Addiction Not News to Tobacco Industry

Nearly 50 million pages of once-secret tobacco industry documents are today freely available and fully searchable online.[1] Collectively, they paint a disturbing picture of an industry fully aware that its business is drug addiction.

Those documents aren’t just history. They describe the system that shaped the path most nicotine users unknowingly stepped onto.

They do more than expose corporate misconduct. They reveal a system built on recruiting new addicts faster than old ones die. Every internal discussion about “market share” depended on one brutal reality: nicotine customers do not stay voluntarily — they stay because dependence makes leaving hard.

The industry cannot ignore that, historically, roughly 27% of new smokers have been age 13 or younger, 60% age 15 or under, 80% age 17 or younger, and 92% under the age of 19.[2]

This wasn’t a side effect of the business. It was the foundation of it. Without recruiting young users before they understood addiction, the model collapses.

That’s why the industry’s survival has always depended on youth. Adults rarely wake up one morning and decide to become addicted to a drug. Teenagers, however, are still forming identity, testing boundaries, and underestimating long-term risk. The industry knew this. It didn’t need to force anyone to smoke. It only needed to ensure that experimentation happened early enough for nicotine to do the rest.

Contrary to “corporate responsibility” image campaigns, with nearly five million annual tobacco-related deaths worldwide,[3] the industry knows that it must either face financial ruin or somehow entice each new generation of youth to experiment and get hooked.

As a Lorillard executive wrote in 1978, “The base of our business is the high-school student.”[4]

Philip Morris USA (PM) is America's largest tobacco company, holding a 49.7% share of the U.S. retail cigarette market in 2019.[5] Based in Richmond, Virginia, and founded in 1854, PM brands include Alpine, Basic, Benson & Hedges, Bristol, Cambridge, Chesterfield, Commander, Dave's, English Ovals, L&M, Lark, Merit, Parliament, Players, Saratoga and Virginia Slims.

Today, in 2020, Philip Morris' website openly proclaims, “PM USA agrees with the overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking is addictive.” “There is no safe cigarette. Cigarettes are addictive and cause serious diseases in smokers. For those concerned about the health risks of smoking, the best thing to do is quit.”

It gets worse. “Philip Morris USA agrees with the overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and other serious diseases in smokers. Smokers are far more likely to develop such serious diseases than non-smokers.”[6]

Remember that fateful “what the heck” moment when you surrendered and gave tobacco that first serious try? What you probably don't recall are the thousands of invitations to surrender and experiment that tobacco industry marketing had by then burned into your subconscious.

As shown by the following quotes from once-secret Philip Morris corporate documents, it was fully aware that it was in the drug addiction business while hammering your brain with those invitations:

• 1972 — “The cigarette should not be construed as a product but a package. The product is nicotine. Think of a puff of smoke as the vehicle for nicotine. The cigarette is but one of many package layers.”

  “There is the carton, which contains the pack, which contains the cigarette, which contains the smoke. The smoke is the final package. The smokers must strip off all these package layers to get to that which he seeks.”[7]

• May 1975 — “… decline in Marlboro's growth rate is due to … slower growth in the number of 15-19 year-olds … changing brand preferences among younger smokers.”

  “Most of these studies have been restricted to people age 18 and over, but my own data, which includes younger teenagers, shows even higher Marlboro market penetration among 15-17 year-olds.”

  “The teenage years are also important because those are the years during which most smokers begin to smoke, the years in which initial brand selections are made, and the period in the life-cycle in which conformity to peer-group norms is greatest.”[8]

  

• November 1977 — “I was amazed at the trend that the [Council for Tobacco Research] work is taking. For openers, Dr. Donald H. Ford, a new staff member, makes the following quotes: ‘Opiates and nicotine may be similar in action’ … ‘There is a relationship between nicotine and the opiates.’ … It is my strong feeling that with the progress that has been claimed, we are in the process of digging our own grave.”[9]

Based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, R.J. Reynolds' Tobacco Company (RJR) has been around since 1874. Before RJR's 2004 merger with Brown and Williamson, its cigarette brands included Camel, Doral, Eclipse, Monarch, More, Now, Salem, Vantage and Winston.

While RJR cigarette store marketing has claimed that smokers smoke its brands for a host of reasons (flavor, pleasure, adventure, price, to be true, to make new friends, have fun, great menthol, or to look more adult), its once-secret documents tell a different story.

Read the following statements carefully. These were not written by critics or regulators. They were written by the people designing the products that kept millions hooked. These are not the words of companies uncertain about addiction. These are the words of companies managing it.

What follows isn’t speculation. It’s the industry explaining, in its own words, how dependence is created, sustained, and monetized.

A nine-page 1972 confidential memo by a senior RJR executive is entitled “The Nature of the Tobacco Business and the Crucial Role of Nicotine Therein.”[10] The next 11 paragraphs share direct quotes from this now famous and extremely informative memo:

“In a sense, the tobacco industry may be thought of as being a specialized, highly ritualized and stylized segment of the pharmaceutical industry. Tobacco products, uniquely, contain and deliver nicotine, a potent drug with a variety of physiological effects.”

