The Humble and Deadly Cigarette

This is not about smoking or lawsuits or lung cancer. This is about the cigarette itself, a truly unique and destructive invention. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 0:35Speaker 02

  We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated and what's just wrong? Health versus hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health Versus Hype wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:15Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And we're just smoking, smoking.

• 1:23Josh Clark?

  Feel all right, just keep on tokin'. And this is.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Uh, Boston. Yeah, okay.

• 1:31Josh Clark?

  Yep, that's right.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  That was, that was in my head. I was getting there. I thought you were gonna go with smoking in the boys' room.

• 1:37Josh Clark?

  No, I always thought that was just kind of lame.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was a remake, you know, Motley Crue. Covered it.

• 1:45Josh Clark?

  I don't remember who did the original, do you?

• 1:47Speaker 02

  No, I don't remember.

• 1:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah, you don't need to email in and tell us. That's all right. If we're curious enough, we'll go look it up.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  Or you can, feel free.

• 1:55Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 1:58Josh Clark?

  Who?

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Okay, tell someone not to email?

• 1:59Josh Clark?

  Now I do wanna know. I'm gonna look while you talk.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  Well, I think you should wait for the email. Maybe the, the writer of that song is listening.

• 2:08Josh Clark?

  Brownsville Station.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Okay, there you go.

• 2:11Josh Clark?

  I'd never in a million years would have come up with that cuz I've never heard those two words together as a band name.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Oh, well, you've never taken the train there, then?

• 2:18Josh Clark?

  Have you ever heard of Brownsville Station?

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Just when I took a train to Brownsville Station?

• 2:24Josh Clark?

  That's gross. I think I know what you're talking about.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  Oh, God. All right, let's get off this and get on something even grosser, which is cigarettes.

• 2:32Josh Clark?

  Nice.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Uh, and this was from our, uh, from our pal Julia, and I, I just sort of, I commissioned this one cuz I was like, you know what? Let's just do one on the cigarette itself. Not like smoking and not the lawsuits and all that stuff or lung cancer, but just on the thing, the object. And Julia sent us an article called "The Cigarette Itself", appropriately titled, and I learned a lot in this one. Uh, chiefly that the cigarette was born in Spain in the early sixteenth, uh, sixteenth century when, uh, cigar smokers, cigars were around, and it was sort of a luxury item for the wealthy at the time cuz they were, you know, hand-rolled and, uh, imported from Mexico and South America. But when they would, you know, stub out that last, you know,

• 3:15Speaker 02

  half inch of a cigar or whatever, uh, people that didn't have as much money would come along, grab that thing, and take out the tobacco, um, you know, grind it up and pick it apart a little bit, and wrap it in paper and smoke it. And that was a little cigar or a cigarello.

• 3:34Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm. Isn't that amazing?

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I never thought about the word cigarette being a play on cigar.

• 3:41Josh Clark?

  Oh, really?

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Like a tiny cigar, like, cuz I always heard cigarello, but like a kitchenette, a cigarette is just like a, the same sort of version of that.

• 3:51Josh Clark?

  Ironically, I never thought of a kitchenette as a small version of a kitchen.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Come on.

• 3:56Josh Clark?

  So Chuck, let's just hold our horses here. Before we go any further into the history, let's give a few basics about the cigarette.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  Great.

• 4:05Josh Clark?

  So they're about 84 millimeters long, a standard cigarette. And for reference, that's about the length of a cigarette. They're sold in packs of 20. And if you really want to get technical about a cigarette, next time you're at a party and you're bumming one from somebody or castigating somebody for smoking, even better, you can say that a cigarette is also technically known as a heated tobacco product.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  That's right. As we'll see, a camel first started putting them in packs of 20. And I could not find out if, I think they did that to match the number of matches in a matchbook, which is 20.

• 4:46Josh Clark?

  Oh, really?

• 4:47Speaker 02

  I'm pretty sure that's the story.

• 4:48Josh Clark?

  I wish somebody would have told the hot dog makers that. Cause you know, you got the buns of eight or the pack of eight hot dogs and buns of six. I can never keep up these days with which is.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, that just still doesn't make any sense at all. But yeah, I'm pretty sure that they put it in a pack of 20 eventually to match the matches in a matchbook. But that may also be apocryphal, who knows?

• 5:11Josh Clark?

  It's a good one though.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  What cigarettes are for is to deliver nicotine to your body, which is a feel-good chemical that is naturally occurring in tobacco. And the whole point is to, with a pipe, cigar or cigarette or anything like that, an e-sig is to get you that nicotine, to get you addicted to it, to eventually kill you from it.

• 5:32Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it's crazy, but that's essentially the point. And I think before the advent of mass-produced cigarettes, maybe you had a lesser chance of developing all sorts of hideous cancers and other diseases. But that even if that's not true, or even if it is true, it doesn't matter because we live in the age of mass-produced cigarettes and these things are exquisitely engineered products that so much time and money and effort has gone into and so much research that most of what we know about cigarettes, what cigarettes do to the human body, how addictive they are, comes from the research the tobacco companies did over the decades

• 6:16Josh Clark?

  that they kept, that eventually had to be handed over to the state attorneys general who sued them back in the 90s.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's crazy how it all panned out. If you're looking at, you know, and Julia kind of breaks it down with the white end and the brown end, but there are plenty of cigarettes that are white through and through, meaning the filter end is the same color. But the tobacco end is a filler of cut tobacco leaves and then plenty of additives. I think, how many did they admit?

• 6:48Josh Clark?

