Alcohol and Tobacco Advertising and the American Youth
BY
A recent study conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration concluded that by the twelfth grade approximately one quarter of all Americans regularly use or smoke tobacco, while three quarters of students have consumed “more than a few sips” of alcohol (Cohen, 2005). Underage consumption of these potentially deadly substances has been an ongoing epidemic in this country for countless years, and continues to be just as prominent as ever in today’s youth.
The argument has been made that the aforementioned problem directly correlates to alcohol and tobacco advertisements targeted to appeal to the youth. While it is true that there has been a significant amount of legislation passed to try to prevent advertising these products to the most susceptible patrons of the nation, the question of whether these companies and our government are honestly doing all they can in terms of preventing use amongst the youth remains at large. Tobacco and alcohol companies continue to deliberately market their products to youth, despite the legal and moral guidelines they are supposedly held to.
To understand where we are today in terms of advertising and marketing for tobacco and alcohol, first we must understand a brief history of its routes in America and restrictions that have been set upon it. Tobacco companies really started to expand after the invention of the cigarette rolling machine in the 1880s (James, 2009). This machine helped improve their productivity per day literally one hundred times. Rolling cigarettes by hand, an average tobacco company could produce 40,000 cigarettes in one day, but four million with the use of this new invention (James, 2009). This invention obviously created more than enough supply for the companies, and they were left looking for consumers. Several decades later our country entered World War II, and soldiers were all presented with an abundance of free...
