I can't bring myself to watch Mad Men yet. The aesthetics, the sheer beauty of wafting smoke, the clear confidence of a hand on a zippo. Don Draper reminds us of another era, an era that believed in the sheer sexiness of smoking. It was pretty. And it duped us.
We all remember the American lawsuits against big tobacco in the 1990s. The companies were found guilty of all manner of fraud and liability, from deliberately hiding their knowledge of smoking's health risks to their lavish Madison Avenue campaigns that made us feel sexy, cool, rugged. By the time I started smoking in the 1980s, the health risks were well known, but back in the 30s, 40s, 50s? My aunt, who became an adult in the 1940s, speaks apologetically about smoking: "I tried it, but I just couldn't take to it." I guess she didn't apply herself enough. The sheer scope of Big Tobacco's fraud left us feeling righteously indignant. They knew, but they wanted to keep turning a bloated profit. They killed people to make money.
Naively, I never suspected that quitting smoking would plunge me into an entirely different profit-making machine. As a critical humanist, and a scholar of cultural studies, it is, to say the least, embarrassing that I did not imagine that if companies would kill you to make a profit, surely there were many that would save you to make a profit too. Ah capitalism and your clever ruses!
Here's what you need to know: Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT) is big business. Quit-smoking drugs are big business. (Just glance at the Ad Sense ads on my blog. I'll wager they're all for some stop smoking aid.) It seems so painfully obvious now, but I had honestly never thought about it before. You're part of a billion dollar market and, as the saying goes, may the buyer beware.
Regardless of the efficacy (or lack thereof) of these products, I'm now interested in their economics: the way they build their market in order to satisfy it. There is likely an entire book to be written about "Big Nicotine," but for now I'll simply whet your appetite with some not-so crackpot theories. Drug companies are huge financial backers of stop-smoking campaigns. Drug companies are behind the financing of massive numbers of studies that expose the health risks of smoking. NRTs (as opposed to stop-smoking drugs) are still just as addictive as cigarettes. There is a world of conspiracy theories to be found in those few facts. But more importantly for me, there is a serious critical undertaking: how much and to what extent to I believe and trust in the information I have access to, given the economic context of its production? How much of what I learn arises from altruism, how much from cynical profiteering?
Here is just one example I've found of the ways that the discourse of quitting is being shaped directly by the companies behind the drugs and NRTs: try to search for information about what will happen to your body when you quit. No matter how you configure your search, or how many sites you click through on, the majority of the information you find will be strikingly similar. It will divide time into these increments: 20 minutes, 8 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours, 2-12 weeks, 3-9 months, 5 years, 10 years. For the record, the (almost always uncited) information you find is copyright Johnson and Johnson, makers of Nicorette.
Smoking was once cool and sexy. Now, quitting is healthy and outdoorsy. We've moved from one target market to another.
If I were being wholly honest though, I'd still rather be Don Draper than that crunchy-granola boy in the Khashi commercials.
