Addiction

Cigarettes and Apps Are The Same

I grew up in a smoking

world in America and Europe. In the ‘50s doctors went on TV advertising promoting that such-and-such brand was healthy. By the time the late ‘60s came, health risks were more apparent and advertising on TV showed cartoons with Yogi Bear mocking a smoker “coughing his fool head off.” Soon to follow were notices on the side of cigarette packages claiming cigarettes promoted cancer and emphysema. Soon to be followed by graphic print images of lungs post-mortem, swiftly followed by television commercials where dying cancer patients breathed with the aid of a voice vibrator after smoking had caused their vocal chords to be removed.

For 30 years, along with the media outreach to stop smoking’s death toll, the tar and nicotine levels of cigarettes were forced into open debate, cigarette vending machines mostly outlawed because they gave no age limit purchase to minors who, through eventual legislation, we forbidden to buy any tobacco products.

Of all the measures to halt smoking, the public awareness campaigns had the most lasting effect. Smoke and you are killing yourself. Show the public dying, crippled, surgically carved-up smokers, and the glamor of smoking is reduced to a risk that any sane person would want to avoid. How to avoid? Up sprang another industry of nicotine patches, nicotine gum and then the so-called savior of those wanting to stop smoking – the pseudo-smoking inhalers, vapes, often with nicotine added. It is worth noting that the FDA still has not come out against these vapes with any scientific resolve, nor political resolve. Why? The lobby-strong marijuana industry, represented by past political leaders like GOP Speaker John Boehner, are relying on the intake method of their product, either smoking or in vapes (as well as “edibles”).

As a culture, we’ve seen all the spin arguments before. “People can self-regulate.” Some can, that is true, so why then did the cigarette industry promote “2 packs a day is healthy” in the ‘50s. Why did Madison Avenue and the lobbyists fight for decades any notion that cigarette smoking is deadly?

Today, the undercurrent, and lessons learned by the tobacco industry, are being played out again with the Internet applications (“apps”). Facebook is not harmful as an app, why should it be restricted? Nor are Snapchat, X, TikTok, Instagram and a host of others. Nor were, in their day, Cool, Marlboro, Kent, Camels, Lucky Strike, Winston, or Virginia Slims. Designed to be addictive, promoting content, visual and aural intake, are addictive, so the end result is the same – commercial gain for the companies at the expense of well-being for some users. Not all users, but definitely some users – especially those not old enough to understand the risk, understand the life-long addition.

Do you know anyone who started smoking for the first time at age 30? If not, why not? Perhaps by that age they understood, learned of, the risks and wanted to avoid them. Yet, today do you know of any teenager who has not tried a vape? Some won’t, vaping is not nationally promoted. And, here’s the biggest question of addition today: do you know of any, even one, young person who is not online on one of those social media apps? Compared with the percentage of cigarette smoking teens in 1960, at 42%, the percentage of teens on Internet apps is 100%. That’s an addiction rate, a designed addiction promotion rate, of 100%. Weaning them off these compulsive apps and unhealthy mental degradation, makes the campaign against cigarettes look like childsplay.