I am not so much disgusted and as in total disagreement regarding gov’t nationalization of any business.
The tobacco industry had argued that for many years, but hadn’t they pretty much been refuted on that score? That was certainly my recollection.
The key thing is, people get hooked on tobacco when they’re young. There are exceptions, but generally if you’re old enough to buy beer and you don’t smoke, you aren’t going to start.
I don’t know how often your average teen sees those Truth ads (I don’t watch TV often enough to have a feel for how often anything shows up on TV), or what impact those blackened-lung photos have on them, or if they even see them in health class these days. But teens are by far the most susceptible group to advertising and other media manipulaton (e.g. product placement in movies and TV programs), which is why TV programming is primarily directed at young people - that’s who the advertisers want to hit up. They have no use for fiftyish types like me.
So yeah, I think advertising makes a real difference here.
If government begins to rely on tobacco for revenue to the extent that Philip Morris does, they will start using the same tactics to peddle it.
Ah, the sweet taste of Victory.
I must admit it was easily misinterpreted as being nothing more than a snide remark.
That would be hard, since I didn’t offer any logic.
I certainly don’t think it’s modest. Reasonable, yes, due to the specific nature of this one industry. But hardly modest.
Part of it, of course, is a plain philosophical difference. I believe that there are instances where government can and should act powerfully to promote the common good. You don’t. You may not even believe such a thing as the ‘common good’ is even worth discussing.
Getting children hooked on an extremely addictive drug, and eventually causing them to die at much earlier ages than would have otherwise been the case.
No, really. The ‘hard work and investment’ you see here takes on a somewhat different moral tinge in most people’s eyes when we’re talking about the tobacco industry.
Besides, I’m not saying they shouldn’t be rewarded for their efforts; I certainly don’t think it’s reasonable to carve out an exception to the Takings Clause here. Those who have built up the industry would, under my plan, be paid the market value for their investment.
The deal here is that, like most Americans, I’d like to see fewer and fewer young people get hooked on tobacco over time. I don’t want to punish the tobacco industry; I just want to buy it. I don’t want to punish tobacco users; I want to continue to make the products they’re using available to them, as long as they want/need to keep on using them.
And I’m aware that some young people will keep on starting to smoke, no matter what we do.
But I want to pull the plug on the forces that profit from new addicts, and will always find new and subtle ways to promote their products to young people, to influence them to light up for the first and second and third time. I can’t think of a better and fairer way than this to rid the country of the tobacco business as what you might call a pro-addiction lobby, perpetually fighting for the right to plant their product in the minds of teenagers. As long as there is a for-profit tobacco industry, it will inevitably be trying to do that.
That may be OK with you, but it’s not OK with me. I have the wacky belief that grownups shouldn’t prey on minors, not just sexually but in general. And that goes double, triple, whatever, when addictive substances are involved, as they are here.
I think that was the whole point. If you offer no logic, you can argue for or against anything with equal “merit”.
Perhaps more enforcemnet of existing laws is what you need to accomplish your goal, that of reducing teen smoking. I see underage kids smoking in public with impunity, and never once have I seen so much as a citation issued. As a society, we seem to have decided to turn a blind eye to teen smoking. That is the problem.
Well, I don’t see how ANY politician’s gonna cut out one of their biggest contributors, so it’s a non-starter.
Plus, most smokers woudn’t quit even if it meant the possibility of a public beheading.
Well, now I’ve offered some logic. Does that help? 
Given that the cops can’t shut down the crack trade, I can see why cops feel they have better things to do than ticket a minor for smoking tobacco.
But seriously, enforcement of existing smoking laws will wax and wane over the years. But corporations never slumber, never sleep, and they will always be trying to push everything from their products to their political agenda. We, the people, will only be pushing back some of the time. Buy up the tobacco industry, and you get rid of the ‘push’ from the other side to get our kids hooked on tobacco, for there will be no ‘other side’ anymore.
Dare I ask for a cite? That certainly seems to run contrary to the type of advertising cigarette companies use – their ads seem to me to be principally designed for “branding” purposes. YMMV, I suppose, but that’s how I see things. **
They see them a lot more than they see cigarette ads on television. The number of cigarette ads on television is exactly zero. Ditto for the radio, IIRC.
Most cigarette ads are in print publications and on billboards. Given our MTV, couch potato, Nintendo-playing, Johnny-can’t-read culture, I’d lay good money that the average kid sees a lot more antismoking ads than they do ads by tobacco companies.
