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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know.
I think part of our ongoing corporate malfeasance edition.
Yeah, for sure.
And the beginning of this episode ties in a lot with, we did an episode about the history of the cigarette.
Sure.
Like just the thing that you shouldn't put in your mouth, but people do.
Right.
And so we're going to talk a little bit about that here at the beginning, because you need to know a little bit about that as it leads up to what were the lawsuits against Big Tobacco.
Uh and we should start by saying that it's been a long time that we've uh known that tobacco and smoking was really bad for you and would kill you uh like the 1920s we knew for sure
The 1950s, we really, really knew.
And in the 1960s is when John F. Kennedy finally came out via his surgeon, General Luther Terry, and said, all right, everybody, it's 1964.
I'm finally going to issue a government report based on, you know, about a dozen studies with lots of data about a million male smokers.
And this stuff is really bad for you.
So we're going to have to start putting warning labels on packages.
Yeah.
The great thing about those warning labels, though, is you were educated to imagine Sammy Davis Jr. saying it in your head.
That's right.
So the cigarette companies, this is the beginning of their playbook.
And their playbook was basically, nah, prove it.
You can't prove it.
This is the whole idea of settled science, the idea that which is just a complete oxymoron.
Science is never settled.
It's a constant ongoing process.
But the idea that you have to have 100 percent definitive proof before you can even begin talking about whether something is harmful or not.
And really exploiting and manipulating the public through really horrible means.
This is where that all started.
And the first response that cigarette companies came up with was to say, all right, how about we put filters on cigarettes?
Because as everybody knows, cigarettes make your throat kind of scratchy.
Sometimes they can make you hoarse.
And that's okay.
That's just part of smoking.
These new filters are going to help with all of that.
And there you go.
Cigarettes are healthy, everybody.
That's right.
In the 60s and 70s, that's when we saw lighter cigarettes or low-tar cigarettes.
In the 50s, they got really sort of organized and official about their products.
PR campaigns, I guess, or propaganda campaigns, when they formed the Tobacco Industry Research Committee under the guise of studying the health hazards of smoking
But it was very much just a PR move.
They put out an ad called a frank statement to cigarette smokers early on, which said like, hey, we're really like your health is paramount to us as we sell you cigarettes.
It's hard not to laugh.
It's just so dumb to think about that people would have bought this.
Yeah.
But also just so cynical that they would say this, too, you know.
But they said, all right, we're really going to pledge to research this, everyone, because we care about your health.
But also, again, like you can't really prove that it's just a cigarette.
It's like, how do you know that these people dying of lung cancer didn't also get it from all the other stuff that's going on in the world?
Yeah, and actually that would become...
Kind of codified in what's called the Roper proposal.
There was a Tobacco Institute vice president.
So in addition to the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, they also came up with the Tobacco Institute.
And then they renamed the TIRC, the Council for Tobacco Research Research.
No word of the industry in it, so it's even more trustworthy, right?
And Fred Panzer was vice president of the Tobacco Institute, and he wrote a memo in 1972 that said, essentially, here's what we should do.
We need to create doubt about the health charge without actually denying it.
And essentially, it's a variation on the theme that the case is not proved.
And he said kind of what you were saying, that like these are like you can't really prove that it's cigarettes.
So, for example, extroverts are more likely to smoke cigarettes, but they're also more likely to get out in the world and dropped out of a heart attack.
So maybe it's just that extroverts smoke cigarettes.
Or that there was one called the constitutional hypothesis that was people who get sick from smoking are biologically predisposed to get sick in general.
So it's really them.
This is all just thrown about in 1972 to basically lie to the public and confuse the public about whether or not cigarettes were unhealthy or harmful.
Yeah.
So they're pushing this campaign out behind the scenes.
They're just throwing in the back file drawer every study that they had that showed that nicotine was addictive, that smoking was bad for you.
Like they're suppressing that information as well as at the same time targeting children.
With product placement in movies, specifically Superman II in 1981 with Marlboro.
Obviously, we've talked about Camel Joe before in the history of the cigarette.
Joe Camel.
What did I say, Camel Joe?
Yeah.
I like Camel Joe.
Okay.
We should leave all this in there except for the beep, although there's plenty of those in episodes.
