed to. That makes sense. There's also
a sales formula that they have to calculate every year
to take into account the amount of profits that they're
losing to companies that aren't part of the Master Settlement
(40:10):
Agreement and therefore aren't hamstrung by those payments, which means
that in some cases, some years there have been the
sales calculation has been larger than the inflation calculation. Right,
So the states have shouldered the burden of competition for
(40:31):
these tobacco companies, Like the States took on that loss
for the tobacco companies, which is just disgusting to me.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
Yeah, and you know, when you just think about what's
happened with the raising the cost of cigarettes, there's a
lot of people that look at the settlement of like, well,
now you're just getting like the tobacco companies aren't paying states,
Like people who still smoke cigarettes are just funneling money
through the tobacco companies to the states.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
Yeah, that's a great way to put it, okay, Chuck.
So one of the other things the legacies of the
Master Settlement Agreement is it created a blueprint. I think
you said this kind of early on for other ways
that states could get together and create real change against
corporate malfeasance, specifically, again in cases where there is harm
(41:20):
that comes directly from using a product as directed or
intended right, not abusing it or something you're just using
it like it's supposed to be used and you're being harmed.
So you have things like social media, opioids, climate change
is a trickier one, but fast food and the reason
why also they fit this Master Settlement Agreement framework is
(41:42):
these companies are following like a lot of the same
techniques that the tobacco industry laid down by starting back
in the fifties.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Yeah, it's interesting because there's there are two playbooks. On
the one side, you have the government. Now that's like
all right, now, we got a playbook moving forward, so
we can sue Meta about social media and the harms
to children and the fact that they know they're targeting
children and harming children, or opioids of course with the
(42:12):
pharmaceutical companies. But then there's that other playbook like you
were talking about, where they end up getting sued. But
Meta and the pharmaceutical companies were like, hey, you know
what if we can get kids hooked on this stuff
and market to children, then we can make a lot
more money for investors.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
Yeah, a good example of that, not necessarily targeting children,
but of just this completely screwing up the narrative for
their own gain at the expense.
Speaker 3 (42:39):
Of people's lives.
Speaker 2 (42:40):
The opioid pharmaceutical industry with opioids basically floated this idea
called pseudo addiction to where the people who were supposedly
addicted to opioids weren't actually addicted. What was happening is
that their pain wasn't being managed adequately. That's why they
needed to take more. We're going around from doctor to doctor,
(43:02):
and the answer the solution was to up their dose,
don't cut them off, don't put them in treatment.
Speaker 3 (43:06):
Up their dose.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
That's what they really need, because it's not real addiction
because you can't.
Speaker 3 (43:10):
Get addicted to opioids.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
They actually publicly said stuff like that, and I mean
that's cause to go after them alone, you.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
Know, yeah, I mean, yeah, just as despicable as any
of these huge corporations sort of issuing these really flimsy
denials that the public just it just makes them look worse.
You know, the public doesn't buy this stuff.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
Yeah, it's true now I think we did before.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
Yeah you know, yeah, you're probably right.
Speaker 3 (43:40):
You got anything else?
Speaker 1 (43:42):
I got nothing else. That's uh, this is we gotta Yeah.
I feel like this is in a suite of episodes
we've done over the years. Josh and Chuck take on the.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
World, big Industry. Well, Chuck doesn't have anything else. Chuck
said the world, and I said big industry, So that
combination obviously unlocked listener mail.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
Hey, guys, amongst my favorite things, and that's favorite with
an ou So I think I know where Rebecca's from,
or at least you know one of a few places
she could be from. One of my favorite things about
stuff you should know is Josh's jokes that don't land. Wow,
all right, absolutely hates my jokes that don't land, by
(44:25):
the way, so you should feel good and counting how
many no, no, no, okay, and counting how many times
Chuck says that's right in an episode, I guess i'd
feel like I say sure more.
Speaker 2 (44:36):
Than more than that's right, but you say for sure
for sure, yeah for sure, But just one time I
was adding a for sure to the first for sure
for sure.
Speaker 1 (44:45):
My absolute favorite thing, though, guys has to be the
interlude jingles before and after.
Speaker 3 (44:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:50):
I love how the jingle always matches the theme of
the show. For example, the short stuff on the Benefits
of Singing in a group had the barbershop Quartet episode
about Shakespeare had the green sleeve style jingle. In Schoolhouse
Rock had the queen style jingle. My favorite one might
have been the techno punk jingles on the Cyberpunk episode,
which was fantastic. All that to say, shout out to
Jerry and the folks who produce these. They are appreciated,
(45:13):
and Rebecca, I'm glad you brought this up. We said
it a lot over the years, but it always bears
repeating that, you know, these are written by Stuff you
should Know listers and produced and performed and we just
get these and people are like, hey, use this thing.
I made it as a love letter to the show.
And then Jerry does a great job of selecting the
episodes where it has a nice bit, so we always
(45:33):
like reiterating this is how it works, and Rebecca since
kindess regards in a PS. Shout out to Rebecca's twin
sister Lauren, who introduced Rebecca to Stuff you Should Know
many years ago and they have been regularly discussing episodes
weekly since that's awesome.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
Yeah, thank you. We love it when a family member
or friend turns somebody onto Stuff you Should Know and
then they end up talking about or listening together.
Speaker 3 (45:59):
That's kind of the point.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
That's how a community has formed. Everybody.