  599.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, they wanted to get to 600 so bad, but they finally in 1994 released their additives and it was a list 599 long, which is crazy to think about.

• 6:59Josh Clark?

  I think they had 600, but some very sharp eyed tobacco lobbyist was like, uh, uh, you got arsenic in here twice.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  So it says, "Cut tobacco leaves. It's held in a porous wrapped paper that is sealed by an adhesive." And if you'll look closely, there is a printed, there's printed information on that paper that you're also smoking. And you're going to be burning when you're smoking that tobacco, that paper, those additives, that ink, that adhesive, and everything. And the smoke that comes out, and these are words I did not know, the smoke that comes just from a burning cigarette sitting there is called side stream smoke. The stuff that you inhale is called mainstream smoke.

• 7:40Josh Clark?

  Yeah, the mainstream smoke comes out of the filter. You draw through the filter and the smoke that comes out, that's the mainstream smoke. The filter is, we'll see, it does something a little bit here or there, but not really. It's essentially to give smokers the illusion that they're preventing some sort of harm to themselves when they actually aren't. Another illusion is that these cigarette butts, which are the most littered item in the entire world, I saw something like 4.1 trillion cigarette butts are littered, not thrown away, littered every year around the world. And a common misconception among smokers is that they're biodegradable. They're not.

• 8:24Josh Clark?

  They're photodegradable, not biodegradable, which is a real problem because they kind of, well, they litter all over the place and they're a type of plastic.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, those filters are cellulose acetate. And there are companies that put charcoal in there, but because charcoal is a great filter generally, naturally, but there aren't any studies that show that charcoal in a filter helps at all.

• 8:48Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  As far as like health outcomes or anything like that. Uh, there are two paper wraps on the filter and there's a plug wrap around the actual filter. And then there is, if it's a brown filter, there's the brown, uh, it's called tipping paper around the plug wrap and that is also sealed up, uh, so that, you know, you don't want that smoke coming out of the side of the filter.

• 9:08Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Uh, you want it going into your mouth and then that filter is also treated. Um, they changed the pH on that filter to, to purposely turn it brown as you smoke. So you look and you see, man, look at all that brown stuff that's not getting into my lungs.

• 9:23Josh Clark?

  It fooled me for 20 years, up until a couple of days ago, I had no idea that that was the case.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, just one of the, the dirty tricks that cigarette manufacturers use and still use.

• 9:35Josh Clark?

  That's just nuts. Uh, so let's go back to the cigarello, shall we?

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Let's do it.

• 9:41Josh Clark?

  So, um, the, the cigarello, it, I think you said it was the early 16th century. So the early 1500s, right after the age of discovery kicked off, right? And it took all the way to the late 1700s before it really started to spread outward into Italy and Portugal, which are not that far away. Apparently people didn't think that much of the cigarello by then, but as Europe started to go to war with itself, the cigarello kind of hitchhiked to the fronts and, um, was like, hey, what do you guys think about me? Pretty great, huh?

• 10:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it's, it's crazy. The rise of the cigarette is tied directly to the various wars over the years and the fact that soldiers wanted to smoke. Um, it was, you know, it helped calm their nerves. I think it was a, was a comfort piece when you're, I bet a cigarette and kids don't ever try it, don't ever even try it. But I bet when you're at war, sitting in a foxhole in miserable conditions, I bet that cigarette is one of the, the few pleasures that comes your way, you know?

• 10:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  I bet that's a great cigarette to smoke.

• 10:46Josh Clark?

  I would think so too. Yeah.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  So anyway, uh, French and British soldiers discovered them in the early 1800s during the Napoleonic Wars. And this is where the French came up with the word cigarette instead of sigarillo. And the Crimean War around the middle of the century came along. A new generation of British and French soldiers got this, you got these cigarettes with that, that pretty harsh Turkish tobacco. And they said, we love this stuff. They brought it home. And there was a tobacconist named Philip Morris that had a, a shop on Bond Street in 1847, where he was selling cigars and tobacco products. And he was like, I'm gonna start making cigarettes.

• 11:30Josh Clark?

  So, yeah, okay. So Philip Morris, the Philip Morris Company, one of the largest producers of cigarettes in the entire world, is directly related to Philip Morris? It's not just like a, like a shout out or something like that?

• 11:45Speaker 02

  Oh, I never looked that up, but I just assumed that it was, eventually became the big company.

• 11:51Josh Clark?

  I, I mean, it would make sense because a lot of, a lot of these companies did grow out or were consolidated by larger companies. A lot of the original cigarette companies. So it's entirely possible for sure. But regardless, he was one of the people who brought it to London and made it kind of like a fancy thing, which is really surprising because Chuck, in America, it went a totally different way. When it really became a thing in the United States, as we'll see, it became associated essentially with juvenile delinquents at first. It was not a fancy, like a Bond Street type thing to do. It was kids playing craps rather than going to school were smoking cigarettes too.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, ne'er do wells.

• 12:36Josh Clark?

  Yes, ne'er do wells.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  So at Philip Morris's Bond Street Tobacco Store, they started making their own cigarettes. They were not mass produced, obviously. He had people hand rolling, just like they did with cigars. But they were pretty good. They would get out, they would pump out like three or four a minute, which is pretty fast. They were pretty expensive as a result. And a couple of things happened that really made cigarettes, you know, way more widespread. One was the invention of a rolling machine, like a machine that could pump out. You know, eventually like 250,000 a day for a company. And the American cigarette, which used a combination sometimes of Turkish tobacco,

• 13:20Speaker 02

  or sometimes just straight up American tobacco that was a lot less harsh and more palatable for, I guess, American appetites.

