Tobacco Use in the USA
• High school students who are current (past month) smokers: 23.0% or 3.5+ million [Boys: 22.9% Girls: 23.0%]
• High school males who currently use smokeless tobacco: 13.6% [Girls: 2.2%]
• Kids (under 18) who try smoking for the first time each day: 4,000
• Kids (under 18) who become new regular, daily smokers each day: 1,000+
• Kids exposed to secondhand smoke at home: 15.5 million
• Workplaces that have smoke-free policies: 68.6%
• Packs of cigarettes consumed by kids each year: 800 million (roughly $2.0 billion per year in sales revenue)
• Adults in the USA who smoke: 20.9% or about 45 million [Men: 23.9% Women: 18.1%]
Deaths & Disease in the USA from Tobacco Use
• People who die each year from their own cigarette smoking: 400,000
• People who die each year from others' smoking (secondhand smoke & pregnancy smoking): 38,000 to 67,500
• Kids under 18 alive today who will ultimately die from smoking (unless smoking rates decline): 6,000,000+
• People in the USA who currently suffer from smoking-caused illness: 8.6 million
Smoking kills more people than alcohol, AIDS, car accidents, illegal drugs, murders, and suicides combined, with thousands
more dying from spit tobacco use. Of the roughly 416,000 kids who become new regular, daily smokers each year, almost a
third will ultimately die from it. In addition, smokers lose an average of 13 to 14 years of life because of their smoking.
Tobacco-Related Monetary Costs in the USA
Total annual public and private health care expenditures caused by smoking: $96.7 billion
- Annual Federal and state government smoking-caused Medicaid payments: $30.9 billion
[Federal share: $17.6 billion per year. States share: $13.3 billion]
- Federal government smoking-caused Medicare expenditures each year: $27.4 billion
- Other federal government tobacco-caused healthcare costs (e.g. through VA health care): $9.6 billion
• Annual health care expenditures solely from secondhand smoke exposure: $4.98 billion
Additional smoking-caused health costs caused by tobacco use include annual expenditures for health and developmental
problems of infants and children caused by mothers smoking or being exposed to second-hand smoke during pregnancy or
by kids being exposed to parents smoking after birth (at least $1.4 to $4.0 billion). Also not included above are costs from
smokeless or spit tobacco use, adult secondhand smoke exposure, or pipe/cigar smoking.
Productivity losses caused by smoking each year: $97.6 billion
[Only includes costs from productive work lives shortened by smoking-caused death. Not included: costs from smokingcaused
disability during work lives, smoking-caused sick days, or smoking-caused productivity declines when on the job.]
Annual expenditures through Social Security Survivors Insurance for the more than 300,000 kids who have lost at
least one parent from a smoking-caused death: $2.6 billion
Other non-healthcare costs from tobacco use include residential and commercial property losses from smoking-caused fires
(about $400 million per year) and tobacco-related cleaning & maintenance ($4 billion, commercial only).
• Taxpayers yearly fed/state tax burden from smoking-caused gov't spending: $70.7 billion ($630 per household)
• Smoking-caused health costs and productivity losses per pack sold in USA (low estimate): $10.28 per pack
Tobacco Industry Advertising & Political Influence
• Annual tobacco industry spending on marketing its products nationwide: $15.4 billion ($42+ million each day)
Research studies have found that kids are three times as sensitive to tobacco advertising than adults and are more likely to
be influenced to smoke by cigarette marketing than by peer pressure; and that a third of underage experimentation with
smoking is attributable to tobacco company advertising and promotion.
• Annual tobacco industry contributions to federal candidates, political parties, and PACS: Over $3 million
• Annual tobacco industry expenditures lobbying Congress: Over $20 million
Tobacco companies also spend enormous amounts to influence state and local politics; and, when threatened by the federal
McCain tobacco control bill in 1998, spent more than $125 million in direct and grassroots lobbying to defeat it. Since 1998,
Altria (Philip Morris) has spent more on lobbing Congress than any other business.
Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, January 4, 2007 / Eric Lindblom & Katie McMahon
brieftly introduction
Standards of evidence, both scientific and medical, must be met in cases involving large-scale, serious dangers to public health. A strong case can be made for imposing restrictions on the sale, promotion, and even consumption of a certain products, such as cigarettes, which harm public health and the global economy. There is now a substantial body of evidence demonstrating how damaging tobacco use is on individual nations and on the global economy. Because there are now laws restricting tobacco adverting in the U.S, the tobacco market has diminished in the U.S. Therefore, tobacco companies are focusing marketing on Asian countries.