Speaker 2 (46:02):
Also shout out to Dave and Ben too, who also
do a pretty boss job of selecting jingles, but I.
Speaker 3 (46:08):
Think Jerry's probably the goat.
Speaker 1 (46:11):
Agreed.
Speaker 2 (46:12):
If you want to be like Rebecca and by proxy
Lauren and get in touch with this via email, all
you have to do is send it off to Stuff
Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (46:26):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart 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 this is stuff you
should Know. I think part of our ongoing corporate mouthfeas.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
In this edition, Yeah for sure. And the beginning of
this episode ties in a lot with we did an
episode about the history of the cigarette, sure, like just
the thing that you shouldn't put in your mouth, but
people do, right, And so we're going to talk a
little bit about that here at the beginning, because you
need to know a little bit about that as it
(00:42):
leads up to what were the you know this lawsuits
against big Tobacco. And we should start by saying that
it's been a long time that we've known that tobacco
and smoking was really bad for you and would kill you.
Like the nineteen twenties we knew for sure, the fifties
we really really knew. And in the nineteen sixties is
(01:06):
when John F. Kennedy finally came out via his Surgeon
General Luther Terry, and said, all right, everybody, it's nineteen
sixty four. I'm finally going to issue a government report
based on you know about a dozen studies with lots
of data about a million male smokers, and this stuff
is really bad for you. So we're going to have
(01:26):
to start putting warning labels on packages.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Yeah. The great thing about those warning labels, though, is
you were educated to imagine Sammy Davis Junior saying it
in your head.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
So the cigarette companies this is the beginning of their playbook,
and their playbook was basically, nah, yeah, prove it. You
can't prove it. This is the whole idea of settled science,
the idea that which is just a complete oxymoron, science
has never settled. It's a constant, ongoing process. But the
(02:03):
idea that you have to have one definitive proof before
you can even begin talking about whether something is harmful
or not, and really exploiting and manipulating the public through
really horrible means, this is where that all started. And
the first response that cigarette companies came up with was
to say, all right, how about we put filters on cigarettes, Because,
(02:26):
as everybody knows, cigarettes make your throat kind of scratchy.
Sometimes they can make you hoarse, and that's okay, that's
a part of smoking. These new filters are going to
help with all of that, and there you go. Cigarettes
are healthy everybody.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
That's right. In the sixties and seventies, that's when we
saw lighter cigarettes or low tar cigarettes. In the fifties,
they got really sort of organized and official about their
PR campaigns. I guess they're propaganda campaigns. When they formed
the Tobacco Industry Research Committee under the guise of studying
(03:03):
the health hazards of smoking, but it was very much
just a PR move. They put out an ad called
a Frank Statement the cigarette smokers early on, which said like, hey,
we're really like, your health is paramount to us as
we sell you cigarettes. It's hard not to laugh because
this is just so dumb to think about that people
would have bought this.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Yeah, but also just so cynical that they would need
for sure this too, you know.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
But they said, all right, we're really going to pledge
to research this everyone because we care about your health.
But also again, like, you can't really prove that it's
just a cigarettes, Like, how do you know that these
people dying of lung cancer didn't also get it from
all the other stuff that's going on in the world.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Yeah, And actually that would become kind of codified in
what's called the Roper proposal. There was a Tobacco Institute
vice president, so in addition to the Tobacco Industry Research Committee,
they also came up with the Tobacco and this Institute,
and then they renamed the TRC the Council for Tobacco Research.
(04:06):
No word of the industry in it, so it's even
more trustworthy, right, And Fred Panzer was vice president of
the Tobacco Institute, and he wrote a memo in nineteen
seventy two that said, essentially, here's what we should do.
We need to create doubt about the health charge without
actually denying it. And essentially it's a variation on the
(04:27):
theme that the case is not proved. And he said,
kind of what you were saying that like these are
like you can't really prove that it's cigarettes. So for example,
extroverts are more likely to smoke cigarettes, but they're also
more likely to get out in the world and drop out.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
Of a heart attack.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
So maybe it's just that extroverts smoke cigarettes, or that
there was one called the constitutional hypothesis that was people
who get sick from smoking are biologically predisposed to get
sick in general, so it's really them. This was all
just thrown about in nineteen seventy two to basically lie
to the public and confuse the public about whether or
(05:06):
not cigarettes were unhealthy or harmful.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Yeah, so they're pushing this campaign out behind the scenes.
They're just throwing in the back file drawer every study
that they had that showed that nicotine was addictive, that
smoking was bad for you, Like, they're suppressing that information
as well as at the same time targeting children with,
(05:30):
you know, product placement in movies, specifically Superman two in
nineteen eighty one with Marlborough. Obviously we've talked about camel
Joe before in the history of the cigarette. That was
what I say, cammel Joe. Yeah, I like camel Joe. Okay,
I think we should leave all this in there except
the beep, although there's plenty of those episodes.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
Yeah, let's get the beep out.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
So that was in nineteen eighty eight. I like camel Joe.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
I like so called you.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
I always called them camel Joe. I didn't know that
wasn't the name.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
I'm sure there's some retired tobacco industry guy who was like, man,
we should have called him Camel Joe. That is way better.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
Here's a gen X stat for you, which is fairly
staggering but completely believable. Youth smoking, like kids and teenager smoking,
had been on the decline kind of through the seventies
and eighties for the most part, and then in the
nineties when gen X came around to like prime smoking age,
it really jumped. It hit an all time high in
(06:31):
nineteen ninety seven of thirty six point four percent of
youth were smoking. Adults were smoking at twenty four point
seven percent at the time, and that's just a staggering number.