• 13:26Josh Clark?

  Smooth, mild.

• 13:30Josh Clark?

  So yeah, there was a guy named James Duke, who was a Durham, North Carolina tobacco heir. And I think, if I remember correctly, when we went to Durham for our show recently, I think Buttsimes, they have like a big Duke stencil on a, like a smoke stack at some place.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  Oh, that's funny.

• 13:48Josh Clark?

  I'm pretty sure.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  On a smoke stack?

• 13:50Josh Clark?

  He, yeah, he created W. Duke Sons and Company in 1883 to start making cigarettes, sorry, 1881. By 1883, he was making 250,000 a day, thanks to the invention of James Bonsack, who created that cigarette rolling machine that you mentioned earlier, that could roll 200 cigarettes per minute.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's quite an increase from three or four over there on Bond Street. So Duke said, hey, give me a deal. I'll buy a few of those things if you give me a good price on them.

• 14:24Josh Clark?

  He was like Iran.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  And, yeah, exactly. And he said, sure. And he said, all right, all you cigarette rollers, you're out of business. And they said, no, you can't hire a machine to do work that humans do. And he said, watch me. And so he put these machines in. All of a sudden, they were a lot cheaper to sell, to make and to sell. They were readily available. And like you said, they were smoother and they got popular, at least with the juveniles. But that would be the first step toward making them a little more mainstream. But it is interesting that they were, I think in 1900, 2% of the market was, tobacco market was cigarettes. People were still really into chewing tobacco at the time and dipping snuff.

• 15:06Josh Clark?

  Yeah, people loved that kind of stuff. So by the 1890s, though, this was enough of a thing that kids were smoking, cigarettes, that as early as the 1890s, states started to pass bans on selling cigarettes to minors. Isn't that interesting?

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think I didn't think they cared about children at all back then.

• 15:24Josh Clark?

  I know.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Apparently, they're they're like, hey, this this doesn't look good. These kids walking around smoking like they're seven years old.

• 15:31Josh Clark?

  They're like, what are you doing out of the coal mine?

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Right, exactly.

• 15:35Josh Clark?

  Do you want to keep going and talk about where the cigarette really broke out in America? Or do you want to take a break first?

• 15:41Speaker 02

  I think it's break time, buddy.

• 15:42Josh Clark?

  OK, we're going to take a break, everybody. We just decided.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  Not a smoke break, just a break.

• 15:52Josh Clark?

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• 16:14Josh Clark?

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• 16:30Speaker 02

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• 16:52Speaker 03

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 16:55Josh Clark?

  Hey, this is Josh and Chuck from Stuff You Should Know.

• 16:58Speaker 02

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• 17:21Josh Clark?

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• 17:45Josh Clark?

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• 17:48Speaker 05

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• 18:06Josh Clark?

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• 19:16Josh Clark?

  So, just like in Europe, Chuck, war helped cigarettes just blow up, basically. And World War I in particular brought cigarettes to America by introducing it to American troops. And like you said, the men fighting World War I in the trenches were like, "We need something. Somebody give us something to smoke." And the US government was like, "That's fine, but cigars are kind of pricey." I don't know if you guys have been to a cigar shop lately. "We can't really give all of you cigars all the time. What about these cigarettes that are being made that are pretty cheap?" And the men in the trenches said, whatever, we just need to smoke something.

• 19:55Josh Clark?

  So very quickly, a steady, never-ending stream of packs of cigarettes started being sent to the boys on the front in Europe. And also like businesses, individual citizens, the government, they were all paying for it. And they just smoked, smoked, smoked out of the trenches in World War I. And when they came back, they were like, you guys, you gotta try these, they're amazing.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it was kind of perfect for a foxhole because it was much quicker than a cigar.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  Like, you know, you can smoke a cigar for an hour and you didn't have that kind of time. If you just wanted a quick nicotine fix, the cigarette was kind of perfect for wartime. And buddy, did they explode. Camel cigarettes in 1913 sold about a million packs of cigarettes. Or is that a million cigarettes?

• 20:49Josh Clark?

  A million packs.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  A million packs of cigarettes. In 1914, they sold 425 million packs. And by 1919, they sold 21 billion packs of cigarettes.

• 21:02Josh Clark?

  Yeah, which not coincidentally was after World War I ended. And all of those men fighting in World War I came back with pretty healthy little cigarette habits by then.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  That's an astounding number. And I knew it was going to be a lot, but that kind of jump, I mean, can you imagine the kind of money they were making?

• 21:20Josh Clark?

  I know, and that's just Camel cigarettes. That's not all cigarettes.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was one brand.

• 21:25Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Another thing World War I did was kind of change the United States' view on life and was like, okay, a lot of people just died and maybe we should start thinking of life as a little more valuable and precious and relax a little bit and enjoy ourselves.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  And one of the- So we'll smoke and kill ourselves.

• 21:43Josh Clark?

  Exactly, right. One of the upshots of that was that, um, I guess norms and expectations around women really loosened up. And one of the things that women did almost immediately was they started smoking. It became socially acceptable for women to start smoking. And the tobacco companies clapped their hands together and rubbed them and just started drooling at the jowls.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. All of a sudden, they were targeting with advertising campaigns about how glamorous it was, how feminine it was, how independent you were if you were a smoker as a woman.

• 22:12Josh Clark?

  Yep.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  This is also a very fun fact. Philip Morris, the Marlboro cigarette, which I have always associated with like-

• 22:21Josh Clark?