Yeah, let's get the beep out.
So that was in 1988.
I like Camel Joe.
I like Camel Joe more, too.
I always called him Camel Joe.
I didn't know that wasn't the name.
I'm sure there's some retired tobacco industry guy who's like, man, we should have called him Camel Joe.
That is way better.
Here's a Gen X stat for you, which is fairly staggering, but completely believable.
Youth smoking like kids and teenagers smoking had been on the decline kind of through the 70s and 80s for the most part.
And then in the 90s.
When Gen X came around to prime smoking age, it really jumped.
It hit an all-time high in 1997 of 36.4% of youth were smoking.
Adults were smoking at 24.7% at the time.
And that's just a staggering number.
I think it's at like three point something percent now.
So Gen Xers are smoking at a rate of 36 percent.
Yeah, and there's two things that they suggest had to do with that huge jump in youth smoking.
One was this big campaign and push to target youth smokers.
The tobacco industry called them replacement smokers.
They would replace the other lifelong smokers that died off from smoking, right?
Yeah.
And that's the thing, too, is like one of the things about smoking, very few people start smoking as adults.
We call them total morons.
Most people who smoke started smoking in adolescence.
So the tobacco industry had every incentive to go after kids.
They just knew that society would not allow them to do that if they did it overtly.
So they had to do it.
You know, kind of under the radar with Camel Joe.
The other thing is that there was a price war that started in the mid-90s and that they think that this...
The drop in the price of cigarettes made it more likely for younger kids to smoke because younger kids are more price sensitive than older people who are smokers.
Remember how cheap cigarettes were back then?
Yeah.
It was like $1.25 a pack or something.
For sure.
Yeah.
I mean, I wasn't a regular smoker.
I occasionally smoked as we talked about before.
So I wasn't like buying packs, but I sold them at the Golden Pantry in Athens, Georgia on the east side.
And cigarettes were cheap.
And there somebody told me the day that they were like twelve to fifteen dollars and like twenty something bucks in New York.
A pack?
I believe that.
I totally believe that.
Well, we'll see why here in a minute.
So, yeah, one of the other things, too, that they're doing at the same time besides suppressing studies, sowing doubt and confusion among the public about the harm of cigarettes, they're just out and out denying publicly that not only are cigarettes not harmful, they're not even addictive.
That as recently as 1994.
Yeah.
They were publicly saying like like the head of Philip Morris was saying in interviews, we do not believe cigarettes are addictive.
In the 90s, people had known like all you had to do is ask a smoker back in the 50s if they were addicted to cigarettes and they could tell you that they probably were.
And like this, the industry in the 90s still wouldn't.
Fess up to that.
Like that was their tactic.
Just a complete solid wall with zero cracks in it over and over again being reinforced publicly.
Yeah, actually in the 1950s, I think they probably said like, no, I don't think they're addicted, but do you have a cigarette?
Can I have a cigarette?
Right.
I see a guy over there smoking.
You think he has an extra cigarette for me?
Right.
All right.
So in the 1950s, we need to start with sort of lawsuit talk.
There were a lot of lawsuits, all unsuccessful.
By the mid 90s, when they were still saying that it wasn't addictive, there were at least 400 lawsuits that they never lost.
They never settled.
They had 100 percent record.
That's crazy.
Which is staggering to learn.
They had obviously a ton of money to form like the best legal representation they could, but they're also actively lobbying state governments about
Making it harder to sue about tort reform because like, hey, tobacco is a natural product.
So cigarettes fall into that category, like despite all the other stuff that's in there.
So you can't sue somebody for packaging a natural thing and selling it to people.
Yeah, that was the other thing they were doing, too, is they were really lobbying people.
Government really effectively.
Like they spent a lot of money on lobbyists, right?
Not like now.
So, yeah, they were like the Teflon Don of industries, I guess, the tobacco industry was.
What did you just say?
Not like now?
Because I picked up a sarcastic.
Yeah.
What were you mentioning?
I'm sure they're still pouring tons of money into the lobby.
Oh, sure.
Sure.
Yeah, I'm sure, too.
But so they were they were just completely untouchable.
Like, I mean, if you have 100 percent record, that in and of itself will prevent people from filing suit against you.