I think it's at like three point something percent now.
So gen xers were smoking at a rate of thirty
six percent.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
And there's two things that they suggest had to do
with that huge jump in youth smoking. One was this
big campaign and push to target youth smokers. The tobacco
industry called them replacement smokers. They would replace the other
lifelong smokers that died off from smoking, right. And that's
(07:12):
the thing too, is like one of the things about smoking,
very few people start smoking as adults. We call them
total morons. Most people who smoke started smoking in adolescents.
So the tobacco industry had every incentive to go after kids.
They just knew that society would not allow them to
do that if they did it overtly, so they had
(07:32):
to do it, you know, kind of under the radar
with Camel Joe. The other thing is that there was
a price war that started in the mid nineties, and
that they think that the drop in the price of cigarettes, Yeah,
made it more likely for younger kids to smoke, because
younger kids are more price sensitive than older people who
(07:54):
are smokers.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Remember how cheap cigarettes were back then. Yeah, it's like
a buck buck twenty five a pack or something for sure. Yeah.
I mean I wasn't a regular smoker. I occasionally smoked,
as we talked about before, So I wasn't like buying packs,
but I sold them at the Golden Pantry in Athens,
Georgia on the East Side. And cigarettes were cheap, and
(08:15):
they're somebody told me the day that they were like
twelve to fifteen dollars in like twenty something bucks in
New York a pack.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
I believe that. I totally believe that.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Oly. Well, we'll see why here in a minute.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
So yeah, one of the other things too, that they're
doing at the same time, besides suppressing studies sewing doubt
and confusion among the public about the harm of cigarettes,
they're just out and out denying publicly that not only
your cigarettes not harmful, they're not even addictive. That as
recently as nineteen ninety four, Yeah, they were publicly saying,
(08:50):
like the head of Philip Morris was saying in interviews,
we do not believe cigarettes are addictive. In the nineties,
people had known, like all you had to do is
ask a smoker back in fifties if they were addicted
to cigarettes, and they could tell you that they probably were.
And like this, the industry in the nineties still wouldn't
fess up to that. Like that was their tactic. Just
(09:12):
a complete solid wall with zero cracks in it, over
and over again being reinforced publicly.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Yeah. Actually, in the nineteen fifties, I think they probably said, like, no,
I don't think they're addicted, but do you have a cigarette?
Can I have a cigarette?
Speaker 3 (09:25):
Right?
Speaker 1 (09:25):
I see a guy where they're smoking, you think he
has an extra cigarette for me?
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Right?
Speaker 1 (09:29):
All right? So in the nineteen fifties, we need to
start with sort of lawsuit talk. There were a lot
of lawsuits all unsuccessful. By the mid nineties, when they
were still saying that it wasn't addictive, there were at
least four hundred lawsuits that they never lost, they never settled.
They had one hundred percent record.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
That's crazy, which is.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Staggering to learn. They had obviously a ton of money
to form like the best legal representation they could, but
they were also actively low being state governments about making
it harder to sue about tort reform because like, hey,
tobacco's a natural product, so cigarettes fall into that category,
like despite all the other stuff that's in there, so
(10:13):
you can't sue somebody for packaging a natural thing and
selling it to people.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
That was the other thing they were doing, too, is
they were really lobbying government really effectively.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Like they spent a lot of money on.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Lobbyists, right, not like now.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
So yeah, they were like the teflon down of industries.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
I guess, yeah, tobacco industry.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Was what did you just say, not like now, because
I picked up like atastic, Yeah, what were you mentioning?
Speaker 1 (10:45):
I'm sure they're still pouring tons of money into the lobby.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Oh sure, sure, yeah, I'm sure too. But so they
were they were just completely untouchable, Like, I mean, if
you have one hundred percent record, that in and of
it self will prevent people from filing suit against you.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Right, yeah, because it's expensive, it is, right.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
And you're just like, I'm not gonna win, or the
chances of me winning are so low, I might not
even file suit. So the state also, we should mention
Congress is doing almost nothing about this at this point.
So the state attorneys general, William Safire just smiled from heaven.
Led by a guy named Michael Moore, he was the
(11:28):
attorney general from Mississippi. They got together and they said, well,
if the federal government's I can't do anything about it,
we're going to Yeah, and one state might not be
able to take on the tobacco industry, but every state,
territory and DC together definitely can take on the tobacco industry.
Not only can we take them on, we can seriously
(11:50):
threaten to bankrupt the entire tobacco industry right out of
existence if we really try.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Yeah, and they play their cards right, because they were like,
how can we best go at them? Maybe medicaid is
the way to do it, because we have these medicaid
programs through our individual states that are not going bankrupt,
but they're they're in bad shape in a lot of
cases because they're treating all these smokers who are really
expensive to get through, like you know, lung cancer treatment,
(12:21):
and they have deceived us for all these years. So
let's go after him for RICO status like fraud and racketeering.