  Cowboy killers?

• 22:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, like a dude cigarette, cowboy killers, that the Marlboro man and the famous Sunset Boulevard, uh, you know, cut out that was there forever.

• 22:31Josh Clark?

  And Kramer. Don't forget Kramer was the Marlboro man for a minute.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  That's right. He was. Uh, but the Marlboro cigarette, I have such a hard time saying-

• 22:39Josh Clark?

  It's hard to say.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  It was launched as a women's cigarette. Uh, it was, it was known as Mild as May. And, uh, I'm not sure when that switched, but that's kind of a fun little fact.

• 22:51Josh Clark?

  I vowed to pick up mild as May as a phrase I'm gonna start using.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  I like that.

• 22:56Josh Clark?

  Uh, Lucky Strike was also like, hey, uh, rather than, uh, reaching for a sweet, which will eventually disappoint your husband, reach for a Lucky Strike instead. Just smoke anytime you have a chocolate craving.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. And all those accessories, uh, that, hey, listen, again, kids, don't smoke, but I'd be a liar if I didn't say in an old movie, when someone took out one of those little slender cigarette cases and popped out a cigarette from that neat row and tapped it on the outside of that metal case. I don't know. That was pretty cool looking to, to young Chuck.

• 23:31Josh Clark?

  Yeah. I recently read Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. Have you ever read that?

• 23:36Speaker 02

  No, was it the Rebecca Hitchcock movie Rebecca?

• 23:39Josh Clark?

  I think Hitchcock may have made it. Yeah. And that that tracks because I think it was written in the early 30s.

• 23:46Josh Clark?

  Have you seen the movie? Was it about a woman who is basically living in the shadow of her husband's first wife?

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:53Josh Clark?

  So that's that. That's the book, but people.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  Great, undervalued Hitchcock movie, by the way.

• 23:58Josh Clark?

  It's a great book, too. But people bust out cigarette cases like every couple paragraphs in there and offer cigarette and everyone smokes after after tea and all this stuff. So I know exactly what you're talking about. It it just stuck out to me. I think, I guess, as a 21st century person, knowing what smoking does, looking at people who were living in a time when they didn't know what smoking did. It's kind of not funny to see, but it's just it's just bizarre to look back like that.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, there were. I remember in college in Athens, it was always one like classy coed who like carried her cigarettes in a case and maybe even had one of those little cigarette holder extenders or whatever.

• 24:37Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, because, you know, they were like, hey, look at me. I'm different. And, you know, I'm an art major. So this is what we do.

• 24:43Josh Clark?

  I'm like friggin Audrey Hepburn here.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  The other thing that happened was they started putting cigarette lighters in cars in, I think, 1925, 1926 is when they became standard.

• 24:57Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  In cars, a little push button cigarette lighter. So now they're saying like, smoke everywhere.

• 25:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And it just so happens 1925, 1926 is when the first cars came out, basically. So right out of the gate, they had cigarette lighters, huh?

• 25:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. And right out of the gate, movie stars started smoking on screen, men and women, and started getting deals, started getting sponsorship deals with certain cigarette companies.

• 25:23Josh Clark?

  Yeah, you could get 150 grand plus a year's supply of Lucky Strikes if your smoking was sponsored by Lucky Strike, which I think Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, they all had those deals with Lucky Strike. So they would out in public be smoking Lucky Strikes, but during interviews, they'd also stop and be like, wow, this Lucky Strike is so mild, smooth, or whatever. Like, they would talk about it like as if it were, you know how people try to place ads or they used to, I don't know if they still do in podcasts, where suddenly we'd just be talking about a product and it'd take you a second to catch up? That's what they used to do with Lucky Strikes.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they're like, they sent me a year's supply. So they sent me 1,000 packs of cigarettes.

• 26:04Josh Clark?

  Exactly. It was nuts. So there's just tons of stars smoking. They were literally sponsored by tobacco companies. And even if you weren't, you could still be pitching them in regular ads. And there's a push today to, I think, retroactively and moving forward, give R ratings to movies that have smoking in them, which I hadn't heard of, but I ran across that recently.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I heard about that. Much different back then, obviously. By the middle of the 20th century, cigarettes had 81% of the tobacco market. So people really ditched the chaw and the snuff for cigarettes, generally speaking. And people, you know, pregnant women were smoking. You'd smoke in the movie theaters, smoke on planes, on buses, in the office. Your doctor would smoke in front of you during an appointment.

• 26:54Josh Clark?

  People reading the news on TV would be smoking while they were giving you the news.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  It's crazy when you look back at old, like, TV show either, not just episodes, but like Dick Cavett Show and stuff like that. Just like, everybody was smoking all the time.

• 27:08Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I mean, there were ads that were doctors recommending a certain kind of cigarette because they were smoother. They made you cough less or something like that. It was just absolutely crazy. But eventually, people started getting hip to the idea that these things might kind of be bad for us. I think as far back as the 1760s, there was a doctor named John Hill, who wrote cautions against the immoderate use of snuff because he'd noticed that people who were using snuff tobacco, which is exactly what it sounds like, powdered tobacco you sniff like it's a bump of cocaine. They were, he had observed nasal swellings and excrescences in snuff users.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  What even is that?

• 27:51Josh Clark?

  It's, I think, puffy, pussy lumps in their noses. And he's like, I think those are probably cancerous. And this is back in the 1760s.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's super early on. In 1900, they finally put like tobacco extract. They did like official scientific tests. They put tobacco extracts. They applied it to guinea pigs, of course, and they saw cellular activity associated with cancer development. They linked it to cheek cancer as early as 1928. And then about a decade after that, they said, you know what? If you smoke, you're not going to live as long.

