Since 5000 BC, humans have been smoking tobacco products. In what is the current day America’s shamanistic rituals included the smoking of tobacco. Tobacco farming and trade spread wildly worldwide due to trade once the European settlers arrived and colonized North and South America. Smoking today is especially popular in Nauru, a small country in Oceania. Smoking rates in the US have been in sharp decline. Some speculate a shift in the stigma of smoking laws that dictate where smoking is permitted and who can smoke; in addition, increased awareness of health risks associated with smoking is the cause of this decline.
However, there is a debate on the way in which cigarette companies advertise to us, even with our decline in smoking rates. In Australia, for example, they have laws such that all cigarette packages must have images of health complication warnings and no decorative font or colors, making them look quite grotesque. Similar legislation was almost passed in the US but was thrown out at the last minute, protecting packaging as intellectual property of manufacturers and companies such that requiring these warnings would be an infringement on free speech. Many argue that attractive cigarette packaging isn’t what makes people smoke or what makes them addicted, but rather companies putting addictive chemicals in cigarettes and underlying social issues that make people vulnerable to addiction, which the government should focus on rather than the attractiveness of the packaging. Others argue that what matters more than a private corporation’s freedom of speech is real people’s freedom to live, that such dangerous items should not be advertised freely, such that poison shouldn’t either.
Even then, many people have the hobby of collecting cigarette packages from all time periods and from all around the world; there are people who see these packages and their devotion as art and relevant to history. How can lawmakers protect people without infringing on their liberties? Is it people or companies that they would rather protect, and what do our shifting attitudes say about the overarching debate of which freedom is more important? What do you think?