Blog #4

When I was young, my father was addicted to cigarettes. I always assumed it was a byproduct of his youth, living in a small town in southwestern Minnesota. Hearing it from him, living in rural Minnesota was horrendously boring (it didn't help that this was back when there were 3 channels on cable and all of them sucked), so you want anything that can take your mind off it. Coincidentally, this is also why meth is as popular as it is in rural America. However, legal and illegal drugs carry different stigmas along with them. In the early to mid 20th century, cigarettes were marketed as a health item, which resulted in some ad taglines that are wildly outdated ("More Doctors Smoke Camels than any other cigarette", "Give your throat a vacation...smoke a fresh cigarette", etc.) and some that are genuinely concerning ("Gee, Mommy, you sure enjoy your Marlboro!" spoken by a cherub-faced baby). Meth never had advertisements backed by multi-million dollar corporations trumpeting health benefits that were negligible when compared with the almost-inevitable cancer.

Methamphetamine, at least in its crystal form, has been known to be addictive as hell and dangerous to use. Cigarettes are now known to be both incredibly addictive and carcinogenic, but that hasn't always been the case. A large part of how we now perceive tobacco addiction comes from the massive cover up campaign masterminded by the billion-dollar cigarette industry. The World Health Organization released a 78 page report, comprised almost entirely of internal documents from tobacco giants, detailing the marketing tactics and deceit that the tobacco industry used to continue its financial growth (http://www.who.int/tobacco/media/en/TobaccoExplained.pdf if you want to read it). The more recent, incredibly aggressive regulation of cigarettes, with packs carrying huge warning labels and occasionally a graphic picture of a cancerous throat, comes from the massive amount of money throughout the 20th century that the tobacco industry was pouring into falsified research to dispute the danger of cigarettes. If there's one moral to this rambling, kind of scattered blog post, it's that when looking into perceptions of addiction, it's important to pay attention to where the money is going.