• 28:30Josh Clark?

  No. And then I think by 1950, they started having enough studies that they could do meta-analysis essentially and say, if you smoke, you have a higher chance of getting lung cancer than somebody who doesn't smoke. Four years after that, the British Medical Journal published a study that said that cigarettes were killing doctors in significant numbers, too. And the fact that doctors are now dying from smoking cigarettes, that kind of got people's attention.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, and these were all unfiltered, basically, up until 1950. In 1950, the Winston cigarette was the first one to come out as a mass marketed filtered cigarette. And again, you know, it helps a little bit. It's not like the filter is completely useless, but it's not filtering out. It was largely a ruse to say, hey, they're saying smoking is bad for you. So now we've added a thing to make it safe.

• 29:25Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I read that initially it was an earnest attempt to create a healthier, less deadly cigarette.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  I could see that.

• 29:34Josh Clark?

  They were just like, well, we failed at this, but now we've basically fooled people into thinking that filters are actually doing something. We have to keep filters on forever. And yeah, it very quickly just became a device rather than something that actually worked. It can, it can catch some particulate matter, but it's doing nothing to the, to the gases in the smoke. They're just coming through fully toxic. But again, smokers were like, okay, great. We've got that licked. We have filters now. Let's all go back to smoking as much as we want.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think by year 1965, 42% of American adults smoked.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  Uh, in 1980, it went down to 33. By 95, it was down to 25, 2010, 19%. And just a couple of years ago in 2023, 11%.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  But that's, that's nuts. Like 40, it's like, close to half of American adults in the 60s were smoking.

• 30:32Josh Clark?

  Well, it's funny. It's based on old movies and TVs and books and stuff like that, or TV shows and books. I, that seems low to me.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it looks like 100%.

• 30:42Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it really does for sure. But yeah.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  I wonder who didn't smoke. Like, half the people probably just were like, I mean, I'm sure some people were like, this seems really unhealthy. But some people, you know, they make your fingers smell nasty. They make your, your breath gross. That probably had a lot to do with it.

• 30:58Josh Clark?

  I would guess so too. And then also, I mean, if back in the 20s, they were like, you, you can get mouth and cheek cancer from it. It's probably trickled out to some people more than others, you know?

• 31:12Speaker 02

  For sure. So they add the, the filter, but a lot of R and D and money was spent because all of a sudden you're adding this barrier between the smoker and the smoke. And so they had to invest a lot of money into making sure like the draw was correct. And that you weren't, you know, what they didn't want was, was for you to lose any of that habit forming nicotine. So they put a lot of dough into, I guess, like you said, probably earnestly trying to reduce some toxins, but also make sure that experience stayed the same to keep people smoking cigarettes.

• 31:45Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And they spent billions of dollars figuring this out because if you're a smoker and you have to, like, if you have a crushed filter, it makes it hard to draw through and it's essentially a ruined cigarette because you, the, you don't, like, you don't want to have to, have to exert any kind of effort in smoking. And if you do, it's just a, it's not worth it. So they could not mess with the smoking experience. They had to make it as good or better, while also preserving all the best parts of an unfiltered cigarette. What they essentially came up with was to use more porous paper than actually poke like little tiny holes in the seam where the tobacco comes up. Up against the filter, which is sealed, as you talked about by that tipping paper.

• 32:30Josh Clark?

  But they they poked little holes in that end of the tipping paper. So that more outside air could be sucked in and mixed with the smoke. So it was a milder smoke. And from what I can tell, light cigarettes, that's it. They have more tiny holes than a non-light, a regular cigarette. That's the only difference.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not like lighter chemical additives or lesser chemical additives and stuff like that, right?

• 32:56Josh Clark?

  But the big tobacco companies are very happy for you to walk around thinking that that's what it means. But all it means is it's it just hits you lighter because it has more little micro holes in that tipping paper at the end.

• 33:14Josh Clark?

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• 33:23Speaker 02

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• 33:36Josh Clark?

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• 33:52Speaker 02

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• 34:16Josh Clark?

  Everyone has a story to tell. What's yours? The moment you met your partner, landed that promotion? For people living with a rare disease, life can feel divided into before the diagnosis and all the after moments that follow. On Voices of Vivgart, Vivgart is also known as its generic name, Fgartigamod Alpha F-Cab. You'll hear powerful stories from people facing challenges and embracing a life with a rare disease.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  Join host Andra Stratten as she guides listeners through honest conversations about life after diagnosis. You'll hear how each guest worked with her care team on their treatment plan, as well as their personal challenges, setbacks, progress, and moments of connection.

• 34:53Josh Clark?

  These stories reveal that life is bigger than a moment, a condition, or a tough day. Listen to Voices of Vivcard on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 35:09Josh Clark?

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• 35:27Speaker 02

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• 35:42Josh Clark?

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• 35:54Speaker 02

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• 36:16Speaker 02

  Uh, should we take another break?

• 36:18Josh Clark?

  Yes.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  All right, we'll be right back, right after this.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  So there are different, you know, sizes of cigarettes. If you've ever been a smoker or worked in a convenience store or something like I did at the Golden Pantry in Athens, Georgia, you learn a lot about cigarettes and what kind of people smoke what kind of cigarettes. It's pretty interesting, actually.

