Big Tobacco Facts & Quotes

• “The base of our business is the high school student.” – Lorillard Tobacco
  
  

• “Cherry Skoal is for someone who likes the taste of candy, if you know what I mean.” –U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Representative
  
  

• “…if our company is to survive and prosper over the long term, we must get our share of the youth market….this will require new brands tailored to the youth market.” – R. J. Reynolds
  
  

• “Students are tremendously loyal. If you catch them, they’ll stick with you like glue.” – 1950, Phillip Morris Memo
  
  

• In 1999, an R. J. Reynolds focus group described Joe Camel as “a good role model.”
  
  

• “The teenage years are the most important, because those are the years which most smokers begin to smoke, the years in which initial brand selections are made, and the period in the life cycle in which conformity to peer group norm is greatest.” – 1975, Phillip Morris Report
  
  

• Big tobacco once compared the addictiveness of cigarettes to M&M’s.
  
  

• “If younger adults turn away from smoking, the industry will decline, just as a population which does not give birth will eventually dwindle.” – R. J. Reynolds researcher, 1984
  
  

• In 1996, Charles Harper, R. J. Reynolds Chairman said, “If children don’t like to be in a smoky room, they’ll leave.” When asked by a shareholder about infants, who can’t leave a smoky room, Harper stated, “At some point they begin to crawl.”
  
  

• “Children love cartoons and these can be incorporated into the purchasing of cartons/packets of Camel cigarettes.” – Tobacco Executive
  
  

• A tobacco company considered adding honey to cigarettes because teenagers like sweet products.
  
  

• Published research studies have found that kids are twice as sensitive to tobacco advertising as adults and are more likely to be influenced to smoke by cigarette marketing than by peer pressure.
  
  

• In 2006, a court found that tobacco companies manipulate nicotine levels to keep smokers addicted.
  
  

• In 1985, a tobacco industry brainstorming session came up with the idea of reaching their ‘younger adult smokers’ in candy stores.
  
  

• It is estimated that the tobacco industry spends $13.4 billion on marketing annually.
  
  

• One tobacco company supplied their product to be used in the 1979 G-rated film The Muppet Movie.
  
  

• Tobacco companies have been known to place in-store advertising signs at child’s eye-level.
  
  

• One tobacco company brainstormed reaching potential smokers in school bathrooms, playgrounds, YMCAs and city parks.
  
  
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