Right.
Yeah, because it's expensive.
It is.
Right.
And you're just like, I'm not going to win or the chances of me winning are so low I might not even file suit.
So the state also we should mention Congress is doing almost nothing about this at this point.
So the state attorney's general, William Sapphire, just smiled from heaven, led by a guy named Michael Moore.
He was the attorney general for Mississippi.
They got together and they said, well, if the federal government's not going to do anything about it, we're going to.
And one state...
Might not be able to take on the tobacco industry, but every state, territory, and D.C. together definitely can take on the tobacco industry.
Not only can we take them on, we can seriously threaten to bankrupt the entire tobacco industry right out of existence if we really try.
Yeah.
And they played their cards right because they were like, how can we best go at them?
Maybe Medicaid is the way to do it because we have these Medicaid programs through our individual states that are
Not going bankrupt, but they're in bad shape in a lot of cases because they're treating all these smokers who are really expensive to get through, like, you know, lung cancer treatment.
And they have deceived us for all these years.
So let's go after them for RICO status, like fraud and racketeering.
Yeah.
And that'll send a shiver even through the spine of a Teflon Don.
Right.
And they were turning up, like Livia says, like literal truckloads.
Of documents from the industry about them selling to teenagers, burying studies, covering up what they knew about how addictive everything was.
And there were, I mean, this would be a good
Sort of thriller movie almost, like a Soderbergh kind of thing, he'd probably do a great job with it, where they're erasing documents out of offices while they're trying to actively
Bury these documents.
Like I think the guy from Texas was literally trying to put papers on a private jet so they could be taken to a district judge before the state court could seal them up because once the feds are investigating, it can't be sealed at the state level.
Right.
Or even if they do steal it at the state level, this federal district judge is like, that doesn't apply to me.
So I can make these public or part of a court case, right?
So, yeah.
I mean, yeah, that is like a thriller.
And there is something that kind of touched on this.
It was the insider with...
Who is the Australian actor who used to get in fights all the time?
Russell Crowe.
Yeah.
Russell Crowe is Jeffrey Wigand, I think.
Yeah.
Who was like this whistleblower in the tobacco industry.
It was great.
I think that was a Michael Mann movie.
Michael Mann.
Man, I nailed it.
You're nailing all of it.
I should be a guest on Movie Crush.
Yeah.
Oh, man, if only.
But one of the other things you kind of touched on their strategy, like the focusing on lying to the public and targeting teens.
That was a really smart strategy, because if they were just like cigarettes are harmful and we need to get rid of them.
A lot of adults are like, you don't need to tell me whether I should smoke or not.
I can kill myself if I want to.
So they left that part alone.
And they went after the fact that they were targeting teens and lying to the public because the public sentiment can get behind those two things.
Like, yeah, kids are out of bounds.
We don't want them smoking.
And...
You know, we were lied to all these years by these same people.
Yeah, go get them.
So that was a really smart strategy that these attorneys general like took on.
Like it was amazing, an amazing court angle, I think is what they call them.
What a court angle.
Look at that.
Hmm.
Yeah, for sure.
The writing was on the wall for investors because we're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars at stake.
They were like, Hey, this is, this is going to look really bad.
And our stock prices are going to really go in the tank.
And so you got to cut a deal here.
Uh, so in which the tobacco company never had thought about, you know, cause they had not only lost, uh, uh, never lost, they never settled anything.
Yeah.
So finally in April of 97, uh,
They were set to go to trial in a few months and they're like, all right, let's get a meeting set up with this Michael Moore character from Mississippi.
Not the movie guy, obviously.
Sure.
And an attorney for tobacco free kids who was working with the states about all the marketing toward, you know, kids with Joe Campbell, Joe and everybody.
Yeah.
So they started negotiating like, all right, out of the gate, let's just say we'll get rid of Camel Joe.
We love him.
Kids love him, but we'll get rid of him and the Marlboro Man, if that makes you happy.
Kramer?
And then a few months later in June, they said, all right, we got to start talking, like hash out the money part.
So how does $368.5 billion sound over 25 years as just an opening salvo?
Yeah.
And the states were like, I was not expecting that, actually.
But they so they were like, OK, here's the problem, though.
