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 Every day 3,000 teenagers begin smoking cigarettes, and of those, nearly 1,000 will die from smoking related illnesses. If this does not shock you than nothing will. One third of your friends who smoke will die from their nasty little habit. What is even more shocking is that the choice to smoke no longer relies solely on the individual. Today, through different advertisement ploys, tobacco companies have made that choice easier for teens to make.
There are many different ways for the companies to influence the young minds of America, and the tobacco companies have found four main ways to prey on possible smokers. They sell kiddie packs with 20 or less cigarettes because teens don't usually like to carry many cigarettes on them at a time, they angle all their advertising towards youth and the things youth enjoy doing, they give away hundreds of millions of dollars worth of merchandise which promotes their company, and they use cigarette vending machines to make it easier for teens to access cigarettes.
The question that comes to mind about what companies are doing is why; why would a company target a consumer who cannot even legally purchase the product which the company is trying to vend? The answer is quite simple: the tobacco companies have recognized that there is a high probability that the first brand of cigarettes a smokers uses will also be his or her brand of choice. They have also seen teens tend to buy heavily advertised brands and often change the brands they smoke as a result of a single advertising campaign. For example, in 1988 after R.J. Reynolds introduced Joe Camel, there was an immediate increases in sales to teenage consumers.
The companies also see that the reason many adolescents smoke is because they think that it makes them look older and they can often capitalize on those age aspirations. Recently, there has been an onslaught of new brands of cigarette that appeal to teens, these brands include Red Kamel and Black Death. They take advantage of the rough and rebel edge that has been used to characterize Generation X. But in the end, all the advertising, giveaways, and other ploys tobacco companies have used to sell their products lead back to one single motivation: money.
These companies often disregard the statistics that have shown that lung cancer, heart disease, and chronic emphysema are all caused by smoking. It is also been proved that nicotine is highly addictive and often prevents smokers from discontinuing their deadly habit. It is appalling to me that companies would sink so low as to knowingly sell a harmful product to people who they know are not old enough to legally purchase it just to make a few dollars more in profit. It seems as if Corporate America has completely disregarded the true value of human life in order to increase it's profit margins. The tobacco industry has put a price on human life and it is becoming increasingly obvious that the price is not very high.
I personally think that the continually growing amount of advertising and promotion of tobacco should be curbed before it gets so out of control that it causes even more illegal activities and deaths. I urge you not to just stop smoking, but above all else, to let your voice be heard from the boardrooms of the tobacco companies to the classrooms of our school. Do not give in to the overwhelming demands of Corporate America.
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