Hacker News Reader

Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

If they do as well as they did with Big Tobacco it will be a massive failure other than giving themselves a huge paycheck.

$50 BILLION in tobacco product sales and 46% profit margin last year (Coca-Cola has 26% profit margin in comparison)

And all those payouts to the states that were supposed to help people, all those extra taxes to discourage smoking? Well all that money went to other pet projects because no law was ever made how it should be used.

View on HN

I don't know how to define failure... The extra cost does reduce smoking and a lot of taxes have been collected. ($19B in 2020 according to [1], overwhelmingly to the states).

One can certainly disagree with what the tax money was spent on, but that's really a different question since that goes for all taxes collected.

Not sure too many people are eager to raise sale or property taxes to cut the tobacco taxes and/or cut state budgets.

[1] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...

The absolutely drastic reduction of smoking says otherwise.

I personally think that has more to do with state taxes raising prices and young people choosing vape over traditional tobacco.

I'd argue the drastic reduction of smoking is the result of a culture shift around the activity (better education) and governments banning it from public spaces, not lawyers suing Philip Morris.

Educational programs aren’t free, though. The tobacco industry was forced to spend billions paying for these programs as part of the master settlement in 1998. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Ag...

The "better education" part is directly funded from tobacco lawsuits.

I'd posit that legal actions provide lubricant for shifts in social consensus. We could probably argue chickens and eggs for awhile though.

Yeah, given shifts in social consensus also provide lubricants for lawsuits (and laws). One would have to study the issue harder than I have--and I'm sure people have and probably written books. But certainly there was a massive shift in most places that probably isn't explained by either legal actions or higher taxes.

I think it's pretty hard to say that that cultural shift happened in isolation from the reduction in commercial advertising of tobacco products (due to legal bans in the 70s and 80s) and the associated increase in advertising of their negative effects (often paid for by lawsuit settlement money).

Those companies spent billions to shape the cultural perception of smoking through direct advertisement and popular media.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com