How the World Got Hooked
THE American senator smokes two packs of cigarettes daily. “I know it is going to shorten my life . . . It will probably kill me,” he told his colleagues in a debate over price supports for tobacco farmers. “I despair the day I ever got addicted to this horrible mess.”
The senator is not alone in his regrets. By some estimates, 90 percent of his country’s smokers either have tried to quit or want to quit. And in 1983 alone, two million Japanese smokers did stop. Says one authority: “Almost all habitual smokers appear to be sorry they ever took to tobacco, and warn their offspring not to follow their examples.”
But how did all these regretful smokers get so deeply involved? Somehow, as researcher Robert Sobel puts it regarding this world, “for whatever good or evil it may bring, we are wedded as a civilization to those paper tubes containing small amounts of granulated weed.” One of the six giants of the cigarette industry has a quarter of a million employees. Each year its sales in 78 countries on six continents total $10 billion (U.S.). How could such a widely unwanted habit create the demand requiring the huge industry that supplies the habit?
Actually, the cigarette story may be one of the biggest surprises of the last hundred years. Sparking the incredible demand of this so-called cigarette century were two 19th-century wars. A newborn industry, advertising, fanned the embers. And a surprising new tobacco—bright yellow, milder, and chemically different—emboldened smokers to inhale its smoke. That noteworthy change in smoking habits, oral inhaling, ensured that most smokers would remain hooked the rest of their lives.
The Wars That Kindled a Demand
Tobacco remained an extravagant luxury until 1856, when cigarettes found their first mass market. That is when British and French soldiers returned from the Crimean War with “paper cigars” and a habit they had learned there. A cigarette fad swept across Europe, creating an unexpected demand for Turkish cigarettes or their English imitations.
The “Crimea fad” established the cigarette as a cheap wartime substitute for pipe or cigar. But the fad died. Furthermore, as Robert Sobel points out, “in the early 1860s, there appeared to be no way that middle-class American men—the prime market for smokes—would take to cigarettes.” Smoke from these early cigarettes was not as seductive as that of the modern cigarette. Like cigar smoke, it was slightly alkaline, and smokers held it in their mouths. There was no comfortable way to inhale as cigarette smokers usually do today. It was time for the next surprise development.
The American Civil War (1861-65) introduced a more addictive smoke, doing so with what tobacco expert Jerome E. Brooks calls “explosive force.” Once more, war brought the inexpensive cigarette to soldiers—first Confederate, then Union. But this time it was no passing fad.
These cigarettes used American tobacco, and something about them was different. American growers had adopted new strains of tobacco that grew well in their nitrogen-poor soil. They also discovered, by a freak accident on a North Carolina farm, a curing process that turned their leaf bright yellow, mild, and sweet. In 1860 the U.S. Census Bureau called it “one of the most abnormal developments in agriculture that the world has ever known.” After a few cigarettes of this novel tobacco, new smokers felt a compelling urge to light up again.
Hooked!
Not understood at the time, this small but relentlessly growing market had become physically dependent, hooked, on a highly addictive substance. “The casual smoking of more than two or three cigarettes during adolescence” almost invariably leads to “regular dependent smoking,” says addiction researcher Dr. Michael A. H. Russell. “Unlike the adolescent who shoots heroin once or twice a week at first, an adolescent smoker experiences some two hundred successive nicotine ‘fixes’ by the time he has finished his first pack of cigarettes.”
Yes, inhaling was the secret. Nicotine, it seems, will penetrate and irritate mucous membranes only under alkaline conditions. Because cigarette smoke is slightly acid, it is the only tobacco smoke mild enough in mouth and throat for routine inhaling. But in the lungs the acid neutralizes, and nicotine dumps freely into the bloodstream. In just seven seconds the nicotine-rich blood arrives at the brain, so that each puff yields an almost instant nicotine reward. Youths who smoke more than one cigarette, reports a British government study, stand only a 15-percent chance to remain nonsmokers.
Thus, in the same decade as the Crimean War, the cigarette industry had spawned a powerful new habit. Within 20 years tobacco merchants hit on the idea of using catchy newspaper ads and testimonials to attract new customers. A machine patented in 1880 mass-produced the cigarette and kept the price low, while pictures of sports heroes and smiling ladies sold the cigarette image to the male public. But what kept them coming back for more? Nicotine dependency! As health writer William Bennet, M.D., puts it: “Mechanization, clever advertising and marketing techniques made their contribution, but [without nicotine] they never would have sold much dried cabbage.”
By 1900 the modern cigarette, already international, was ready to tighten its grip on world society.
[Blurb on page 5]
A new smoker experiences 200 nicotine “fixes” from just his first pack of cigarettes