Cigarette manufacturers were losing money for years due to fewer people smoking cigarettes. The increase in vaping helped save Big Tobacco’s butt.
Years ago in 1981, Philip Morris – one of the largest tobacco manufacturers in the world, released a special report for its shareholders. The document stated that ““today’s teenager is tomorrow’s potential regular customer, and the overwhelming majority of smokers first begin to smoke while still in their teens… The smoking patterns of teenagers are particularly important to Philip Morris.”
We all know that Big Tobacco has never been concerned about the health of its consumers. Way back in 1964 the Surgeon General of the United States issued a report that cigarette smoking causes death and disease. However, for the next 40 years Big Tobacco continued to deny the health risks of cigarettes, even going so far as to testify to Congress in 1994 that “nicotine is not addictive” when the science clearly stated that it is.
So if you were a Big Tobacco executive and the amount of people who smoked cigarettes was continually going down, what would you do? It sure would make a lot of sense to start investing in nicotine products that weren’t cigarettes, right? And as we know, all vapes do contain some amount of nicotine.
These giants of the cigarette market saw a chance to do exactly that when e-cigs and vapes began to make their way into the mainstream market. With the rise of vape products that didn’t face any of the same advertising restrictions that cigarettes did, Big Tobacco jumped at the chance to target their favorite market: teenagers.
Do you know who owns Juul? The same company that owns Marlboro. The vape brand Vuse? That’s owned by the company that makes Camel cigarettes. And the same brand that makes Newports is a majority shareholder of the popular brand of Blu vape products.
All of the same companies that ignored the health risks of cigarettes are now in the vaping market. If they were willing to put the lives of their customers at risk before, what makes vapes any different?
