Luis Suarez
Professor Haight
WRC 1013.0G3
10-09-15
E cigarette uprising
Tobacco is the greatest cause of preventable death in the United States, leading to the premature deaths of more than 480 000 Americans annually (Amato sec.1). Regardless, the sale of cigarettes and tobacco is a multi-billion dollar industry. Farelly’s studies show that in the year 1990, the average number of packs sold per person that year was well over a hundred. Cigarettes however, might not be worth all the issues and conflicts associated with the product, such as rising tobacco illness and health care costs. Cigarettes are highly addictive, create harmful health consequences, and entail high health care costs. Tobacco distributors target their audience to start smoking as early as 18 to their 20s. (Freeman Advertisements in the past positively advertised cigarettes; however, nowadays cigarettes are mostly negatively advertised to protect the new generation after the discovery of just how harmful they are to our health. Cigarettes becomes a controversial topic due to distributors’ claims to freedom of speech and the new found harmfulness of cigarettes. Also an issue regards underage teens being influenced by advertising to pick up smoking at such a young age which in turn leads back to the controversial topic of advertising smoking positively or negatively.
With the increasing awareness of the harms of cigarettes, the tobacco industry, being on the ropes, has shifted their approach in their product presentation and advertisements. In Robert N. Proctor’s book, The Golden Holocaust, he explains the companies’ approach in making light of the dilemma of the effects of tobacco by giving claims, such as cigarettes being, “…inherently risky.” “The hope was to glide safely through the collapse of the denialist project, using the reassuring rhetoric of “risk”: Isn’t life, after all, inherently