How the USA beat smoking

So back in the 1960s, the United States government basically declared war on drugs, right? Uh, there were all these different substances that the population was taking and they were doing all kinds of harm and they went after all these things. And fast forward to today, 60 years later, arguably we've lost the war on drugs. But there's one thing really interesting. There's one drug that we totally have beaten. Um, and I was a little tricky in this intro because that drug was legal at the time and it stayed legal. And that drug is actually cigarettes. It's hugely addictive, incredibly difficult to get off, and incredibly bad for you. But what happened with that particular substance and how the government has basically, well, just killed the entire industry, it's totally fascinating. If you're new here, my name is Michael Girdley. I am a business nerd. I like to do videos explaining concepts of business, tying that into societal trends. I've built businesses, I've sold businesses, I've created them. I've hired a lot of people, done it for 30 years, and if you're an entrepreneur, that's what this channel is about. And this weekend, we are here visiting my son in Phoenix, who is here for college, and this video is inspired by the cool, crisp, and clean Arizona air, which frankly is just gorgeous here in the winter. So I thought about this topic of smoking, frankly, 'cause I was reflecting on my wife and I's last vacation. We went away for our anniversary Barcelona, and that's in Spain. And one of the things we hated about Barcelona was seemingly everywhere we turned, somebody was like smoking or blowing smoke at us. You couldn't sit down in a cafe without a young person like this lady here smoking next to you, somebody smoking in the streets like this lady, and you're sitting at a cafe and like everything smelled like Marlboros. It's just disgusting. We just didn't like it. Turns out it wasn't just us. I pulled up this chart here, which shows that of prevalence of cigarette use, Spain was number 3. 40% of the population reported that they would smoke on at least the irregular. Only China and Germany have them beat. Pretty incredible numbers. Pulled up like, what are the numbers per country around the world? And this chart's super fascinating. You look up at the top and you have places like Turkey and Spain and stuff like that. But then down at the bottom, you have Iceland and the United States. Like, super fascinating that, well, people aren't smoking in the United States. And to me, having grown up when you could still, back in the '80s, smoke on airplanes and restaurants had smoke-filled, you know, kind of nastiness, and you'd come home from the bars even as late as being college age and your hair would smell like smoke. Like, the world is totally different from just 30 years ago. And it turns out it's just not my perception. Smoking rates in the United States are at an all-time low. Basically, if you go back like over 80 years, fewer people smoking are smoking than ever before. Like just a crazy transition of where things were. And if you look at this graph, as late as the 1960s, like 40 to 50% of Americans were regularly using tobacco. Just a total like destruction of the habit in large, like crazy. Before the '60s and before kind of the war on tobacco started by the government, Like, smoking was growing like crazy. You can see here in this chart that it eventually was dominating more and more of society to where it peaked back in the '60s. Well, and that's when things changed. Government's very first attempt to start to go against the cigarette world, despite, you know, everybody knowing for the longest time that cigarettes were bad for your health and dangerous, the industry had resisted all that. And the government's very first shot was for the Surgeon General to come after the cigarette industry. And they released a seminal kind of 1964 report saying that cigarettes, well, they're unhealthy and they'll kill you. Kind of crazy. That's where they, the government started to insist on things like warning labels and that sort of thing to show up on packages of cigarettes. But here's a fascinating article. Even after like that 1964, you know, Surgeon General report came out, like reporters were suddenly expecting cigarettes to stop being consumed so much? Well, it turns out when you have an addictive thing, that's somebody's habit, like a cigarette is, it is difficult to get people to change. And the numbers, well, they didn't even really start to budge early on. If you're looking for proof that cigarettes kill, this is the best graph that I have to show that. Basically, it maps lung cancer mortality to prevalence of smoking. And it turned out when people stopped smoking so much, lung cancer rates went down. It just took a while for those lung cancer rates to actually catch up because remember, there's a lag between people stop smoking and smoke and when lung cancer shows up and they end up in the hospital and then they die. Come back to this chart here a lot as we continue on and explain the story here. But basically it shows the story of how it took years and decades to win the war on cigarettes and smoking, which, by the way, I find totally nasty. It's one of the worst habits. I've never used tobacco in my life except for one time I used chewing tobacco, and then I threw up, and that was the only time. Never again. I was 16, give me a break. But I'll come back to this chart a lot because it shows kind of the seminal moments as the multi-decade war on tobacco, well, kind of went down, and the multifaceted way that the government went after the industry. This is kind of a key point to the whole video here, which was winning the