Smoking Essay, Research Paper

America s adolescents live in an environment today where tobacco companies misleading advertisements are attracting more and more kids to buy cigarettes before they are old enough and educated enough to understand tobacco s long-term health risks.

Tobacco companies use a number of clever, sneaky and intelligent methods to attract adolescents into the world of smoking.

sex apperl Another label, Kool uses the slogan, B Kool to market their product. In their advertisement, there is a young woman sitting behind a man who seems to be pretty cool. He is on a motorcycle, wearing sunglasses, and his hair looks pretty cool too. However, his picture is faded out. would like you to believe it is because he doesn t smoke. The woman s eyes are on the man with the cigarette. The people who designed this ad want young boys with low confidence to think that the way to win an attractive girl s attention is to smoke like the man in this ad.

There are also ads that are directed mainly at girls. A good example is the Virginia Slims advertisement. In the picture appears a very confident looking young lady leading a shy man. These manufacturers want girls to believe that smoking brings confidence and independence to an individual. targets young girls is These manufacturers want girls to believe that if they smoke, they will be slim, cute, and popular.

Tobacco companies have directed most of their luring advertisements towards young children as well as adolescents, trapping kids into becoming addicted customers from extremely young ages. Joe Camel is on the lid, and a cigarette is in his mouth. Children think that Joe is a cute character, and if he smokes, then smoking must be okay.

Tobacco companies use lying strategies to attract children when they are young, and then put social pressures on them when they become teens. These companies know that teens feel a pressure to be accepted by their peers, so they bombard them with billboards and ads that advocate smoking as a means to fit-in and to be cool.

Tobacco companies lose 3,000-5,000 customers each day. (More than 1,000 die from using tobacco as intended; the rest quit or die of other causes.) Of course they need to find ways to manipulate young children into becoming their prime customers; these are the people who will be creating the majority of the profit for their companies. The tobacco industry spends 3-4 billion dollars each year on advertising because they need to replace their lost revenue sources. 840 packs of cigarettes are sold in the United States every second. This means a lot of profit for the tobacco companies.

CONCLUSION

For decades, tobacco executives have prevaricated about the health risks of tobacco and have pretended not to know about the addictive power of nicotine. These companies are making large profits of money by tricking people under the age of 18 into believing that smoking is not harmful to one s health, and that it is actually a cool thing to do. They are targeting kids at increasingly younger ages, and will use any means necessary to coax children into obtaining cigarettes so that they will develop a lifelong struggle of addiction and disease forming habits essentially for the purpose of catering to the greed of a hefty paycheck.