• 36:59Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I worked at a last chance gas station and liquor store and we sold cigarettes for $1.25 a pack, which is far and away the cheapest cigarettes in all of Athens. So we had a lot of people come in there, too.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  What was the cheapest brand? Do you, I totally remember the ones that we had.

• 37:16Josh Clark?

  I don't remember what they were back then.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  The cheapest cigarettes, and these are the people, this is the stuff I always felt the worst about, was when people were like, "I can only afford to buy the bare bones, swept off the floor tobacco cigarette brand." That was just more depressing to me even. And in our store, they were bucks.

• 37:36Josh Clark?

  I don't remember those at all.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  It had a big antler deer on the front of it and bucks were really cheap compared to the other ones. So I can't imagine what was in those things.

• 37:45Josh Clark?

  That sounds very scary.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  But there are different lengths, different kinds of filters. I remember the Parliaments had the recess filter occasionally when I had cigarettes here and there. In New Jersey, that's, a lot of people smoke Parliaments. You can have those long 120s, they're called extra longs, and different diameters, including something I tried in college occasionally was the old Camel wide.

• 38:07Josh Clark?

  Oh, I forgot about those.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  Remember those plugs?

• 38:11Josh Clark?

  Yep. I went the opposite direction. I smoked Capri Ultra Slim 120s for a little while.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  Are you serious?

• 38:18Josh Clark?

  They were essentially as big around as like a popsicle or a sucker stick.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. I remember my friend Justin's mother smoked those and I never saw anyone that wasn't a mom smoke those.

• 38:31Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I took a lot of crap back in the day because I would smoke those. I smoked Virginia Slims for a while.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  That's really funny.

• 38:37Josh Clark?

  I don't remember how either of those came to be my brand, but I would guess that I started smoking Capri's because I liked the watercolor design on the box. That's probably what first caught my attention.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  You always have marched to the beat of your own drum. So I could see Josh Clark doing that just to be different.

• 38:54Josh Clark?

  They were good though. I liked them. Wait, let me rephrase that. Kids, kids, please don't listen to any kind of nostalgic tone in anything I'm saying. Because if I could go back and do it again, I never, ever, ever would have smoked.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 39:09Josh Clark?

  Quitting smoking was the single hardest thing I've ever done in my entire life by far. It is definitely not worth it.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. I was the dreaded social smoker who all my smoker friends hated because I could always take it or leave it. And it never got its hooks in me as far as an addiction goes.

• 39:30Josh Clark?

  That just did not compute with me, but I was always in awe of people like you.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was the one who would bum the cigarettes off my smoker friends and they were always nice about it. I was not the guy at the party who let the filtered in because I had too much to drink.

• 39:45Josh Clark?

  I was the guy who would smoke with the flu.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Or the guy that if the cigarette broke, the tobacco and broke a little bit, you would hold your finger around that part just so you could still not waste that cigarette.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  But again, we're not waxing nostalgic, everybody.

• 40:02Josh Clark?

  So where are we, Chuck? Oh, we were talking about some innovations at the time, I guess.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, one innovation, and by innovation, we means terrible things cigarette companies did to make them worse and more addictive, basically. So like innovation for them was what's called puffed or expanded tobacco. And that's when they soak tobacco leaves in ammonia and Freon.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  To make them puff out and increase their volume, they swell up some and then they freeze dry that and they do that to then get more cigarettes out of less of a tobacco purchase or harvest.

• 40:38Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it's just a space filler. And from what I saw Freon, they only use that only for about 30 years that discontinued a couple decades ago. But ammonia is still very, very much an ingredient in cigarettes. One of the big things ammonia does is it allows you to absorb freebase nicotine more easily. So you get more nicotine out of each puff of cigarette, which a lot of observers point to as clear evidence that tobacco companies went out of their way to make their products more addictive.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. Also, we should mention while we were kind of talking about what kinds of people smoke what cigarettes and if you work at a convenience store, you kind of see repeated patterns. It's clear if you've ever sold cigarettes that African Americans tend to prefer menthol cigarettes. I think more than 85% of black smokers smoke menthols. And once again, the tobacco companies found this out kind of during the civil rights movement and they were like, hey, we found a new target demographic of people that we can try and kill and market to.

• 41:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah, because about the same time as the civil rights movement was just barely starting and the black press became an actual viable outlet for national brands to advertise in, all of a sudden, menthol cigarettes became a thing. Salem, Newport, Cool, Alpine, all came out within a year or two of each other. Alpine's not around anymore. And so just by essentially, I guess, targeted happenstance, the tobacco companies started heavily advertising menthols in the black press. And so that eventually came to be the favorite kind of cigarette among black people in America. And I read an article by a guy named Alan Blum, who is the director of the Center for the Study of Tobacco in Society.

• 42:29Josh Clark?

  And he kicked out an estimate that about a third of the ads in some issues of Ebony and Jet magazines, black oriented national magazines in the US were for tobacco products, mostly cigarettes, mostly menthol cigarettes.

• 42:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's, that's crazy, a third. Uh, and then in 1990, uh, some people say like peak, um, targeted, uh, advertising and branding came when RJ Reynolds was, uh, going to release their Uptown menthol cigarette. The first cigarette made like specifically targeted toward black Americans. They did a bunch of market research and RJR was like, hey, you know what they'll really like is this classy black and gold package and the name, uh, Uptown cigarettes. Uh, they were the only cigarettes with, um, had the filters down in the pack. Uh, because the company found through research that black smokers open, uh, open packs from the bottom.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  So they could grab the tobacco in to avoid crushing that filter. Uh, and or to keep their fingers fricking on it because that's the part that went into their mouth. So they literally flipped how they packaged cigarettes to appeal to black customers.

