I started off
looking through past documentaries that have been made centered around tobacco.
The majority of them covered negative health effects of cigarettes such as
"The Tobacco Conspiracy" and "Passion for Cigarettes".
"Addicted to Pleasure: Tobacco" looked at the addictive qualities of
tobacco, historically in the British empire and specifically how they are being
made more and more addictive. I found two documentaries that were closer to
where we were aiming to go, so I feel like it would be beneficial to watch
those and make sure we don't cover the same kind of information. "Farming
in the Black Patch" looks at why farmers have stayed loyal to tobacco
despite the public's increasingly negative opinions toward smoking and
"Bright Leaves" deals with tobacco farms in North Carolina and the
workers dealing with society's changed attitudes toward smoking. "We Love
Cigarettes" looks more through cross-cultural tobacco beliefs, which is
probably where I'm more interested, and covers smoking bans in the US and
Europe that made it so 1/3 of the world's cigarettes are smoked in China and
globally the tobacco industry is still growing strong as a result of this
outsourcing.
As I said in
class, when I studied abroad in Wales the most jarring aspect was the attitudes
toward smoking. I hardly ever see people smoking in the U.S., but in the UK
it's extremely prevalent. You have to walk through a cloud of smoke before
entering any building and despite the mandatory "smoking kills"
warning on their bags of tobacco, it never seems deter anyone from actually
smoking. Looking into cross-cultural tobacco beliefs, I found that currently
Bhutan is the only country where tobacco is actually illegal. However, even
before the ban, only about 1% of its population actually smoked. Tobacco is not
grown in Bhutan and it costs a lot to import goods, so prior to the ban
interest in cigarettes was already dwindling. In English-speaking countries, smoking
prevalence declined after the implementation of tobacco control but has hardly
changed since the 1990's. Tobacco control is a priority area under the World
Health Organization (WHO), which addresses the health effects of tobacco.
For the next
portion I kind of did just free word association and made a list of things that
I thought about when I thought about tobacco. Neither of my parents smoke but
my mom remembers when she was younger and they stopped allowing ads for
cigarettes on the television and they had one night where they just played a
bunch of cigarette ads back to back as a final hurrah. My dad often talks about
a Kurt Vonnegut quote, "Here's the news: I am going to sue the Brown &
Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a
billion bucks. Starting when I was only twelve years old, I have never
chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right
on the package, Brown & Williamson have promised to kill me. But I am
eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats." Other than that I mostly just
think of movies and television series. Like Mad Men dealing with Lucky Strike
and "The Insider" during my Al Pacino phase. Recently I watched
"Thank You For Smoking" which brought up how cigarettes are kind of
marketed to people, which was also incredibly interesting to me.
I then started
looking at tobacco in popular culture. Hollywood used to glamorize smoking such
as "A Streetcar Named Desire," "Rebel Without A Cause" and
"Breakfast at Tiffany's". Cigarettes used to pay to be a part of
movies (product placement) until the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement in
1998, although smoking is still prevalent in films, whether obvious or not.
There have since been changing attitudes toward smoking and movies seem to be
mirroring this trend. For example, "Stranger than Fiction" shows a
character smoking but also makes it a point to have them coughing and hacking,
reducing the glamorous association with smoking and tobacco.
I then looked
into specifically North Carolina tobacco farming and negative effects that this
changing public opinion has had on farmers and the industry as a whole. North
Carolina has been and continues to be the largest producer of tobacco in the
country but China is the number one grower of tobacco in the world (with the
largest amount of consumers). Since the Great Depression there have been
government imposed production limits on tobacco farms and as a result a lot of
the industry has been taken over by foreign growers. There has also been a significant
drop in number of tobacco farmers for the last decade, partly due to e-cigs and
the challenges they impose upon the tobacco industry. Although since that
article, it seems that vaping has surpassed the challenge that e-cig's created
for the industry.
References
- http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/how_they_do_it/2005/01/the_first_nonsmoking_nation.html
- http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.sdg.3-a-viz?lang=en
- https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2010/07/the-glitz-the-glamour-the-smoke.html
- http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/tobacco-conspiracy/
- http://www.documentarytube.com/videos/addicted-to-pleasure-tobacco
- https://www.ket.org/series/KFBLA/
- http://www.pbs.org/pov/brightleaves/film-description/
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/broadband/tx/smoking/
- http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/09/02/thousands-farmers-stopped-growing-tobacco-after-deregulation-payouts/32115163/
- http://publicradioeast.org/post/growing-tobacco-north-carolina
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