And that'll send a shiver even through the spine of
a teflon don. And they were turning up, like Livia says,
like literal truckloads of documents from the industry about them
(12:43):
selling to teenagers, bearing studies covering up what they knew
about how addictive everything was. And there were I mean,
this would be a good sort of thriller movie, almost
like a Soderberg kind of thing. You probably do a
great job with it. Where like they're racing like documents
out of offices while they're trying to actively like bury
(13:04):
these documents, Like I think the guy from Texas was
literally trying to put papers on a private jet so
they could be taken to a district judge before the
state court could seal them up because once the Feds
are investigating, it can't be sealed at the state.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Level, right or even if they do steal it at
the state level. This federal district judge is like, that
doesn't apply to me, so I can I can make
these public are part of a court case, right, So yeah,
I mean yeah, that is like a thriller. And there
is something that kind of touched on this. It was
the Insider with who is the Australian actor he used
to get in fights all the time?
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Russell Crowe?
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Yeah, Russell Crowe is Jeffrey Wiggand I think yeah, who
was like this whistleblower a movie back on Industry?
Speaker 3 (13:46):
It was great.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
I think that was a Michael Man movie.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Michael Mann, Man, I nailed it. You should nailing all
of it.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
I should be a guest on movie Crush.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Oh man, if only.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
But one of the other things you kind of touched
on their strategy, like the focusing on lying to the
public and targeting teens. That was a really smart strategy
because if they were just like cigarettes are harmful and
we need to get rid of them, a lot of
adults are like, you don't need to tell me whether
I should smoke or not. I can kill myself if
(14:19):
I want to. So they left that part alone and
they went after the fact that they were targeting teens
and lying to the public, because the public sentiment can
get behind those two things like yeah, kids are out
of bounds, we don't want them smoking, and you know
we were lied to all these years by these same people. Yeah,
go get them. So that was a really smart strategy
(14:40):
that these attorneys general like took on, like it was amazing,
an amazing court angle, I think is what they call them,
what a court angle?
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Look at that, Yeah, for sure. And the writing was
on the wall for investors because we're talking about hundreds
of billions of dollars at stake, and they were like, hey,
this is this is going to look really bad and
our stock prices are going to really go in the tank.
And so you got to cut a deal here, which
the tobacco company never had thought about, you know, because
(15:12):
they had not only lost, never lost, they never settled anything.
So finally in April of ninety seven, they were set
to go to trial in a few months and they're like,
all right, let's get a meeting set up with this
Michael Moore character from Mississippi, not the movie guy obviously,
and an attorney for Tobacco Free Kids who was working
with the States about all the marketing toward you know,
(15:34):
kids with Joe, Cammel Joe and everybody. So they started negotiating, like,
all right, out of the gate, let's just say we'll
get rid of Camel Joe. We love him, kids love him,
but we'll get rid of him and the marble or
man if that makes you happy. And then a few
months later in June, they said, all right, we got
to start talking, like hash out the money part. So
(15:56):
how does three hundred and sixty eight and a half
billion dollars sound over twenty five years as just an
opening salvo?
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Yeah, And the States were like, I was not expecting
that actually, but they so they were like, okay, here's
the problem though, These are like we need to bring
the Feds in, like that Congress has to approve of
this deal the way that we've set it up. And
there were some federal aspects to it. One was that
the FDA would start regulating tobacco products. Another one was
(16:26):
that the companies, these tobacco companies would be protected against
any further civil and class action lawsuits.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
This is the big one.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
In exchange, they would create a fund to pay some
of those people off, and then there would also be
federal restrictions on indoor smoking. And this did not go
very far because of that protection of the companies.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Right, yeah, I mean that was the sticking point. I
think they could have not too happily lived with the
rest of it, but that was a big one as
far as Congress, and soon enough the American people were like,
uh uh, we can't have that. No, So Congress had
a build to ratify or at least considering a bill
to ratify it, Universal Tobacco Settlement Act S fourteen fourteen.
(17:14):
They were debating it, all this disclosure comes out and
they're like, man, they were really awful companies and it's
worse than we thought even and the idea of them
being protected moving forward, like is it going to fly?
So the late Senator John McCain said, all right, how
about S fourteen fifteen where there's more money, like had
(17:35):
this five hundred and twenty billion sound and we're not
going to protect you from now on like you you
can be sued moving forward too.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
The industry lobbied like they've never lobbied before to keep
this from getting passed through. And again you mentioned the
stock prices when all these stuff, the stuff is going on,
their stocks are tanking. When you know there would be
a win for in the negotiations for the tobacco companies,
their stock prices would go back up. It's all very cynical.
And this stock price went back up after McCain's bill
(18:07):
did not get passed. And one of the reasons it
wasn't passed is because other senators added like riders that
had nothing to do with tobacco, and I'm guessing unpopular writers,
probably at the behest of the tobacco companies. I could
not find the writers to save my life, to basically
sink this bill. You know, like, imagine if you had
(18:28):
this great bill and then somebody's like, I'm also adding
a rider to repeal the requirement for child sexual predators
from having to register and they can live by schools. Now,
your bill's not going to pass. And I get the
impression that that's kind of what happened to McCain's bill.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Yeah, for sure, there was another thing we just sort
of should mention in passing at least, so it was
another suit in October of ninety seven. This is why
they're debating these original bills in Congress where they did settle.
It was a separate class action suit that was filed
ninety one by flight attendants in the United States saying like, hey,
(19:07):
smoking sections and planes are like killing us and it's
pretty awful. So it was a husband and wife team
named Stanley and Susan Rosenblatt who filed this one, and
they ended up settling for three hundred million dollars to
fund medical research. And they said this was a big
sort of turning point, and that's the first time they
(19:27):
officially caved. And again this is while they're debating these
bills in the Congress.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Right, Chuck, I feel like we set things up pretty
well for a break, Like we deserve an.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Ad we deserve a break today.
