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From: wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin )
Newsgroups: net.med,net.legal
Subject: Re: AMA anti-smoking drive
Message-ID: <791@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 17-Dec-85 15:00:53 EST
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Posted: Tue Dec 17 15:00:53 1985
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An interesting side-note about this. In the McNeil-Lehrer news program
coverage of this issue, they had a tobacco-industry-group representative
and a medical-group representative. The tobacco man mentioned that, in
countries where cigarette advertising was simply completely banned (some
Scandinavian countries, etc.) the per-capita consumption of tobacco went
UP. The obvious response to this (and I yelled it at the TV but the fool
doing the interviewing did not ask this simple and obvious question [have
you noticed they *never* ask the right questions?] :-) was to ask,
"Well, then, why not stop advertising right now, voluntarily, and save
all that money, and watch your sales rise anyway and just glory in your
glut of profits?"

Anyway, later discussion established that advertising does not (on the
whole) cause non-smokers to become smokers; it just changes brand
loyalties amongst those who are already smokers. Marlboro was given as
an example -- the "Marlboro Man" ad campaign is credited with moving
that brand from just about nowhere to become the biggest-selling brand
of cigarettes now.

So, again an obvious solution: a tobacco monopoly! If all the different
brands were really all products of the same company, there would be NO
reason for advertising, because it wouldn't pay the cartel anything to
motivate people to switch between different brands, if they were all
coming out of the great tobacco trust! So they would stop advertising as
soon as they realized this, with no need for special first-amendment-limiting
legislation.  All we need do is cancel the existing anti-trust laws insofar
as they refer to tobacco companies. The current merger mania will do the
rest, and shortly all the tobacco companies will be one big smoking giant...

This will also make collecting tobacco taxes easier. Tobacco advertising will
disappear shortly thereafter; as smokers die off and fewer and fewer
people start smoking, they will become less and less of a burden on
medical facilities and social behavior and will dwindle away to a
memory. Meanwhile, as its customers disappear, the great tobacco trust
will gradually shrink down to about the equivalent of the current
kumquat-marketing association. Industrial and social evolution!

[Methinks this is the third or so Nobel-prize-winning-quality-but-yet-cheap-
and-simple idea I've posted to the net this year. Aren't you-all lucky?!]

Regards, Will