These are like we need to bring the feds in like that.
Congress has to approve of this deal the way that we've set it up.
And there were some federal aspects to it.
One was that the FDA would start regulating tobacco products.
Another one was that the companies, these tobacco companies, would be protected against any further civil and class action lawsuits.
This is the big one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In exchange, they would create a fund to pay some of those people off.
And then there would also be federal restrictions on indoor smoking.
And this did not go very far because of that protection of the companies.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, that was the sticking point.
I think they could not too happily live with the rest of it.
But that was that was a big one as far as Congress.
And soon enough, the American people were like, we can't have that.
No.
So Congress had a bill to ratify or at least considering a bill to ratify it.
Universal Tobacco Settlement Act as 1414.
They were debating it.
All this disclosure comes out and they're like, man, they were really awful companies and it's worse than we thought even.
And the idea of them being protected moving forward, like, isn't going to fly.
So the late Senator John McCain said,
Said, all right, how about S-1415, where there's more money?
Like, how does 520 billion sound?
And we're not going to protect you from now on.
Like, you can be sued moving forward, too.
Yeah, the industry lobbied like they've never lobbied before to keep this from getting passed through.
And again, you mentioned the stock prices.
When all this stuff is going on, their stocks are tanking.
When there would be a win in the negotiations for the tobacco companies, their stock prices would go back up.
It's all very cynical.
And they the stock price went back up after McCain's bill did not get passed.
And one of the reasons it wasn't passed is because other senators added like riders that had nothing to do with tobacco.
And I'm guessing unpopular riders probably at the behest of the tobacco companies.
I could not find the riders to save my life.
Um to basically sink this bill you know like like imagine if you had this great bill and then somebody's like um i'm also adding a rider to repeal the requirement for um
Child sexual predators from having to register and they can live by schools now.
Your bill's not going to pass.
And I get the impression that that's kind of what happened to McCain's bill.
Yeah, for sure.
There was another thing we just sort of should mention in passing, at least.
There was another suit in October of 97.
This is while they're debating these original bills in Congress.
Where they did settle.
It was a separate class action suit that was filed in 91 by flight attendants in the United States saying like, hey, smoking sections and planes are like killing us.
And it's pretty awful.
So it was a husband and wife team named Stanley and Susan Rosenblatt who filed this one.
And they ended up settling for 300 million dollars to fund medical research.
And they said this was a big sort of turning point.
And that's the first time they officially caved.
Yeah.
And again, this is while they're debating these bills in the Congress.
Right.
Chuck, I feel like we set things up pretty well for a break.
Like we deserve an ad.
We deserve a break today.
Let's do it.
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Okay, so things are just kind of not going quite well because the whole thing was handed over from the states to Congress, and Congress just fumbled it, as they do.
So some of the states went on and were like, we're going to just keep going and negotiating our own agreements with the tobacco companies.
Florida, Minnesota, Mississippi, who had led the charge originally in the first place, and Texas.
They all came up with their own settlements in pretty eye-popping amounts.
Texas got more than $17.5 billion out of their agreement.
Minnesota got a nice chunk of change, but they also had the foresight to say, not only are you going to settle with money, part of this is that you have to disclose public records, all internal documents.
That are part of discovery in this process are going to be made public after this.
And the tobacco companies had to agree with that.
So that was where a lot of these disclosures came from, that they had just been lying, lying, lying.
Because these troves of documents that came up in discovery during these cases, just journalists went crazy.
It was like a feeding frenzy on them.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
They saw the writing on the wall once again.
So they got together with the other remaining states who were all plaintiffs at this point in November of 1998.
And agreed to what would end up being the Tabasco, the tobacco, oh man, the Tabasco settlement.
Can you imagine the numbers?
The Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, the MSA, which would include $206 billion paid out over 25 years to 46 states, five territories in D.C. Yeah.
And they would allocate it according to like how many smokers they estimated each state had and how much was still based on the Medicaid thing.
So how much they had, you know, had to pay out in Medicaid for all these related costs.
They said, well, also stop targeting minors, even though they really like to smoke, as it turns out.
And they love cartoon camels.
So no more cartoon characters in our ads.
We're not going to give away free cigarettes to minors.
At recess.
