this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
156 points (96.4% liked)
Health - Resources and discussion for everything health-related
2303 readers
139 users here now
Health: physical and mental, individual and public.
Discussions, issues, resources, news, everything.
See the pinned post for a long list of other communities dedicated to health or specific diagnoses. The list is continuously updated.
Nothing here shall be taken as medical or any other kind of professional advice.
Commercial advertising is considered spam and not allowed. If you're not sure, contact mods to ask beforehand.
Linked videos without original description context by OP to initiate healthy, constructive discussions will be removed.
Regular rules of lemmy.world apply. Be civil.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Once you start seeing the huge financial incentives to keeping people smoking cigarettes specifically, you can't unsee it. From tobacco companies, sure, but also from state governments. State governments get a large amount of revenue from cigarette smokers. And for many of the more financially mismanaged ones, that revenue pays off debts that would otherwise leave them insolvent.
Article from 2008. It wasn't just mortgages that were being "securitized", Wall Street managed to sell state governments on securitizing their payouts from the tobacco company Master Settlement Agreement. States sold those payments to Wall St for pennies on the dollar to get a quick infusion of cash, and now they owe and they can only keep paying if people keep smoking cigs.
Article from 2014, when the e-cig boom was starting. you can see how concerning the loss of revenue is.
So you get an unholy alliance between tobacco companies (who yes, own a lot of vape brands but see higher margins from traditional cigarettes) and state governments. Throw in the stupid parents having a moral panic, and the conclusion is obvious: ban vapes, leave cigarettes.