"I'm astounded at the depths the tobacco industry will go to pursue profits at the expense of countless lives," says the World Health Organization's director of health promotion, Ruediger Krech.
The number of adult tobacco users has dropped steadily in recent years, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday, but it warned Big Tobacco is working hard to reverse that trend.
In 2022, about one-in-five adults around the world were smokers or consumed other tobacco products, compared to one-in-every-three in 2000, the United Nations health agency said.
A fresh report looking at trends in the prevalence of tobacco use between 2000 and 2030 showed that 150 countries were successfully reducing it, the WHO said.
You can always tell if Philip Morris is sponsoring your media by how much smoking is in it. I recently watched Russian Doll on Netflix and it seemed like half the budget to make the show was from big tobacco. I almost had to stop watching because of it.
On the other hand, there are a lot of period pieces set in the 20th century where no one is smoking. I remember people smoking like chimneys back in the 1980s. You could smoke everywhere. You could smoke on airplanes. There were smoking sections in restaurants. There were smoking and non-smoking hotel rooms. A shit ton of people smoked.
So a modern show with people smoking, yeah, that's not the best idea... but a show taking place in 1960 and nobody's smoking? That's ridiculous. And yet I keep seeing movies like that. Smoking is bad, but so is erasing it from history.
But the American government was paying people to stop growing domestically.
Tobacco farming is insanely regulated, you can only produce so many pounds. If you don't have it the authorization, you have to lease it from someone who does. And if you don't lease/sell as much as your allowed, they shrink your amount every year.
There hasn't been new sign ups for decades, it's all running off families who have been doing it for generations