Speaker 4 (19:42):
Let's do it, okay, Okay.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
So things are just kind of not going quite well
because the whole thing was handed over from the states
to Congress, and Congress just fumbled it.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
As they do.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
So some of the states went on and we're like,
we're gonna just keep going and negotiating our own agreements
with the tobacco companies Florida, Minnesota, Mississippi, who had led
the charge originally in the first place, and Texas. They
all came up with their own settlements and like pretty
(20:38):
eye popping amounts, Texas got more than seventeen and a
half billion dollars out of their agreement. Minnesota got a
nice chunk of change. But they also had the foresight
to say, not only are you going to settle with money,
part of this is that you have to disclose public records.
All internal documents that are part of discovery in this
(21:02):
process are going to be made public after this, and
the tobacco companies had to agree with that. So that
was where a lot of these disclosures came from. That
they had just been lying, lying, lying, because these troves
of documents that came up in discovery during these cases,
just journalists went crazy. It was like a feeding frenzy
(21:24):
on them.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Oh yeah, for sure. They saw the writing on the
wall once again. So they got together with the other
remaining states who were all plaintiffs at this point in
November of nineteen ninety eight and agreed to what would
end up being the Tabasco Tabasco, the Tobacco Oh man,
the Tabasco Settlement. Can you imagine the numbers? The Tobacco
(21:49):
Master Settlement Agreement, the MSA, which would include two hundred
and six billion dollars paid out over twenty five years
to forty six states, five territories in DC. Yeah, and
they would allocate it according to like how many smokers
they estimated each state had and how much It was
still based on the medicaid thing, so how much they had,
(22:09):
you know, had to pay out and Medicaid for all
these related costs. They said, Well, also stop targeting miners,
even though they really like to smoke, as it turns out,
and they love cartoon camels, So no more cartoon characters
and our ads. We're not going to give away free
cigarettes to miners at recess, which is crazy. We are
(22:32):
going to shut down these you know, sort of shell
research companies that are really just PR firms for US,
dissolving those We're going to release all these documents, and
we're going to create a national foundation to address underage
tobacco use and addiction. And we promised to care this time.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
Yeah, we're a newer, gentler loving tobacco company.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
They also created what's now known as the Truth Initiative,
which is this whole teen anti smoking campaign that was
funded originally by the tobacco companies.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Those commercials were great.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
Yeah, they're still around. The Truth Initiative is they seem
to have migrated online.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Surprisingly, Yeah, I'm sure.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
I mean, I guess that's where kids are these days
or something.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
That's where the kids are.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
And so initially this agreement was just before or between
these forty six states and territories in DC and the
four largest tobacco companies which represented the vast majority of
the market share of the tobacco industry in the United States,
Philip Morris, R. J. Reynolds, Brown and Williamson and Laurellard.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
I'd only heard of two of those.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Yeah, for sure, I've heard of the other ones, but
I cannot tell you what they make.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Okay, Yeah, no idea, let's just leave it at that.
Maybe they make a Bucks I remember, Yeah, I remember.
I think we talked about Bucks in the cigarettes episodes
were at the Golden Pantry. Those were the Those are
the ones that I think the rumor was, at least
they were just made from the sweepings, the trimmings and
sweepings up of factories. They would just package them as Bucks.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
I'm quite sure that that is true to some degree.
There's a kernel of truth in there, and there's probably
kernels of something in those buck.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
Cigarettes just about to say that.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
So a bunch of manufacturers were like, we don't need
to take part in this. We didn't do that much damage.
They're called non participating manufacturers. They were typically smaller players.
I mean, if you weren't one of the big four,
you were basically by definition, one of the smaller players.
But the States are like, not so fast. You still
are going to have to pay money to us for
(24:38):
each cigarette that you sell. And those smaller players, most
of them were like, well, maybe we'll sign this master
settlement after all the mask So they really lasted, like
a lot of tobacco manufacturers into this, this whole agreement.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
Yeah, if you're wondering about DIP, they had a different agreement,
but it was still an agreement kind of under the
spanner with US Tobacco Company, which makes Skull and Copenhagen.
Did you ever dip at all?
Speaker 3 (25:07):
Yes? I did.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
One thing I never really did was chew. That was
I tried it once and turned as green as you
can get.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
Yeah, I chewed tobacco early on. We might have spoken
about this when I was a youth group member at
my church. It was pretty popular. So I chewed like
Redman and Levi Garrett occasionally and then here and there.
In college, I would dip with friends who dipped, but
it never, like all nicotine never got its hooks and
me thankfully.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Oh that is thankful, for sure, because once it does,
it's hard to get rid of.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Yeah, for sure. But one difference with the dip companies
is they were given out and I remember this is
a big deal. They used to just give out reams
of dip to minor league baseball and major league baseball.
That's why baseball was and other sports too, but baseball
was always associated with dipping. But they were like, you
can't give this stuff away to like high school and
(26:00):
college baseball teams anymore. In minor league baseball teams.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
Yeah, I think any sports team because like kids look
up to them, right, which is a big part of
why they were doing this. So the sunflower seed companies.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
Rejoiced, oh for sure.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
So there was.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Another thing that came up that was fairly unpopular. But
also I think people were just kind of what's not ambivalent,
but where you're of two minds and you're kind of
tussling over it internally, Yeah, the internal tussley we'll call it.
