It’s amazing what marketing can do to distort perception. For example, compare the tobacco industry to the recent pandemic. COVID-19 had a U.S. death toll of about 1.2 million over three tough years. We shut down the entire planet, and the virus would go on to kill an average of 400,000 Americans a year, for three years.
Smoking has been here all along — glamorized, marketed to kids — killing 500,000 Americans a year, every year, forever.
The tobacco industry was supposedly subdued decades ago by a historic legal beat-down, yet somehow still spends $22 million every day promoting its wares. That’s nearly a million dollars an hour.
-Matt Taibbi, Matt Bivins, MD
