How the tobacco industry targets young people

On this page:

Note: There are links to external websites listed below. The Irish Cancer Society is not responsible for the content of external websites.

Who makes cigarettes?

The tobacco industry are a very powerful and manipulative industry who are more concerned about making profit and getting customers hooked and don’t care about the damage their product is doing.
 
The tobacco industry is dominated by a handful of large companies who operate across the world making enormous profits. Click here to find a map of the tobacco companies all around the world 

Why is tobacco grown?

Tobacco is grown all over the world but is mostly grown in low and middle income countries. Tobacco growing leads to huge poverty issues in these countries.  

• Find out more about where tobacco is grown around the world.

Tobacco and poverty

• Watch this video on tobacco in low income countries and how it leads to hunger and poverty.

Tobacco and the environment

Smoking not only damages your health, it has a massive impact on the environment.

Each time you smoke a cigarette, chemicals are released into the atmosphere, polluting the air.

But pollution is not the only way cigarettes damage the environment.

• Approximately 5 million hectares (600 million trees) of forest are destroyed each year to provide trees to dry tobacco around the world. This is the same size of 3.6 million Gaelic Football fields.
• Litter caused by cigarette butts is a significant problem in Ireland. The 2015 National Litter Report revealed that cigarette butts accounted for 60% of litter on our streets.
• When it rains, cigarette butts lying in our streets and gutters are washed in to our harbours, beaches and rivers. The chemicals in these butts and the butts themselves impact on our water quality and can be deadly to our marine life.
• Cigarette butts can take up to 12 years to break down
• Tobacco litter takes toxic substances into the soil and water – cadmium, arsenic lead and polonium may lead to contaminated water and food.

The tobacco industry needs young people to start smoking

The tobacco industry has a problem. 1 in 2 smokers will die from a smoking related illness. This is a problem for the tobacco industry because dead people do not smoke. The tobacco industry has to find a replacement for every person killed by their products
The tobacco industry needs 25 young people to start smoking in Ireland every day to replace those who have quit or die from their smoking.

Who is most likely to take the risk of starting smoking and ignore the consequences? Who will believe the industry’s lies? The answer is young people.

What Big Tobacco has to say about young people

Publicly, the tobacco industry has always claimed that it does not use advertising to get young people smoking.  However, documents from the tobacco industry that once were confidential and are now public reveal that they see recruitment of under 18s to smoking as essential.

Some quotes from the Tobacco Industry:

• “Younger adults are the only sources of replacement smokers” - RJ Reynolds, 1984
• “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.” - Philip Morris 1981
• “The ability to attract new smokers and develop them into a young adult franchise is key to brand development.” - 1999 Philip Morris report
• “They got lips? We want them.” - Reply of an RJ Reynolds representative when asked the age of the kids they were targeting

How does the tobacco industry market cigarettes to young people?

The tobacco industry spends billions of their profits each year to get young people smoking and to keep them smoking. In the US alone, the industry spent €7.3 billion in 2008 on advertising and promotion.

80% of smokers start smoking in their youth. The tobacco industry knows this - a 1984 RJ Reynolds document stated, “Younger adults are the only source of replacement smokers."

Addiction keeps people smoking into adulthood where it kills one in two long-term users of tobacco.
It is illegal to advertise tobacco products in Ireland. However, there are other ways that the tobacco industry markets its products.

Smoking in the movies

While it is more difficult for the tobacco industry to expose young people to images of people smoking, films are one place where it is normal to see people smoking.

Films give the tobacco industry a great opportunity to market a product that kills 6 million people a year to young people.  A study shows that the tobacco industry may make as much as €635 million each year as a result of new smokers influenced to start by the movies.

Teenagers whose favourite stars smoke are up to 16 times more likely to think favourably of smoking. Smoking in movies makes it appear normal and admirable to smoke and portray smokers in the same way that the tobacco industry does.

Read some more facts about smoking in the movies and take a look at some of the films currently in cinemas that feature smoking.~~ 

• View “Redefining Cool”, a short video which tells more about smoking in the movies.