Five point one five billion dollars went to the National
(26:37):
Tobacco Growers Settlement Trust Fund to compensate tobacco farmers because
they were going to sell a lot less tobacco.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Because of this.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
And it's interesting to think about.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Yeah, because you're like, on the one hand, like, who cares,
it's tobacco, and then on the other hand, you're like,
these are often family farmers who have been doing this
for generation. So I kind of to yeah, I'm tussling
internally over it.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
What word is it? I know what you're talking about. Yeah,
I don't know. I don't know somewhere right.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
In And then one other thing about this too that
was part of the provision was people were like, well,
what about the federal government because Medicaid is this joint
state federal partnership and the feds fund a lot of this,
And the Feds were like, no, we're leaving ourselves out.
We're waiving any right to any of that money. This
was the state's game, and they did a great job
with it.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Yeah, a lot of public health officials were like not
super happy about that because they were like, hey, listen,
unless we have the Feds overseeing this, How do we
know what the states are going to use this money for?
And you know, not to tease too aggressively, but I
think we'll see an Act three that that was very
much a valid concern.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Yeah, for sure. The Feds did come after them though
they I think this was they were secretly going to
do this, and they're like, no, no, We're just going
to leave it to the states. And the tobacco companies
are like, whoa, and the Feds are like, we have
our own thing we're about to do. There was us
versus Philip Morris at all, and they saw billions and
(28:13):
billions of dollars in compensation for healthcare money that they
had spent out I guess basically what they had shelled
out as part of the Medicaid program. They also went
after them for RICO as racketeers and as being if
you're convicted of racketeering as an organization and you're allowed
to continue on as an organization, the Feds can basically
(28:36):
garnish your profits for a very long time, or they
can go back and seek previous profits, and they did.
They looked for they wanted a portion of the company's
profits from the past forty five years in this case
that was launched in nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Yeah, and in the meantime, Phil Morris was like, hey
Phil Morris at all, thanks a lot, Like why why
has it always got to be us? They're like, you
got a great name, Phil. So the companies did not
settle this time. They're like, all right, we're getting bled
dry by the States. Now the Feds are coming after us.
(29:15):
So we were going to actually fight this thing, and
they lost. In two thousand and six, the District judge
for the United States a rule for the DOJ said no,
you guys are racketeers. I'm going to greatly reduce that
financial penalty down to million I'm sorry, ten billion dollars, yeah,
from the hundreds they were asking for. But you know what,
(29:35):
you got to admit to fraud. You have to issue
what are called corrective statements. And we got to see
all those documents because we know there are still more
documents in your coffers.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
I think there's something like fourteen million documents that were
eventually released internal documents.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
And then finally, remember back as part of like that
first settlement agreement.
Speaker 3 (29:58):
That they tried to kick to the FED to ratify that.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Part of it was having the fdah, yeah, start regulating tobacco.
Speaker 3 (30:06):
That was in nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Yeah, in two thousand and nine, the federal government finally
got around to having the FDA regulate the tobacco industry.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Yeah, all right, let's take our second break, and we'll
come back and talk about what this all meant and
means right after this, all right, we promise talk of
(30:47):
what it all meant and means. And it kind of
depends on who you ask or when you ask as well,
because when it happened and Act, the Effective National Action
to Control Tobacco Group said you know what, and I
think other people too, like the American Cancer Society, the
American Psychological Association, they all got together and said, you
(31:08):
know what, this isn't so great, Like that McCain bill
really had teeth and that didn't pass, and we really
wanted it to. So this is sort of a win
for the cigarette companies. It had a lot of like
obvious immediate impacts. And you know, I talked about, you
know why cigarettes are so expensive, now this is partially
why because they're what's not going to happen is the
(31:30):
investors aren't going to lose any money, so they're going
to say, like, well, just start jacking up cigarette costs,
and a lot less people are smoking, so let's jack
them up even more because we're not going to take
a loss on this.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
Yeah, what are they gonna do? Quit?
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Yeah, So that started almost immediately. As far as price hiking,
like forty five to fifty cents a pack right out
of the gate was just the tip of the iceberg.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Yeah, I mean, did you say twenty dollars a pack?
I believe it, but that's still ipop.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
I think a smoker told me they were like twenty
bucks in New York, but I haven't verified that.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
So one of the things that really happened that people
point to the MSA as being directly responsible for is that,
like the youth smoking just dropped precipitously.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Once they removed the ability for tobacco companies to market
directly to kids and they simultaneously had anti smoking campaigns
targeted towards kids.
Speaker 3 (32:31):
Like it really had an effect.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
Like you said, went from like thirty four percent to
three point eight percent in twenty twenty one. I think
it's even lower than that.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
Now.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
The problem is we didn't learn anything that or we
didn't leave it open enough to apply to future kinds
of tobacco that hadn't been around. So companies like Jewel
and other e cigarette and vape companies they don't face
these same regulations and basically marketed kids. They can use
(33:01):
celebrity endorsers, and they do, but they still get sued
a lot. I think Jewel paid out four hundred and
sixty two million to six different states in twenty twenty three,
So it's still going on. But that's been a huge
dent in the incredible success of the curbing teen smoking.
