Smokers get ill after spending fortunes
A smoker in New York who buys two packs of cigarettes will pay about nine dollars to the State. If he smokes 730 packs in 12 months, in the year he will pay to the State 3,285 dollars in taxes more than a non-smoker.
All over the world high taxes on cigarettes are justified by "the social cost of tobacco". In fact, it causes pathologies that afflict, or will afflict a great number of smokers. For this reason, tobacco leads to enormous medical costs, that are paid by the collectivity.
Tobacco use in the United States entails annual medical costs of more than $75 billion dollars. Who pays? Speaking of social costs, we tend to forget to make the distinction between the countries that guarantee free medical services for everyone, as in Europe, and countries where medical aid is left to the economic possibilities of the individual, as in the United States. Read more »
Marlboro's retail market share is more than 22 billion dollars per year.
European countries squabbled last week over how to split the 1.25 billion dollars that Philip Morris, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes, offered them to settle a dispute over smuggling.
Philip Morris agreed, on July 9th 2004, to pay this amount in order to have a smuggling case against the US company dropped. Today Marlboro cigarettes, after penetrating the market with years of smuggling, are extremely popular in Italy. The same thing has happened in Spain with Winston cigarettes. Big Tobacco makers have a bright future ahead of them. Read more »
Filtrona, Supplier to Philip Morris, First Accepts Then Refuses to Produce for Yesmoke.
"… it seems that fragments of acetate and cellulose are released during the drawing. These deposit in the lungs and in the long term, in combination with the condensate, cause alterations of the lung cells. The active carbon filters, too, release carbon particles." This is written on the Yesmoke.ch site.
Information on cigarettes is allowed, but that on the filters must be "politically correct". This is, in fact, the position of Filtrona SA, the world's principal filter manufacturer and supplier to Philip Morris and other multi-national cigarette companies. Read more »
Switzerland: "Smoke Better" on the Pack, Yesmoke Taken off the Market.
It is forbidden to print on cigarette packets "slogans that might give the impression that a certain tobacco product could be less harmful than others". So, the Yesmokes that displayed the catchphrase "Smoke Better", were outlawed. It was a directive of the Canton Laboratory of Bellinzona that ordered the withdrawal from the market of all the packets, which the company itself immediately destroyed.
We have come a long way in the past few decades on the road of Consumer Protection. "More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette", said an R.J. Reynolds slogan of 1946 … "Philip Morris, a cigarette recognised by eminent medical authorities for its advantages to the nose and throat" - Philip Morris, 1939
Fortunately in 1950, the US Federal Trade Commission declared slogans to be deceptive. For example, those that said that smoking … "renews and restores bodily energy". According to the FTC these were "clearly false, there being in tobacco smoke no constituent which could possible create energy". Read more »