In many Asian countries, smoking is fashionable. And, Asian smokers seem to be susceptible to glitzy advertising campaigns. Smoking American or European cigarettes is seen as "cool." According to The New York Times article "No gift is more appreciated in Vietnam than British-made ‘555' cigarettes. In China, the choice is Marlboro. Among the gentry of Thailand, it is Dunhill"(Shenon, 1994, p.10). “Rates of smoking are extremely high among Asian men: 60 percent in Japan and China, for example, and a whopping 73 percent in Vietnam” (Pollack, 1997. p.1).
Physicians and scientists are concerned about how increased smoking will affect the health of the Asian people. One scientist estimates that "because of increasing tobacco consumption in Asia, the annual worldwide death toll from tobacco-related illnesses will more than triple over the next two or three decades, from about 3 million a year to 10 million a year, a fifth of them in China. His calculations suggest that 50 million Chinese children alive today will eventually die from diseases linked to cigarette smoking" (Shenon, 1994, p.16).
History of the Problem
The tobacco industry, in general, and individual companies, in particular, conduct themselves to ensure a profit from smokers. But, this industry does have many enemies, and the issue that unites these various groups is health. Cigarette smoking has been linked with heart and lung disease and many forms of cancer. Are the giant multinational tobacco companies in financial danger? Probably not, because cigarette use is growing in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and in the former Soviet Union. “In Asia alone, the World Health Organization estimated at the beginning of the 1990s that smoking would increase by one-third during the decade” (Allin, Mossialos, McKee and Holland, 2004, p.82).
While some Asian governments have followed the lead of Western nations and banned tobacco advertising on television and radio, the tobacco companies find ways to get their message to the people-at sporting events, for example, or through clothing that sports cigarette logos. In Japan, the tobacco industry and four multinational tobacco companies have voluntarily developed new, tough advertising standards, effective April 1, 1998. These standards are designed to control smoking by young people (Nakagawa, 1998). In strict Singapore, anti-smoking laws, such as laws against selling cigarettes to minors, carry heavy penalties. Such laws indicate that anti-smoking attitudes of Western countries are finding their way to some Asian countries, (Nakagawa, 1998).
Scope of the problem
The multinational tobacco companies say that they are not trying to get nonsmokers in Asia to start smoking. Instead, they say, they are trying to get Asian people who already smoke to change brands. The evidence suggests otherwise, however. “In previous years, the ministry had tried to include such a section but had been overruled by the more powerful Ministry of Finance, which represents the interests of the tobacco industry (note that the Japanese government owns a major share of Japan Tobacco),” (Pollack, 1997, p.16). In Hong Kong, very few women smoke. Thus, if companies are not interested in creating new smokers, Hong Kong would not appear to be a good market for a cigarette brand aimed at women. “Yet Philip Morris introduced their Virginia Slims brand aimed specifically at women in Hong Kong a few years ago (Shannon, 1994, p.17).
Under the Bush Administration particularly, the US government pushed for agreements that allow free trade in cigarettes, thus ensuring that Asian countries would be open markets for American-based tobacco companies. The 1993 annual report of R. J. Reynolds Tobacco claimed that "today, Reynolds has access to 90 percent of the world's markets, a decade ago, only 40 percent." (Greenberg, 2001, p.101). Clearly, trade negotiators' efforts to support the American tobacco industry have been successful.
Population
China is an especially attractive market to the multinationals because it has “a huge population (1.2 billion people) and a growing economy. The number of smokers in China is greater than the population of the United States” (Shenon, 1994, p.17). Other market groups targeted by the tobacco companies are Asian women and young people. While adult males have been the most common smokers in Asia, advertising aimed particularly at women and young people seek to change that. “Increasing numbers of Asian women see smoking as a sign of their liberation” (Pollack, 199, p.1).
Rationale
There are served reasons why this subject is important to me. It involves large-scale serious danger to public health in Asia and affects my family, and friends, as well as, the health of the next generation. This paper attempts to examine in the case of “cigarette companies who have promoted tobacco use, which is the number one cause of cancer-related death globally” (Williams, 1992, p.74.). The paper also focuses on the efforts to the tobacco companies to target Asian women and young people, and the dangers of passive smoke.
This paper also reflects on the lessons learned from the history of England and its use of drugs in China in the nineteenth century. Because China was richly resources that England did not have, England wanted to have China in its colonial plan. Therefore, “their plans failed Chinese Scholars recognized England’s intention and the result was the opium war” (Waley, 1979, p.15). Now again, Western tobacco companies and politicians uses cigarettes to exploit an in Asian market. Thus, it may be said that the cigarettes companies which have harmed public health in the past continue to the present have been were among the pioneers in the processes of market globalization that we are witnessing today.
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