Big Cigarette Companies Bathe in Snake Oil & Corruption

Let's start by telling a story about a man who became a father, when he decided to surrender into stop smoking for good this time. He became a good role model for his daughter and family. He died a non-smoker at the age of ninety-four. 

I recall that fateful day after service at Saint Patrick’s Catholic church at about 1977, our family just got adopted into a family after being held in an asylum in Gaum because of the Vietnam War. I was a little girl, maybe six or seven, at church with very limited knowledge of English, seeing what was happening outside the church. There was a white man who seemed to be a godly man, talking to my dad and eldest brother, known as brother number one. 

We were fresh off the boat, just acclimating to America and were trying to understand it amid confusion and anxiety about this new place. I can only imagine how scared and frightened my dad felt. This godly man, who seemed to be a priest in training, pulled out a cigarette.  I do not remember what he said, but I recalled what my eyes saw. 

Why is this godly man pushing a toxic poison on my dad, seemingly wishing for his death. I remember my heart racing and wondering and pondering why this godly man pulled out this six-inch stick that smelled like trash and sunk of toxic chemicals. I was stuck with a sinking feeling of confusion. And, even at such a young age, I knew that big cigarette companies bathed in snake oil and corruption. 

I would wonder how something that was marketed to be cool, smelled so bad and was so deadly. This fateful day after church, led to my dad and my brother to be smokers for about twenty years or more. 

Big cigarette companies control the rhetoric, or the marketing, using slogans to make smoking seem cool and safe. Cigarette companies used doctor’s endorsements during the 1940s, to reduce public health concerns over the risks of smoking. Using slogans like “just what the doctor ordered”, and “more doctors smoke camels”, misled the people and showed that cigarettes were fine for your health because doctors did it too. We all now know the risks of smoking too much and the dangers of smoking on your body and others (second-hand smoking).

Cigarette companies, as early as the 1940’s and even up to today, were out to make money and willingly ignore the risk of harming their customers' health.  In the 1950’s and 60s tobacco companies bought and sponsored their own tv commercials, and paid celebrities to sponsor their products. Cultural icons, like the Marlboro man, pushed smoking as a part of traditional masculinity and harmed the health of many men. 

Eric Lawson is known as the Marlboro man. He is ruggedly handsome in his ads from the 1970’s. He died at 72 in his home in San Luis Obispo of respiratory failure due to COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease on January 10th, 2014. He was hired to be the Marlboro man from 1978 to 1981 and smoked since he was 14. Susan Lawson was his wife. She mentioned how proud Eric was when he appeared in an anti-smoking ad that featured a parody of the Marlboro man. And he appeared in an Entertainment Tonight segment that showed the negative effects of smoking. Susan mentioned that he kept this habit until he was diagnosed with COPD. She was quoted to say in the Associated Press on January 26, 2014 “he knew the cigarettes had a hold on him…he knew… yet he would not stop”. 

Eric was being two-faced.

Here are other actors, who were the Marlboro man who died of smoking related diseases, David Miller. He was one of the first Marlboro men in the 1950s and died of emphysema in 1987.  And David McLean who was a Marlboro man in the 1960s, died of lung cancer in 1995.

Tobacco companies knew what they were doing, they controlled the message and the rhetoric to make money while willfully ignoring how dangerous this stick was. The use of celebrity endorsements made kids want to be like their favorite celebrity, rock star, athlete, or singer.

 In 1962, the Flintstones cartoon was selling Winston’s cigarettes. This was the same brand my dad smoked. I remember the Saturday morning cartoons, where I would wake up at six am, like many other kids for over half a century. You have your favorite Saturday morning cartoons. Big tobacco companies would place their products in conjunction with cartoon characters to normalize smoking to kids. Joe Camel was invented as a kid-friendly cartoon to do just this. 

They would glamorize smoking, putting expensive diamonds, and glitters on the packaging, or even make candy, fruit, or just overall sweet, flavored cigarettes with the intention of creating a future generation of smokers. 