• 43:41Josh Clark?

  Yes, and this did not land well, um, with, uh, people in the United States. There happened to be a black, uh, Health and Human Services Secretary at the time named Louis Sullivan. And he bucked tradition and directly targeted Uptown cigarettes and RJ Reynolds as basically a vile product that needed to be, um, removed from the shelves. It hadn't been released yet. The release was targeted for February of 1990, not coincidentally, Black History Month. And enough of a protest erupted in the US led by Louis Sullivan, um, that RJ Reynolds withdrew it before they could ever roll them out and sell Uptown cigarettes.

• 44:25Speaker 02

  Hoorah for them.

• 44:26Josh Clark?

  But the upshot of this is, is that, like you said, 85% of black smokers smoke menthols. And, um, because of the apparent feeling of menthols, it feels nothing like you're killing yourself. In fact, it almost feels refreshing in some cases. Um, the black press relying so much on tobacco advertising that they didn't tend to cover the dangers of smoking, um, like, uh, like mainstream press.

• 44:53Josh Clark?

  Um, heavily targeted advertising in black communities. By 1990, black Americans had a 58% higher rate of lung cancer than white people. And it still goes on today. There's a national ban on flavored cigarettes, but menthol got exempted because black-led community organizations tend to lobby the White House to prevent menthols being taken out of circulation because those groups tend to be funded by tobacco companies. Essentially, they're fronts for the tobacco company lobby. And this one 2012 study found that nearly 40% of black smokers said they would quit if there weren't menthols any longer.

• 45:35Josh Clark?

  So the tobacco companies have a lot to lose and half of an entire market if menthols are done away with, like all the other flavors. It's the only flavor still allowed in the US.

• 45:46Speaker 02

  Pretty despicable stuff. So you're probably wondering like, hey, if smoking is so terrible, surely it started to wane. And I gave you some stats earlier and it has. And that's because in the 1960s, we started slow rolling a little bit more warnings, surgeon general warnings. In 64, the surgeon general released Smoking and Health. This is a report that basically said it's the single largest contributor to lung cancer in men. It's linked to premature birth. It'll increase your risk of a fatal heart attack by 70%. And 65, just a year later, they started mandating warning labels on packs.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  In 1970, they said you can't advertise on TV and radio, even though in print you still could. And then in 1972, finally, the surgeon general said, and this was really the beginning of the change of how they were viewed and like public smoking. In 72, they said involuntary smoking, which is secondhand smoke, it's also really bad for you. We're just going to leave it there. And 14 years later, in the mid 80s, they said it can actually give you lung cancer. Like you cannot smoke at all and be around smokers and get lung cancer.

• 47:04Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that happened to Screech from Saved by the Bell. Dustin Diamond died of lung cancer and he never smoked a cigarette in his life, apparently. He attributed it to staying in cheap hotels where you could smoke still.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  Oh, interesting. I mean, I remember my, my parents never smoked or anything, but I remember having friends whose parents smoked in the car with the windows rolled up.

• 47:25Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that's nuts. I, I lived in college with a guy who did that. I, I was just, I, I even as a smoker, I was like, this is wrong. There's something really wrong with this.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  Oh, God, in the car, like, good luck selling that thing.

• 47:38Josh Clark?

  But yeah, also your kids in the backseat, like, that was definitely a thing.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, uh, well, the other thing we should mention that I never really thought about until this is that smoke isn't even going through a filter. So what little work the filter is doing, that side stream smoke is just going right into your lung.

• 47:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And even your exhaled smoke contains a lot of toxins that are just getting right back out that are part of secondhand smoke too. So, yes.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 48:04Josh Clark?

  That definitely changed the calculus of how people viewed smoking. It wasn't like a you're killing yourself thing anymore. It was a you're killing all of us thing now. And that definitely led to bans in restaurants, movie theaters, all, all over the place. I remember I was, I think I've said before, I was one of the last smokers on an international flight.

• 48:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:23Josh Clark?

  In the nineties on the way to the Netherlands. Um, that just seems bizarre to me now too, that especially that it was that recent. But finally, America came around and was like, you can't smoke indoors anymore in public places. And another thing simultaneously was people started banning smoking in their own homes. That was simultaneous to government mandated smoking bans in public places. People were making that choice as well. So smokers were getting pushed further and further out of the mainstream, essentially.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, like literally outside, like, uh, you had to start telling people like, I'm sorry, there's a non-smoking house. The, the idea of somebody walking into my house and lighting up a cigarette is so bizarre sounding. Like, it, it seems like a hundred years ago that people were doing that, but we lived through it. Like, I remember all that.

• 49:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Oh, for sure. I had a house that we smoked in and it was.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  It's crazy how much things have changed in just a couple of decades.

• 49:21Josh Clark?

  Yeah, because now if somebody did that, it's like a hostile act. Like, they're, they're slapping you in the face. Like, they mean to be starting something, as Michael Jackson said.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm gonna screw up your house right now.

• 49:33Josh Clark?

  Yeah. What are you gonna do about it?

• 49:35Speaker 02

  I'm gonna smoke next to your cat.

• 49:39Josh Clark?

  Poor cat. Although I'll bet cats smoke if they could.

• 49:42Speaker 02

  Oh, that's true. You're probably right. The other thing that came in the early 90s, when everyone said, or when the, all the health experts said, hey, you know, you need to quit smoking if you want to live, is all of a sudden there were nicotine patches and Nicorette gum and stuff like that. All kinds of quitting aids that hit the market that were also big money.

