Tobacco companies have earned a bad name because they profit by providing people with all kinds of cancer at once. In this article, we will not talk about anything other than the bottom that these companies have sunk into making cancer profitable. Remember: Smoking is bad for your health, and if you haven't managed to avoid this addiction, then we recommend reading the article 10 unusual ways to improve health and well-being. So we present to you Top 10 most terrible moves of tobacco companies. It is worth noting that smoking is one of the top 10 most expensive addictions in the world.
10. Free cigarettes for soldiers
Smoking and military service are so closely related that they even have their own Wikipedia page. The soldiers are obsessed with tobacco products. Tobacco companies have long understood that the military is a potential consumer of tobacco products in large quantities due to constant stress and forced long periods of inactivity.
Understanding this, some tobacco companies are lobbying to include cigarettes in the soldier's standard ration, which the tobacco companies happily promise will be provided free of charge. At first glance, this may seem like a good idea, such a move was incredibly well thought out, because although they gave away a lot of goods for free, they succeeded in jailing the soldiers "on the hook”, making them their lifetime customers.
9. Fight against WHO
The World Health Organization plays a big role when it comes to global health issues. Clearly, the WHO is a powerful and respected organization with the ability to instigate change at the global level.
Secret documents leaked to the WHO revealed that several major tobacco companies had been trying to undermine the WHO's efforts for years. The methods and scope of the tactics used are amazing. In short, the tobacco companies were throwing money away at anything that threatened their profits, going all the way. They fought, by the way, including those who tried to cure cancer.
8. Attempt to conquer China
According to Reuters, tobacco companies in China deliberately resisted tobacco price increases. Tobacco companies in China have also refused to put warning labels on packaging, arguing that people already know about the dangers of smoking and no labels will stop them.
7 Bribes To Scientists To Downplay The Link Between Smoking And Alzheimer's Disease
The list of diseases and physical disorders that smoking causes is so impressive that the physical activity required to list them can trigger the onset of arthritis earlier. Suffice it to say that the list is really long. However, one disease that was constantly mentioned in the documents was Alzheimer's disease.
And now, every time, there will be a statement in the documents that smoking is somehow beneficial for people suffering from this disease. When someone checked this statement, it was found that every person or scientist who made such a claim had hidden ties to the tobacco industry. Check out 10 Surprising Facts About Alzheimer's Disease.
6. Smoking fashion
Smoking is cool and everyone knows it, because there is nothing cooler than erectile dysfunction and smelly eyebrows. Going back to the heyday of smoking, cigarette manufacturers Lucky Strike noticed that sales are far from the highest. So, they hired one Edward Bernays to help them. Bernays noticed that the packaging Lucky Strike had an incredibly bright green color. Then he came to the conclusion that the unpleasant color was the reason why people did not smoke. Lucky Strike.
When Lucky Strike refused to change the packaging, Bernays decided he would just make green the trendy color. Which he did by throwing a party in green. When all the most popular people were pictured in green, brand cigarette sales Lucky Strike took off simply because the color green became popular, all the pretty people were dressed in green that evening. You might be interested in the article Top 10 Most Popular Cigarette Brands.
5. Attempt to cheat the government out of billions of dollars
While smoking requires governments to spend billions on health care, it receives money in return in the form of taxes that go to roads, hospitals, and police officers. Thus, the treatment of people who die of cancer due to smoking is also paid for.
In Canada, former tobacco control official Stan Smith was caught red-handed smuggling millions of cigarettes that would have cost over a billion dollars. Smith later turned in his colleagues and went unpunished. Justice!
4. Target children, then deny everything.
The choice of children as the target audience of tobacco companies is always hotly contested. Tobacco companies have always hidden such policies, constantly using the services of highly paid lawyers as a shield. For example, they argued for a long time that Joe Camel was focused on children. Although the cigarette company camel, of course, denied all claims. Critics objected, relying on the fact that "mr camel"is just as recognizable to children as Mickey Mouse.
3. Women's tendency to smoke as an expression of feminism
Going back to the origins of smoking, we can confidently say that the market was almost entirely limited to men. To solve this problem, tobacco manufacturers staged a parade of women who lit "torches of freedom", paving the way for women's equality. Few people guessed that women played the role of puppets who were paid by the tobacco companies to smoke in public places. However, a brilliant marketing ploy led to the creation of the myth that that in order to be equal to men, women must smoke.
2. Support for human rights violations
One human rights group decided to look at how cigarettes are made british american tobacco, and discovered that they directly sponsored the brutal military dictatorship in Burma. In response, the BAT claimed that their factory provided valuable jobs for the Burmese, but human rights activists responded that the BAT paid workers only 25 cents a day, or a third of what they receive in similar jobs.
1. Refusing to educate people about the dangers of smoking
It is now widely accepted that smoking is injurious to health. However, saying that this product kills people is not the best way for business, so a number of tobacco companies simply hide information about how dangerous such a product is. For example, they actively promote the reduction of harm from smoking through cigarettes"low resin", advertising them as less dangerous than those containing full resins.
It turned out that this was a complete lie. Saying that low-tar cigarettes are less dangerous than regular cigarettes is like saying that a shotgun aimed at the chest is not as dangerous as if it were aimed at the face.