They did not care about the health and welfare of the innocent babies. Cartoons became so effective at making kids addicted to tobacco that tobacco companies were prohibited from using cartoon characters in advertisements, as part of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement in 46 States. Big tobacco companies have been getting away with this con for over 50 years, to get kids who become adults addicted and to pocket this dirty money. 

For decades Tobacco companies would sponsor popular sporting events to market to and control their message. RJ Reynolds sponsored the NASCAR Winston Cup for 30 years. Did you notice the cigarette brand name there in that popular sporting event? NASCAR’s Winston Cup was named after the Winston cigarette brand. 

Companies can use the power of suggestion to influence people's buying power. The buyer needs to be aware and informed of that risk that was whitewashed away and suppressed. 

They sponsored girl’s night out events where women would receive free makeup, massages, and other camel brand items. There are new regulations that prohibit this type of event sponsorship. But people can still sign up to receive free products at sporting events today. 

Cigarette companies would call young kids their ‘replacement smokers’ to aggressively advertise to them because they understand they are killing their current customers. To quote from “Young Adult Smokers: Strategies and Opportunities” in 1984 as a RJR report, “Younger adult smoker[minors] have been the critical factor of growth and decline of every major brand and company over the last 50 years…brands/companies which fail to attract their fair share of younger adult smokers face an uphill battle…younger adult smokers are the only source of replacement smokers…if younger adults turn away from smoking, the industry must decline, just as a population which does not give birth will eventually dwindle.”

As a six- to seven-year-old growing up with my dad, and reaching puberty and adolescence, the impression that I saw my dad when he smoked Winston’s is that he was chained to a bad habit that was killing him. He finally quit smoking after three tries and smoked outside the house for many years because my mother had asthma in the backwoods of Orange Texas.  Quitting smoking was easy when he made up his mind to quit smoking for good this time.

The young girl grew up to be a teenager left to ponder if the Marlboro Man, my dad, was not as ruggedly handsome and strong. But the message was clear, I was not going to be conned into the hands of the cigarette companies’ plans. 

He saved his life by quitting smoking, which allowed my mother to live longer. She died when she was 84 and I pondered the effects of secondhand smoke that my dad caused to her failing health. 

He lived 10 years longer and died with dignity and self-pride by himself and stayed a non-smoker. All his kids when he died forgot that he was a smoker, it was only until three years after he died that I remembered that he was a smoker at one point.

 His greatest accomplishment was that he took responsibility for the care of my mother. He remained a healthy and strong non-smoker throughout the turmoil and stress of taking care of her for five long years. 

Life will give you lots of curve balls, my dad’s life gave him many curve balls but at the end of his life he ended it on his terms. He lived independently in the house, he lived with his wife, and enjoyed his life to the very end. He learned how to handle the curve balls and made them his own home run in life.  


You feel a lot of pressure, even anxiety to quit from other people in your life. You long for a break, some relief, a way to chill, distress, take it easy when you smoke tobacco products. You don’t want to give up the calming down effect when you give up tobacco. Quitting smoking is easy when you can thank your unconscious mind for helping you reduce your stress knowing that you can rebel in a new way to escape the frustration and that you can trust your mind to install three creative ways to meet your needs in a new healthier and calmer way to relax. You know that it’s time to quit. The real reason people smoke is the reason why people use hypnosis itself. That may be why thousands of people have used hypnosis to support their decision to quit smoking. You were born a healthy, robust, smoke-free person, that is how you are designed. When you first had them you didn’t even like them. After a while, smoking was how you get out of a tense state of mind such as when you are bored, stressed, angry, or nervous. 

Hypnosis is the most effective way to reach your goal. Hypnosis first breaks the habit, then trains you to shift out of the unwanted states of mind by relaxing much better and in a different way. 

Southeast Hypnosis is in Houston. Our Houston hypnosis program provides a cutting-edge approach that has helped thousands of successful clients lose weight and stop smoking. Our business succeeds because of the success of our clients. 

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