The Leading Cause of Preventable Death
In the late 1990s, over a thousand documents from various tobacco companies were released, showing the lengths to which tobacco companies went to hide 1) the damaging effects of tobacco and secondhand smoke, 2) the addictive effects of nicotine and 3) their attempts to advertise to children and teenagers. But little has changed. Tobacco is responsible for 1,300 deaths per day in the United States. The declining rate of American cigarette smokers has urged tobacco companies to turn to e-cigarettes. Most e-cigarette companies are owned by Big Tobacco, which advertise their flavored products heavily to teenagers, 20% of whom have smoked an e-cigarette in the last 30 days. Teens who start vaping are nearly three times more likely to go on to smoke cigarettes than their peers who don’t use any type of tobacco product.
