This subject Tobacco in today’s society is considered the world’s greatest cause of death that can be prevented. It’s a substance that gets addictive and will kill a person little by little with no warnings. So many diseases comes from smoking like lung cancer, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), and heart disease. Cigarettes has been the cause of death over a hundred million people over just a century (Kohrman, M., & Benson, P. (2011). Tobacco. Annual Review of Anthropology, 40, 329-344). Many companies will deny the effects or blur out the danger and effects of smoking cigarettes in order to gain more money. Tobacco is a killer that will get you highly addicted.
Since the nineteenth century the yearly consumption and production of cigarettes have increased from twenty billion sticks to more than six trillion sticks. Cigarettes is the greatest cause worldwide of death that can be prevented. The majority of death due to smoking cigarettes will be in developing countries because it is where they influence it more with positivity. During the pre-Columbus period nicotine was used as a medicine or for rituals. There were variety of ways of smoking for example inhaling, chewing, and drinking.
They used tobacco to treat many illness like diarrhea and many used it as toothpaste and disinfectant. It is said that the soldiers who smoke in the military mainly use smoking as a “coping mechanism for trauma and that it correlates with depression and alcohol use”. Anthropologists who did these studies say that men are at a higher risk of becoming a smoker. Women in North America tend to smoke in groups to alleviate negative perceptions. People thought cigarettes at the time were cool ad something that was trending. Mark Nichter in 1990 began to confront and examine health organizations like World Health Organization.
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The WHO organization left out the part where children are exposed to second hand smoking. Kohrman did a web project where they show that the manufacturers of cigarettes have been taking money from the corporate social responsibility and have been putting it into Africa’s HIV prevention program. Therefore taking the attention away from cigarettes and tobacco products policies.
Many Tobacco industries want to take away the attention from buying cigarettes and put it somewhere else. To hide the fact that cigarettes are extremely harmful not just to them but to the people around them. Today tobacco industries endorse the policies of the public health that educates the consumers about the risk in order to frame smokers saying that it’s all an informed adult decision. There are so many new products that are said to be safer than cigarettes. Many say it’s a way to quit smoking cigarettes but they are only replacing it for another way to consume the nicotine.
In reality producers are only reducing to a product that less risky so the consumers don’t quit. Industries use the same problem that their product has created for marketing. They use the problems they have created to trick peoples mind into getting a less harmful product one that acts as therapy. They rather sell and make money than inventing something that will help the public quit smoking.
Many cigarettes factories are owned and run by the government to acquire money for themselves. They acquire taxes from tobacco to fund the national government budget. There’s an alliance between the government and tobacco merchants. So they promote life and death in order to sell. Many haven’t gone into investigating the government’s involvement in it. Many who did this research had PHDs and went to a really good school like Harvard.
Many corporations are just looking at their benefits or what they can get from this. They don’t want people to stop smoking so they don’t lose their money and are willing to create something else to replace it. Something that might “reduces risks” of getting a disease but doesn’t entirely reduce it. Cigarettes has killed millions of people over the past century and will keep affecting many more.
References
- Tobacco and public health: ethical issues in the research and translation of evidence
- CDC – Tobacco Data and Statistics
- World Health Organization – Tobacco Fact Sheet
- Tobacco Control Journal
- The Global Burden of Disease from Tobacco Use: Indicators for Comparative Assessment and their Application to France
- Global burden of tobacco-related cancer both smoking and smokeless and its contribution to early cancer deaths
- Statista – Tobacco Industry