Now beer commercials on the other hand…those play into every adolescent male’s fantasy world. Beautiful people partying with whatever drink is advertised. Giant models playing volleyball in the mountains. Hot chicks ripping their clothes off while fighting over whether a beer is “less filling” or “tastes great.” If you really want to curb ads aimed at young people, maybe you should nationalize the beer industry.
Try this one:
I’m aware of that; I remember when cigarette ads on TV ceased.
In order for that to be so, you’d have to have a lot of antismoking ads, period, on the shows that teens watch. Since those are the shows where ad time is most expensive, you’d have to have a well-financed antismoking ad campaign behind them. Can you cite more than a few jurisdictions that have such programs? The word a year or two after the big tobacco settlement was that most states had diverted most of the money that had been expected to go toward antismoking efforts, to their general funds instead, to help pay for the big tax cuts of the late 1990s.
I don’t know how it is now, btw, but back in 1992, a Gallup poll (cited in my link above) showed that:
Other cites in the link suggest that the tobacco industry has continued to find new ways to make themselves visible to their target audience.
I think there’s a big difference between beer and tobacco. Like I said earlier, there are social drinkers; the vast majority of imbibers do so without ever having a drinking problem. But with tobacco, there are just nonsmokers and addicts. Tobacco is unique among legal, nonprescription substances in this regard, which is what (IMHO, anyway) justifies a uniquely strong approach.
I agree that the government doesn’t do a great job of running businesses, and I wouldn’t want the government to run a business that I hoped would put out a good product over the long run, unless the private sector had already given up on that business (like with trains). I’d hope and pray that in 30 years, we still have some decent domestic beers. But if the government buys up the tobacco industry and runs it into the ground in 30 years, nobody will be much worse off for it.
Now I’d be all for kicking advertising of alcoholic beverages off TV and radio, like happened with tobacco 30 years ago. Back in the late 1980s, IIRC, Ted Kennedy and Strom Thurmond (unlikely allies, huh?) joined forces to try to push a bill through that would have done that. They lost (narrowly, IIRC), and it’s never been resurrected since.
Those Truth ads are funded by the tobacco companies as part of the tobacco settlement. Seeing as they manage to find their way onto primetime network TV, they’re apparently pretty well-funded.
I’m curious as to how exactly a backpack, T-shirt or CD player emblazoned with a corporate logo encourages one to smoke (as opposed to just raising brand awareness).**
We have decent domestic beers now?
Glad to hear it. What with watching no TV in between football seasons, I really don’t have a sense of what’s on the tube, especially with respect to commercials. (Did see the ‘catfight’ commercial you mentioned earlier, though - hot stuff indeed! :))
Hey, I’m no psychologist, and I’ll (for once) spare you my WAG. But as you can see from the cites, advertising to teens does increase the number of new teen smokers.
Well, not the stuff they advertise on football games. I love the commercials, but life’s too short for mass-market beer. I generally have some Yeungling in the fridge, though.
Maybe it should be about, you know, personal responsibility. Maybe its NOT the governments problem? I don’t know, crazy idea perhaps, but maybe its the TEENS responsibility…maybe even the PARENTS? I know I know…I’m getting radical here.
It seems to me that, if you were to take a poll today and ask the question: Are cigarettes bad for your health? Will they kill you? Are they addictive? That anyone that can READ the question and is capable of answering it, is pretty much going to say YES!! You’d have to have been somewhere under a rock for the last 30 years if you DON’T know that they are bad for you. In spite of this, people still seem to smoke. Ok…its THEIR choice. Even the teens you talk about. Maybe its peer pressure (I’d say this is the biggest factor, that and the examples of their parents)…maybe it IS advertising (I don’t buy this totally, though I guess it could have some influence). But in the end it IS a choice.
But thats just my opinion…I could be wrong.
Oh, and as for Nationalizing industries…Who IS John Galt?? Gods…
-XT
John Galt is a character in an Ayn Rand book. 'Nuff said.
If you want to change one person’s behavior, you sit down with them and explain the risks and dangers of what they’re doing, and do your best to get them to take responsibility for their actions.
If you want to change the behavior of fifty million people, that doesn’t work anymore; you can’t have one-on-ones with but so many people. So you change their environment.
This makes particular sense in this instance. The tobacco companies have already successfully (from their POV) applied the latter approach. My response is to suggest undoing that operation.
Then once nobody’s filling kids’ environment with pro-smoking messages, then it will be appropriately a matter of individual responsibility.
[size=1]Nobody’s been able to make the tobacco companies take responsibility for their actions yet. Despite the big settlement a few years back, where they promised to stop advertising to kids, they’re still doing it.