Which is crazy.
We are going to shut down these, you know, sort of shell research companies that that are really just PR firms for us, dissolving those.
We're going to release all these documents and we're going to create a national foundation to address underage tobacco use and addiction.
And we're we promise to care this time.
Yeah.
We're a newer, gentler, loving tobacco company.
That's right.
They also created what's now known as the Truth Initiative, which is this whole teen anti-smoking campaign that was funded originally by tobacco companies.
Those commercials were great.
Yeah, they're still around, the Truth Initiative is.
They seem to have migrated online, surprisingly.
Yeah, I'm sure.
I mean, I guess that's where kids are these days or something.
That's where the kids are.
And so initially this agreement was just before, between these 46 states and territories in D.C. and the four largest tobacco companies, which represented...
The vast majority of the market share of the tobacco industry in the United States, Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Brown and Williamson and Laurelard.
I'd only heard of two of those.
Yeah, for sure.
I've heard of the other ones, but I cannot tell you what they make.
Okay.
Yeah.
No idea.
Let's just leave it at that.
Maybe they make a bucks.
I remember, I think we talked about bucks in the cigarettes episode, the golden pantry.
Those were the, uh,
Those are the ones that I think the rumor was at least they were just made from the sweepings, the trimmings and sweepings up of factories.
They would just package them as bucks.
I'm quite sure that that is true to some degree.
I'm sure it is.
There's a kernel of truth in there.
And there's probably kernels of something in those buck cigarettes.
I was just about to say that.
So a bunch of manufacturers were like, we don't need to take part in this.
We didn't do that much damage.
They're called non-participating manufacturers.
They were typically smaller players.
I mean, if you weren't one of the big four, you were basically by definition one of the smaller players.
But the states were like, not so fast.
You still are going to have to pay money to us for each cigarette that you sell.
And those smaller players, most of them were like, well, maybe we'll sign this master settlement agreement after all.
So they really lassoed like a lot of tobacco manufacturers into this whole agreement.
Yeah.
If you're wondering about Dip, they had a different agreement, but it was still an agreement kind of under this banner with U.S. Tobacco Company, which makes Skoll and Copenhagen.
Did you ever dip at all?
Yes, I did.
One thing I never really did was chew.
I tried it once and turned as green as you can get.
Yeah, I chewed tobacco early on.
We might have spoken about this when I was a youth group member at my church.
It was pretty popular.
So I chewed like Redman and Levi Garrett occasionally.
And then here and there in college, I would dip with friends who dipped, but it never like all nicotine never got its hooks in me.
Thankfully.
Yeah, that is thankful, for sure.
Because once it does, it's hard to get rid of.
Yeah, for sure.
But one difference with the dip companies is they were given out... And I remember this was a big deal.
They used to just give out reams of dip to...
Minor League Baseball and Major League Baseball.
That's what baseball was and other sports, too.
But baseball was always associated with dipping.
But they were like, you can't give this stuff away to like high school and college baseball teams anymore and minor league baseball teams.
Yeah, I think any sports team because like kids look up to them.
Right.
Which is a big part of why they were doing this.
So the sunflower seed companies rejoiced.
Oh, for sure.
So there was another thing that came up that was fairly unpopular, but also I think people were just kind of what's not ambivalent, but where you're of two minds and you're kind of tussling over it internally.
Yeah.
The internal tussle, we'll call it.
$5.15 billion went to the National Tobacco Growers Settlement Trust Fund.
To compensate tobacco farmers because they were going to sell a lot less tobacco because of this.
And it's interesting to think about.
Yeah, because you're like, on the one hand, like, who cares?
It's tobacco.
And then on the other hand, you're like, these are often family farmers who have been doing this for generations.
So I kind of, yeah, I'm tussling internally over it.
What word is it?
I know what you're talking about.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know.
Someone write in.
And then one other thing about this, too, that was part of the provision was people were like, well, what about the federal government?
Because Medicaid is this joint state federal partnership and the feds fund a lot of this.
And the feds are like, no, we're leaving ourselves out.
We're waiving any right to any of that money.
This is the state's game.
And they did a great job with it.
Yeah.
A lot of public health officials were like not super happy about that because they were like, hey, listen, unless we have the the feds overseeing this, how do we know what the states are going to use this money for?