(33:24):
It's gone back up if you include vaping and hookahs
and stuff like that. But I have also the impression
that kids are a little smarter than we were at
that age. Yeah, and they are seeing through a lot
of this and it's not working quite as well as
it did on us in the nineties.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Yeah, and you know, more parental oversight and just there's
a lot of factors for sure. On the egs. I
think their day has come a little bit, but I
think that it's really there and for some bad stuff
moving forward because of just all the all the stuff
that goes into that juice you know.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Yeah, Yeah, we took a pretty solid stand or position
on vaping. I think we were if I remember correctly,
we were opposed to it in our episode on vaping.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
That's right. The other thing that the settlements led to
was just a turning of the tide, not just with
kids smoking, but smoking in general, which was what they
were after, was like, let's just try and get smoking
way down overall, and individual states started enacting bands. I
think in ninety eight, Utah and California were the first
and only ones to say, like, hey, you can't smoke
(34:35):
in restaurants anymore, you can't smoke in public places. Second
hand smoke is a real thing, and most states had
these bands in place now and people just generally look
at smoking differently, like, you know, when someone lights up
in public, I guess unless you're in Philadelphia, there are
a lot of people now that will look sort of like,
what are you doing dude?
Speaker 3 (34:56):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (34:56):
Like who still does that exactly? Or when you a
cigarette filter out the window when you're done with it.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
JESU, so sorry, I just went to a dark place.
Speaker 3 (35:08):
Now, I'm with you, I understand.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
So upsetting, Yeah, especially when one flicks off your windshield
and you see a spark bounce.
Speaker 3 (35:13):
Well that's kind of.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Well, just briefly, Yes.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
So there was a lot of a lot of success
directly from the Master Settlement Agreement. Let's talk about the
problems with the Master Settlement Agreement, because a lot of
people are like, this could have been done better, we
should have done the McCain bill right. And then really importantly,
there were only a couple of states that had the
foresight to designate the payments from the Master Settlement Agreement
(35:44):
from the tobacco companies that are made annually in perpetuity.
I hadn't realized this. There's no end date to these
payments as far as I know, which I don't fully
understand because I think they settled on like an actual number, right,
So that doesn't quite make sense to me. But I've
seen in multiple places that these are imperpetuity payments.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
Yeah. The only thing I can figure out there is
they're like, hey, you're still selling cigarettes and this is
still a problem for medicaid. So it's not like that's
ever going to stop. That's the only thing I can
figure out.
Speaker 3 (36:16):
Yeah, I've got that. I get that too.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
I think that that's probably it that's the best argument
for it. But then does that mean that their ultimate
payouts are going to exceed that the hundreds of billions
of dollars that they agreed to pay out to the
states over twenty five years. Like, that's the part I
don't get. But the problem is that the states, very
few states actually said this money is designated for anti
(36:39):
smoking programs, to pay for health care for smokers, or
to repay public costs for healthcare that we spend on smokers.
A lot of states don't do that, and in fact,
most of the states use it to like fill budget
gaps to build new roads. If there's rap, they do
(37:00):
something called securitization, where they sell bonds against their future
annual payment from the tobacco companies.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
Did you see that?
Speaker 1 (37:08):
Yeah, yeah, that's kind of you know, it's a shell
game with the government in a way, In a lot
of ways, I think.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Yeah, because not only are they I mean, it's just
unseemly in the first place, but secondly, when those bonds
come due, when they get that Master Settlement Agreement annual
payment to the state, they have to pay out not
just the face value of the bonds that they sold,
they have to use some of that money to pay
the interest too, So the state's getting less than it
(37:35):
would have if it didn't sell those bonds ahead of time. Right,
So I think that's a sign of poor management of
a state typically if you.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Ask me, Yeah, for sure. I think in the end,
less than three percent of these funds have gone to
smoking prevention and cessation programs, which was a lot of
the reason they initially said they were going to do this.
And I think no state has funded anti tobacco programs
(38:04):
at CDC recommended levels at all.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
Right, and some states even used them to help the
tobacco industry. I know North Carolina, Oh man, they spent
forty five billion dollars, I think on modernizing tobacco farms,
not hey, here's money for your losses. And I think
I said, forty forty two million, not like, here's some
(38:29):
money to compensate you for your losses. Here's some money
to get better at tobacco farming for the future. That's
what That's what North Carolina spent some of its money on.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
Yeah, I think North Carolina big tobacco state. Obviously, they
use seventy five percent of their settlement funds for tobacco production.
It's crazy some of that to private tobacco producers like
you talked about that had taken a hit. But also yeah,
like you said, like, hey, you want a tobacco museum,
(39:00):
will build it with that money.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Right, And if we build it, they will come to
the tobacco company.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Oh man, that's hard to believe on that one.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
There's another thing too, The tobacco companies haven't exactly paid
out all this money. They were supposed to pay out
the couple hundred I think what it was, three hundred
something billion dollars over twenty five years as part of
the settlement in nineteen ninety eight. They have paid out,
according to a press release from Vermont's Attorney General office,
one hundred and seventy five billion, So I think less
(39:29):
than half of what they said. And it's been a
lot longer than twenty five years now, right. And one
of the reasons why is because as part of the
agreement the tobacco companies, there are two calculations that have
to be taken into account. There has to be an
inflation calculation that it's just for inflation, so that the
(39:50):
states are getting their actual value of the dollars that
the tobacco companies agreed to. That makes sense. There's also
a sales formula that they have to calculate every year
to take into account the amount of profits that they're
losing to companies that aren't part of the Master Settlement
(40:10):
Agreement and therefore aren't hamstrung by those payments, which means
that in some cases, some years there have been the
sales calculation has been larger than the inflation calculation. Right,
So the states have shouldered the burden of competition for
(40:31):
these tobacco companies, Like the States took on that loss
for the tobacco companies, which is just disgusting to me.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
Yeah, and you know, when you just think about what's
happened with the raising the cost of cigarettes, there's a
lot of people that look at the settlement of like, well,
now you're just getting like the tobacco companies aren't paying states,
Like people who still smoke cigarettes are just funneling money
through the tobacco companies to the states.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
Yeah, that's a great way to put it, okay, Chuck.