There’s also the issue of whether teens should be empowered to make a choice that’s so difficult to undo. In this society, we’ve decided a big negatory on that one. Whether that’s the appropriate choice is a good topic for another thread.[size]
Yer just pining after that Old Dominion, boy.
Frankly, RT, I just don’t see the sense in it. Apart from all the ‘nationalization’ issues I think it’s liable to cost more in the long run. Remember, every person who doesn’t start smoking is a person going to cost more in social security and medicare as they age and live longer.
It’s clear to me we’re living out of balance (with an irrational system) when it’s in the federal government’s best interest to encourage us to smoke, drink, drive fast and shoot smack.
Here’s the crux of your argument. Why are you assuming that the majority of people want to "change the behavior of 50 million people? Perhaps you and few others do, but why do you assume you can override the will of the vast majority of people in this country?
If they did want to do so, we could easily just declare tobacco an illegal substance and move on. And don’t use the argument that cigarettes would just go underground like marijuana, because they would just as easily go underground in your proposed scenario as well.
What, the vast majority of people in the US think it’s a good idea for people to keep smoking, and for tobacco companies to keep working as hard as they can to hook our kids on tobacco?
OK, I admit it, I’ve clearly totally misread US public opinion. 
I’d say it’s the tobacco corporations that are continuing to override the will of the majority, as they try to “change the behavior of 50 million people”, most of whom are underage. I’m just trying to take that activity out of the picture. They haven’t exercised their ‘individual responsibility’, there’s no indication that they’ll ever change, and this strikes me as a reasonable response.
Nope, especially as under my own proposal, I’ve not regarded smuggling as a problem.
I’ll just point out that I’m very much for the freedom of adult, legally competent individuals to make such choices for themselves.
However, that my belief in freedom of choice applies only to flesh-and-blood human beings. It does not apply in nearly as extensive a manner to nonhuman entities.
They make very good ginger ale.
I still say it’s worth doing. I mean, the reverse argument would be that since people who do manage to live longer cost us too much, we should euthanize everyone at age 85 or something.
Amen to that.
From RTFirefly:
“I’ll just point out that I’m very much for the freedom of adult, legally competent individuals to make such choices for themselves.”
To paraphrase from the Princess Bride: I dinna think that that word (‘FOR’) means what you think it means.
If you are FOR adult freedom, why are you trying to deny that freedom? Your obvious goal, under all your other pious claptrap, is the destruction of the tobacco industry. Why else Nationalize it?? As if the GOVERNMENT could run any business effectively. Hell man, they can’t even run the GOVERNMENT effectively!! So, you want to destroy the industry because YOU don’t believe in it…to save us all from ourselves. Brief note: I don’t smoke, have never smoked and don’t plan on starting. My children don’t smoke either.
From RTFirefly:
“I’d say it’s the tobacco corporations that are continuing to override the will of the majority, as they try to “change the behavior of 50 million people”, most of whom are underage. I’m just trying to take that activity out of the picture. They haven’t exercised their ‘individual responsibility’, there’s no indication that they’ll ever change, and this strikes me as a reasonable response.”
Cite? You have proof that the MAJORITY of Americans feel this way about tobacco and the tobacco companies? You have unbiased polls? You have cites that the MAJORITY of the people that smoke are underage?? Please list them. My view is that, in fact, the majority of Americans are indifferent at best to this issue. My view is that the MINORITY of people who smoke are underage. Please provide me with the information to increase my knowledge that I’m wrong on both of these points.
From RTFirefly:
“John Galt is a character in an Ayn Rand book. 'Nuff said.”
Maybe you should of READ the book. You are almost the same kind of caracature that she protrays of those who want to help their brother…to be their brothers keeper. That was the point I was trying to make. Badly it seems…
RTFirefly…let the people make their own choices. Let them be responsible for their actions. If they CHOOSE to harm themselves, so be it, as long as they don’t harm others by doing so. Why do you want the GOVERNMENT to be responsible fro the peoples actions…why isn’t it up to the people to be resposible for their own actions? You are looking down the same road that brought us prohibition and this insane war on drugs…
But thats just my opinion…I could be wrong.
-XT
p.s. I know I’m gona get flamed for this…
“What, the vast majority of people in the US think it’s a good idea for people to keep smoking, and for tobacco companies to keep working as hard as they can to hook our kids on tobacco?”
RTF: The vast majority of the people in the US think that adults should be able to make that decision for themselves. They don’t want someone like you to make that decision for them.
I’m done with this lame thread.