And, you know, not to tease too aggressively, but I think we'll see in Act three that that was very much a valid concern.
Yeah, for sure.
The feds did come after them, though.
I think they were secretly going to do this when they were like, no, no, we're just going to leave it to the states.
And the tobacco companies were like, whew.
And the feds were like, we have our own thing we're about to do.
There was U.S. versus Philip Morris et al.
And they saw billions and billions of dollars in compensation for health care money that they had spent out.
I guess basically what they had shelled out as part of the Medicaid program.
They also went after them for RICO as racketeers and as being – if you're convicted of racketeering as an organization and you're allowed to continue on as an organization, the feds can –
Basically garnish your profits for a very long time, or they can go back and seek previous profits.
And they did.
They wanted a portion of the company's profits from the past 45 years in this case that was launched in 1999.
Yeah.
And in the meantime, Phil Morris was like,
Hey, Phil Morris et al., thanks a lot.
Like, why has it always got to be us?
They're like, you got a great name, Phil.
So the companies did not settle this time.
They're like, all right, we're getting bled dry by the states.
Now the feds are coming after us.
So we were going to actually fight this thing.
And they lost in 2006, a district judge for the United States.
A rule for the DOJ said, no, you guys are racketeers.
I'm going to greatly reduce that financial penalty down to 10 million.
I'm sorry, 10 billion dollars from the hundreds they were asking for.
But you know what?
You got to admit to fraud.
You have to issue what are called corrective statements.
And we got to see all those documents because we know there are still more documents in your coffers.
Yeah.
I think there's something like 14 million documents that were eventually released, internal documents.
Yeah.
And then finally, remember back as part of like that first settlement agreement that they tried to kick to the feds to ratify, that part of it was having the FDA start regulating tobacco.
That was in 1998.
Yeah.
In 2009, the federal government finally got around to having the FDA regulate the tobacco industry.
Yeah.
All right.
Let's take our second break and we'll come back and talk about what this all meant and means right after this.
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All right.
We promised talk of what it all meant and means.
And it kind of depends on who you ask or when you ask as well, because when it happened, an act, the effective national action to control tobacco group said.
You know what?
And I think other people, too, like the American Cancer Society, the American Psychological Association, they all got together and said, you know what?
This isn't so great.
Like that McCain bill really had teeth and that didn't pass.
And we really wanted it to.
So this is sort of a win for the cigarette companies.
Um, it had a lot of like obvious immediate impacts.
And, you know, I talked about, you know, why cigarettes are so expensive now.
This is partially why, because they're, what's not going to happen is the investors aren't going to lose any money.
So they're going to say like, we'll just start jacking up cigarette.
And a lot less people are smoking.
So let's jack them up even more because we're not going to take a loss on this.
What are they going to do?
Quit?
Yeah.
So that started almost immediately as far as price hiking, like 45, 50 cents a pack right out of the gate is is was just the tip of the iceberg.
Yeah.
I mean, did you say $20 a pack?
I believe it, but that's still eye-popping.
I think a smoker told me they were like 20 bucks in New York, but I haven't verified that.
So one of the things that really happened that people point to the MSA as being directly responsible for is that like the youth smoking just dropped precipitously.
Once they removed the ability for tobacco companies to market directly to kids and they simultaneously had anti-smoking campaigns targeted towards kids, like it really had an effect.
Like you said, it went from like 34% to 3.8% in 2021.
I think it's even lower than that now.
The problem is we didn't learn anything.
Or we didn't leave it open enough to apply to future kinds of tobacco that hadn't been around.
So companies like Juul and other e-cigarette and vape companies, they don't face these same regulations.
They can basically market to kids.
They can use celebrity endorsers.
And they do, but they still don't.
Get sued a lot.
I think Juul paid out $462 million to six different states in 2023.
So it's still going on.
But that's been a huge dent in the incredible success of the curbing teen smoking.
It's gone back up if you include vaping and hookahs and stuff like that.
But I have also the impression that kids are a little smarter than we were at that age.
And they are seeing through a lot of this and it's not working quite as well as it did on us in the 90s.
Yeah.
And, you know, more parental oversight and just there's a lot of factors for sure.
