Tobacco
companies lied to America for more than a century about the dangers of
smoking. They deliberately targeted kids. They even had doctors promote
cigarettes as medicine. And today we are paying the price.
Though smoking is down, three times as many Americans still smoke
tobacco as marijuana. Tobacco use is our nation’s top cause of
preventable death and contributes to about 430,000 deaths each year.
Tobacco use costs our country at least $200 billion annually — which is
about 10 times the amount of money our state and federal governments
collect from today’s taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products.
We know if it’s legalized, marijuana will be commercialized, too. A
commercial marijuana industry will act just as the tobacco industry
acts. Big Tobacco may even take over a marijuana industry once it’s up
and running. According to a report commissioned by tobacco company Brown
and Williamson:
The use of marijuana … has important implications for the
tobacco industry in terms of an alternative product line. [We] have the
land to grow it, the machines to roll it and package it, the
distribution to market it.
Then there’s Altria, the parent company of Phillip Morris. It
recently bought the Web domain names “AltriaCannabis.com” and “AltriaMarijuana.com.”
If this sounds frightening, it is. Big Tobacco has worked long and
hard for decades to conceal the harms of its product — and hundreds of
millions of lives have been lost worldwide in the past century. Big
Tobacco knows it has to replace those lives with new customers every
year. Who does it go after? Kids. Consider:
The Liggett Group: “If you are really and truly not going to sell [cigarettes] to children, you are going to be out of business in 30 years.”
R. J. Reynolds: “Realistically, if our company is to survive and prosper over the long term, we must get our share of the youth market.”
Lorillard: “The base of our business is the high school student.”
Phillip Morris: “Today’s teenager is tomorrow’s
potential regular customer…
Because of our high share of the market
among the youngest smokers, Philip Morris will suffer more than the
other companies from the decline in the number of teenage smokers.”
We would be incredibly naive to think a commercial marijuana industry
wouldn’t employ all of the same strategies to convince people —
especially young people — to use marijuana.
We don’t need Big Marijuana targeting us and saddling our country
with enormous social costs. And we don’t need Big Tobacco taking over
Big Marijuana.
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