So one of the other things the legacies of the
Master Settlement Agreement is it created a blueprint. I think
you said this kind of early on for other ways
that states could get together and create real change against
corporate malfeasance, specifically, again in cases where there is harm
(41:20):
that comes directly from using a product as directed or
intended right, not abusing it or something you're just using
it like it's supposed to be used and you're being harmed.
So you have things like social media, opioids, climate change
is a trickier one, but fast food and the reason
why also they fit this Master Settlement Agreement framework is
(41:42):
these companies are following like a lot of the same
techniques that the tobacco industry laid down by starting back
in the fifties.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Yeah, it's interesting because there's there are two playbooks. On
the one side, you have the government. Now that's like
all right, now, we got a playbook moving forward, so
we can sue Meta about social media and the harms
to children and the fact that they know they're targeting
children and harming children, or opioids of course with the
(42:12):
pharmaceutical companies. But then there's that other playbook like you
were talking about, where they end up getting sued. But
Meta and the pharmaceutical companies were like, hey, you know
what if we can get kids hooked on this stuff
and market to children, then we can make a lot
more money for investors.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
Yeah, a good example of that, not necessarily targeting children,
but of just this completely screwing up the narrative for
their own gain at the expense.
Speaker 3 (42:39):
Of people's lives.
Speaker 2 (42:40):
The opioid pharmaceutical industry with opioids basically floated this idea
called pseudo addiction to where the people who were supposedly
addicted to opioids weren't actually addicted. What was happening is
that their pain wasn't being managed adequately. That's why they
needed to take more. We're going around from doctor to doctor,
(43:02):
and the answer the solution was to up their dose,
don't cut them off, don't put them in treatment.
Speaker 3 (43:06):
Up their dose.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
That's what they really need, because it's not real addiction
because you can't.
Speaker 3 (43:10):
Get addicted to opioids.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
They actually publicly said stuff like that, and I mean
that's cause to go after them alone, you.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
Know, yeah, I mean, yeah, just as despicable as any
of these huge corporations sort of issuing these really flimsy
denials that the public just it just makes them look worse.
You know, the public doesn't buy this stuff.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
Yeah, it's true now I think we did before.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
Yeah you know, yeah, you're probably right.
Speaker 3 (43:40):
You got anything else?
Speaker 1 (43:42):
I got nothing else. That's uh, this is we gotta Yeah.
I feel like this is in a suite of episodes
we've done over the years. Josh and Chuck take on the.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
World, big Industry. Well, Chuck doesn't have anything else. Chuck
said the world, and I said big industry, So that
combination obviously unlocked listener mail.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
Hey, guys, amongst my favorite things, and that's favorite with
an ou So I think I know where Rebecca's from,
or at least you know one of a few places
she could be from. One of my favorite things about
stuff you should know is Josh's jokes that don't land. Wow,
all right, absolutely hates my jokes that don't land, by
(44:25):
the way, so you should feel good and counting how
many no, no, no, okay, and counting how many times
Chuck says that's right in an episode, I guess i'd
feel like I say sure more.
Speaker 2 (44:36):
Than more than that's right, but you say for sure
for sure, yeah for sure, But just one time I
was adding a for sure to the first for sure
for sure.
Speaker 1 (44:45):
My absolute favorite thing, though, guys has to be the
interlude jingles before and after.
Speaker 3 (44:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:50):
I love how the jingle always matches the theme of
the show. For example, the short stuff on the Benefits
of Singing in a group had the barbershop Quartet episode
about Shakespeare had the green sleeve style jingle. In Schoolhouse
Rock had the queen style jingle. My favorite one might
have been the techno punk jingles on the Cyberpunk episode,
which was fantastic. All that to say, shout out to
Jerry and the folks who produce these. They are appreciated,
(45:13):
and Rebecca, I'm glad you brought this up. We said
it a lot over the years, but it always bears
repeating that, you know, these are written by Stuff you
should Know listers and produced and performed and we just
get these and people are like, hey, use this thing.
I made it as a love letter to the show.
And then Jerry does a great job of selecting the
episodes where it has a nice bit, so we always
(45:33):
like reiterating this is how it works, and Rebecca since
kindess regards in a PS. Shout out to Rebecca's twin
sister Lauren, who introduced Rebecca to Stuff you Should Know
many years ago and they have been regularly discussing episodes
weekly since that's awesome.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
Yeah, thank you. We love it when a family member
or friend turns somebody onto Stuff you Should Know and
then they end up talking about or listening together.
Speaker 3 (45:59):
That's kind of the point.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
That's how a community has formed. Everybody.
Speaker 2 (46:02):
Also shout out to Dave and Ben too, who also
do a pretty boss job of selecting jingles, but I.
Speaker 3 (46:08):
Think Jerry's probably the goat.
Speaker 1 (46:11):
Agreed.
Speaker 2 (46:12):
If you want to be like Rebecca and by proxy
Lauren and get in touch with this via email, all
you have to do is send it off to Stuff
Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (46:26):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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