war on tobacco actually required multiple interventions. It wasn't just one thing that won it. It was a bunch of things all done at once for a very long time. And the very first thing that they did was go through and make cigarette smoking and tobacco usage much more expensive. So the feds rolled out taxes on cigarettes and then the states did as well. And so if you look at it, and this is a great chart showing the growth of those, those taxes, you have a situation now where the states sometimes are taking more in taxes from each pack of cigarettes than the manufacturers are. Pretty nuts. One of the ironies of the whole, like, cigarette story is that this taxation basically made the states a partner in the disease of smoking, right? Um, which is like, now states are making a shit ton of money. And this graph shows how much your individual locality is making from cigarette taxes. Like, it's billions of dollars that governments are taking in. And so now back to our graphic of the timeline of smoking and smoking usage. So, so far they've gone as a government and tried to put together a situation to show that smoking is bad, right? That's the Surgeon General's work and a lot of the PR stuff from the government. And now they're making smoking more expensive. But that by itself wouldn't have worked. And so the next thing the government realized they needed to do was to go make smoking uncool. And the way they did that was super tricky. And the way they did it was by these indoor smoking bans. They stopped restaurants, bars, different venues from allowing people to smoke inside of them. Used to be able to smoke in planes, believe it or not. But by banning smoking inside of these establishments, suddenly it pushed it to a place where it wasn't so cool or wasn't so hip. You can see that today when you go kind of walk outside of a building and you see everybody huddled into a corner next to the dumpster, like, like it's not very cool to smoke anymore and you don't look as cool doing it like, like you would hope. And here's a cigarette ad from back in that time. Back in the '80s when they were trying to still convince people to smoke, because the industry would fight against all this, right? They want to keep making money. You know, here's a guy looking pretty cool getting his cigarette lit. Or here's the next one. This is a James Bond movie from the '60s, I believe. And who's cooler than James Bond? And here he is smoking. And yeah, like, smoking will happen if people can look cool doing it. If you're huddled next to a dumpster, looking like a raccoon. That's not, that's not going to help with the image of smoking. Making smoking uncool, it did something pretty interesting. The cessation of smoking, meaning quitting of smoking, actually started more heavily amongst the highly affluent. And if you look today, like, the people that are still smoking, they're by and large people that tend to be on the poorer and more uneducated end of the economic spectrum. We succeeded as a society. Across society, we also pushed the idea of smoking away from kids. So, you know, this chart here is super fascinating. You look at smoking incidents in movies by the rating of those movies, and you can see the prevalence of smoking in those movies that kids could watch. So G-rated, PG, and stuff like that, like going way down, right? So suddenly you have kids seeing smoking as something not cool, right? Because it's been pushed to the fringes. They're not seeing it in mass media and they're not seeing advertisements for it. And the government is telling them it's bad. Like, eventually you keep repeating that process over and over again. And oh, by the way, it's expensive. You keep repeating that process over and over again. Eventually kids are going to listen. And they do. They did. That leads us to this last chart here, which is like the victory lap for the war on smoking. Like, it's at an 80-year low. Like, society won. And it's something I think important that we as humans and as Americans, like, slow down and realize, like, this is a huge win. Like, it's easy to focus on losing a lot of the other wars on drugs or, you know, some of the other problems in the country, and there's plenty. But this is one that's a good thing. And this is actually one of the most fascinating things about human nature. We love to fascinate and talk about the negative things, and we forget about the stuff that's great. And we have changed smoking in America. But you look around and talk to people about it, and nobody realizes how amazing this is. Like, we basically eradicated a highly addictive substance from our country, and it's made everything better, in my opinion. Unless you're a smoker, then it sucks. But you see what I'm saying? Somebody who can't absolutely stand smoking and watched his grandparents smoke, by the way, all of my ancestors smoked. Most of them ended up quitting, by the way, before they passed away. You know, this is pretty amazing. Now, one thing to think about, and we've all seen it, is the rise of vaping. So what's happening with vaping? I'll put up this chart here. Here's the good news about vaping, or the bad news about vaping. The bad news about vaping is it exists, and a lot of kids are doing it. There's all this different stuff happening. But here's the good news: over the past couple years, the prevalence of vaping amongst kids is going down. Teenagers are doing it less and less. So the stuff and the playbook that's being used for cigarettes, a lot of it's being run again for vaping, and, uh, it's working, which is a good thing. Don't vape, kids. All right, that's it for this video. Let me know what you think. Hopefully you hate smoking too. If you do, tell me below. Bye.