“Thus a tobacco product is, in essence, a vehicle for delivery of nicotine, designed to deliver the nicotine in a generally acceptable and attractive form. Our Industry is then based upon design, manufacture and sale of attractive dosage forms of nicotine …”

“If nicotine is the sine qua non of tobacco products and tobacco products are recognized as being attractive dosage forms of nicotine, then it is logical to design our products — and where possible, our advertising — around nicotine delivery …”

“He does not start smoking to obtain undefined physiological gratifications or reliefs, and certainly he does not start to smoke to satisfy a non-existent craving for nicotine. Rather, he appears to start to smoke for purely psychological reasons — to emulate a valued image, to conform, to experiment, to defy, to be daring, to have something to do with his hands, and the like.”

“Only after experiencing smoking for some period of time do the physiological ‘satisfactions’ and habituation become apparent and needed. Indeed, the first smoking experiences are often unpleasant until a tolerance for nicotine has been developed.”

“This leaves us, then, in the position of attempting to design and promote the same product to two different types of markets with two different sets of motivations, needs and expectations.”

“If, as proposed above, nicotine is the sine qua non of smoking, and if we meekly accept the allegations of our critics and move toward reduction or elimination of nicotine from our products, then we shall eventually liquidate our business.”

“If we intend to remain in business and our business is the manufacture and sale of dosage forms of nicotine, then at some point we must make a stand.” “If our business is fundamentally that of supplying nicotine in useful dosage form, why is it really necessary that allegedly harmful ‘tar’ accompany that nicotine?”

That means the money spent on nicotine products today doesn’t just buy a habit. It continues funding a system that knowingly hooked millions when they were too young to understand what was happening.

Seeing that clearly changes the relationship. Once we understand how the trap was set, continuing to finance it stops feeling like comfort and starts feeling like surrender.

As shown, nearly 50 years ago RJR's 1972 memo accurately predicted both the arrival of nicotine replacement products (NRT) and the combustion-free electronic or e-cigarette.

Today, the lines between tobacco industry nicotine and pharmaceutical industry nicotine are horribly blurred. A 2003 nicotine gum study found that 37% of gum users were hooked on the cure, each being chronic long-term gum users of at least 6 months.[11] It's a trend that will continue.

Brown&Williamson (B&W) was a cigarette company that merged with RJR in 2004. B&W brands — now owned by RJR — include Barclay, Belair, Capri, Carlton, GPC, Kool, Laredo, Lucky Strike, Misty, North State, Pall Mall, Private Stock, Raleigh, Tareyton and Viceroy. Here are a few quotes from once-secret B&W corporate documents:

• July 18, 1977: “How to market an addictive product in an ethical manner?”[12]
• June 24, 1978: “Very few consumers are aware of the effects of nicotine, i.e., its addictive nature and that nicotine is a poison.”[13]
• March 25, 1983: “Nicotine is the addicting agent in cigarettes. It, therefore, seems reasonable that when people switch brands, if they have a certain smoking pattern (i.e. number of sticks/day), they will switch to a brand at the same nicotine level.”[14]

Founded in 1760, Lorillard Tobacco Company is the oldest U.S. tobacco company. Its brands include Kent, Maverick, Max, Newport, Old Gold, Satin, Triumph and True. The following telling quotes are from once-secret Lorillard documents:

• April 13, 1977: “Tobacco scientists know that physiological satisfaction is almost totally related to nicotine intake.”[15]
• November 3, 1977: “I don't know of any smoker who at some point hasn't wished he didn't smoke. If we could offer an acceptable alternative for providing nicotine, I am 100 percent sure we would have a gigantic brand.”[16]
• February 13, 1980: “Goal - Determine the minimum level of nicotine that will allow continued smoking. We hypothesize satisfaction cannot be compensated for by psychological satisfaction. At this point smokers will quit, or return to higher tar and nicotine brands.”[17]

Last but not least is British American Tobacco (BAT), which dates to 1902 and sells more than 300 brands worldwide. BAT's international brands include Dunhill, Kent, Lucky Strike, Pall Mall, Vogue, Rothmans, Peter Stuyvesant, Benson & Hedges, Winfield, John Player, State Express 555, Kool and Viceroy. It does not own all these brands but is licensed by other companies to distribute them. Here are a few BAT admissions.

• November 1961: Smoking “differs in important features from addiction to other alkaloid drugs, but yet there are sufficient similarities to justify stating that smokers are nicotine addicts.”[18]
• 1967: “There has been significant progress in understanding why people smoke and the opinion is hardening in medical circles that the pharmacological effects of nicotine play an important part... It may be useful, therefore, to look at the tobacco industry as if a large part its business is the administration of nicotine (in the clinical sense).”[19]
• August 1979: “We are searching explicitly for a socially acceptable addictive product. The essential constituent is most likely to be nicotine or a direct substitute for it.”[20]
• April 1980: “In a world of increased government intervention, B.A.T should learn to look at itself as a drug company rather than as a tobacco company.”[21]

The question is no longer whether the industry understood addiction. The documents show it clearly did. The real question is what that means for anyone still paying to stay hooked.

Nicotine dependence didn’t spread by accident. It spread because it was profitable. And once dependence takes hold, customers return again and again, not because they freely choose to, but because the drug has changed what “choice” feels like.

Recognizing that doesn’t make us weak. It makes us informed. And informed people don’t keep financing the system that trapped them.

The above RJR memo leaves little room for doubt. Nicotine addiction wasn’t an unfortunate or accidental outcome. It was the result the industry depended on.

Seeing that clearly changes the relationship. The money spent on nicotine didn’t just buy a product. It bought continued dependence.

Once we understand that, the illusion breaks. We weren't just consumers. We were paying to stay hooked.