CBC News reports on a Harvard study, based on documents obtained thanks to a settlement in a massive lawsuit against Big Tobacco; the upshot is nicely summed up in the headline, Tobacco companies designed cigarettes to addict women, study says:
“These internal documents reveal that the tobacco industry’s targeting of women goes far beyond marketing and advertising,” said lead author Carrie Murray Carpenter, a research analyst at the Tobacco Control Research and Training Program at the Harvard School of Public Health.
For more than 20 years, the industry studied gender-based differences in motivational factors, smoking patterns, and product preferences in order to promote smoking among women and girls, the authors wrote.
The research allowed the companies to make cigarettes that exploited the concept of relative saftey through light cigarettes and less sidestream smoke, and conformed to women’s taste and odour preferences and the actual way women smoke: with a weaker pull than men.
The documents also show that cigarette makers went so far as to explore the use of appetite suppressants in cigarettes to promote smoking-mediated weight control, the researchers wrote.
I still find it hard to get my mind around how marketers and scientists subordinate their basic sense of decency to the task of answering the question, “How can we manipulate more people into using our lethal, addictive product?”
You assume that they have a basic sense of decency to subordinate.
Well, here’s the thing: I’m convinced everyone operates according to some kind of ethical code. It’s just that, from Big Tobacco to arms exporters to the “payroll lending” racket, that code seems to say, “Yes, these actions will cause incalculable harm. But I’m enhancing shareholder value, and what could be more important than that?”
And then there’s that very slippery argument, “I’m just trying to feed my family”… hoo boy. Anyone care to tackle that one?