• 50:04Josh Clark?

  Yeah, something else I found, and that stuff worked, and what also worked, I really want to do an episode just on this, was that big tobacco settlement among the state's attorneys general in the US.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:15Josh Clark?

  That just

• 50:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, we should cover that.

• 50:16Josh Clark?

  crippled the tobacco industry and really helped lead to its downfall. Because they had to keep handing over all these documents they had that were so damning. And then the press would just run story after story about this stuff. And it really turned a lot of people off on tobacco. But I remember when vaping started to be a thing and I was like, no, how did this happen? Like, we, like, the anti-tobacco forces won. They won. They beat big tobacco. One of the most powerful groups in the world got beaten by the people who were like, no, we shouldn't be smoking. And then vaping came along. So Julia turned up the statistic that I found very heartening.

• 50:58Josh Clark?

  She said that in 2019, 28% of high school students in the US vaped cigarettes, essentially. Three years later, it was 10%. So it was

• 51:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's great.

• 51:09Josh Clark?

  Yeah, cut by two thirds. So I attribute that almost exclusively to our vaping app, where we really came out against it.

• 51:19Josh Clark?

  Either way, whether that had anything to do with it or not, I was really happy to see that.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  I think Gen Z has been known so far for avoiding some of the trappings of these vices of previous generations. I've read that they're smoking less and they're drinking less and That's great. They seem to be a little smarter.

• 51:37Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  There's another stat here that I thought was pretty interesting was when I was talking about percentage of smokers in 1965, 42% smoked. In 1980, it was 33%. But there were more cigarettes sold in the early 80s. In 1965, at 42% smoking, they sold 521 billion cigarettes. That dropped to 33% of the population smoking, but they sold 637 billion. So fewer people seemingly smoking more cigarettes.

• 52:10Josh Clark?

  I would guess that in that interim, the tobacco companies figured out how to make their product more addictive then.

• 52:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:17Josh Clark?

  That's when it would have happened. That'd be my guess.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably so.

• 52:22Josh Clark?

  Well, I can't wait to tee off on that tobacco settlement episode whenever we do it, but this is a, this is a good one. I thought this was a good idea, Chuck. I'm glad you selected it.

• 52:31Speaker 02

  Thanks. I mean, they're not hurting. 2023 Philip Morris raked in 35, almost $36 billion. So they're doing okay. And people in different countries is different. I think Americans smoke less.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  I mean, when I've traveled through Europe, a lot of people smoke. I know in, in Asian countries, there's a lot of smoking.

• 52:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it's everywhere.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:52Josh Clark?

  Right, right after I quit, we went to Japan and they smoked, they smoked during a funeral.

• 52:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:58Josh Clark?

  And I was sitting there like, I want one of those so bad.

• 53:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. When we were in Vegas, collecting our lifetime achievement award a couple of years ago.

• 53:07Josh Clark?

  Yes.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  I went to a dinner at a really nice Chinese restaurant in one of the casinos. Unfortunately, it was a smoking casino. And, you know, the, the restaurants aren't like walled off. It's just kind of part of the casino. There was a group of young Japanese men, probably in their late teens to early twenties, like 13 of them, standing just on the other side of where our table was and just chain smoking.

• 53:34Josh Clark?

  Wow.

• 53:35Speaker 02

  Over and over and over to the point where I was like, man, this has legitimately ruined this awesome meal.

• 53:40Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that sucks.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  It does.

• 53:42Josh Clark?

  It definitely can. It can, just one person smoking can ruin a meal. I can't imagine 13.

• 53:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, but oh boy, they were loving them. They were pretty happy smoking those cigarettes.

• 53:53Josh Clark?

  You got anything else?

• 53:54Speaker 02

  I got nothing else.

• 53:55Josh Clark?

  All right, well, that's it for cigarettes, everybody. Thanks for listening. And since I said, thanks for listening, and Chuck's got nothing else, you put those two together, and we've just unlocked listener mail.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  Correction for Josh during our

• 54:12Josh Clark?

  Oh, boy.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  Listener mail a couple of-- this isn't a big one. Hey, guys, longtime listener, first time writer. Reference to the listener mail in the USAID episode, Josh mentioned Redtail or Red Hawk Beer, and said it was from Modesto, but the beer is Mendocino.

• 54:28Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I remember now.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  Given the cemetery and those names, it's easy to confuse these very different California towns. I can personally confirm Mendocino Brewing Company was and now still is a great brewery. They ceased operation in 2018, but were purchased and are now back in production in hopland, which is in Mendocino County. Thanks for everything you do, you guys. That's from Devin in California.

• 54:50Josh Clark?

  Very nice, Devin. Thank you for that. And yeah, it's still a good beer, even if it is from Mendocino rather than Modesto.

• 54:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, we just want to shout out the right town.

• 55:00Josh Clark?

  Yeah, but thank you for being gentle. I appreciate it, not calling me a dipstick or anything like that.

• 55:05Speaker 02

  No, that's not dipstick worthy.

• 55:07Josh Clark?

  Who was it again? I know I just said their name.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  That's Devin.

• 55:10Josh Clark?

  Devin, thanks a lot, Devin. If you want to be like Devin, you can send us an email to-- Send it off to [email protected].

• 55:22Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, MyHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 55:38Josh Clark?

  Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability, and it starts with a great deal on an off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. And they're built on a reputation for quality and reliability, which is why Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop Toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 56:09Speaker 02

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• 56:39Speaker 06

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• 57:09Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.