On the e-cigs, I think their day has come a little bit, but I think that it's really they're in for some bad stuff moving forward because of just all the all the stuff that goes into that juice, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah, we took a pretty solid stand or position on vaping.
I think we were, if I remember correctly, we were opposed to it in our episode on vaping.
That's right.
The other thing that the settlements led to was just a turning of the tide, not just with kid smoking, but smoking in general, which was what they were after.
It was like, let's just try and get smoking way down overall.
And individual states started enacting
Bands
I think in 98 utah and california were the first and only ones to say like hey you can't smoke in restaurants anymore you can't smoke in public places
Secondhand smoke is a real thing and most states have these bands in place now and people just generally
Uh look at smoking differently
Like you know when someone lights up in public i guess unless you're in philadelphia there are a lot of people now that will look sort of like what are you doing dude
Yeah like who still does that exactly
Or when you flick a cigarette filter out the window when you're done with it
Sorry, I just went to a dark place.
No, I'm with you.
I understand.
So upsetting.
Yeah.
Especially when one flicks off your windshield and you see a spark bounce.
Well, that's kind of pretty.
Well, just briefly, yes.
So there was a lot of success directly from the master settlement agreement.
Let's talk about the problems with the master settlement agreement, because a lot of people are like, this could have been done better.
We should have done the McCain bill, right?
And then really importantly, there were only a couple of states that had the foresight to designate
The payments from the master settlement agreement from the tobacco companies that are made annually in perpetuity.
I hadn't realized this.
There's no end date to these payments as far as I know.
Which I don't fully understand because I think they settled on like an actual number, right?
So that doesn't quite make sense to me, but I've seen in multiple places that these are in perpetuity payments.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The only thing I can figure out there is they're like, hey, you're still selling cigarettes and this is still a problem for Medicaid.
So it's not like that's ever going to stop.
That's the only thing I can figure out.
Yeah, I've got that.
I get that, too.
I think that that's probably it.
That's the best argument for it.
But then does that mean that their ultimate payouts are going to exceed that limit?
The hundreds of billions of dollars that they agreed to pay out to the states over 25 years.
Like, that's the part I don't get.
But the problem is, is that the states, very few states actually said this money is designated for anti-smoking programs to pay for
Health care for smokers or to repay public costs for health care that we we spend on smokers.
A lot of states don't do that.
And in fact, most of the states use it to like fill budget gaps.
To build new roads.
If they're strapped, they do something called securitization where they sell bonds against their future annual payment from the tobacco companies.
Did you see that?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's kind of, you know, it's a shell game with the government in a way, in a lot of ways, I think.
Yeah, because not only are they I mean, it's just unseemly in the first place.
But secondly, when those bonds come due, when they get that master settlement agreement, annual payment to the state.
They have to pay out not just the face value of the bonds that they sold, they have to use some of that money to pay the interest too.
So the state's getting less than it would have if it didn't sell those bonds ahead of time, right?
So I think that's a sign of poor management of a state typically, if you ask me.
Yeah, for sure.
I think in the end, less than 3% of these funds have gone to smoking prevention and cessation programs, which was a lot of the reason they initially said they were going to do this.
And I think no state has funded anti-tobacco programs
At CDC recommended levels at all.
Right.
And some states even use them to help the tobacco industry.
I know North Carolina...
They spent $45 billion, I think, on modernizing tobacco farms.
Not, hey, here's money for your losses.
I think I said $45 billion, $45 million.
$42 million.
$42 million.
Not like here's some money to compensate you for your losses.
Here's some money to get better at tobacco farming for the future.
That's what that's what North Carolina spent some of its money on.
Yeah, I think North Carolina, big tobacco state, obviously, they use 75% of their settlement funds for tobacco production.
That's crazy.
Some of that to private tobacco producers, like you talked about, that had taken a hit.
But also, yeah, like you said, like, hey, you want a tobacco museum?
Yeah.
We'll build it with that money.
Right.
And if we build it, they will come, the tobacco company.
Oh, man.
That's hard to believe on that one.
There's another thing, too.
The tobacco companies haven't exactly paid out all this money.
They were supposed to pay out the couple hundred, I think, what was it, 300-something billion dollars over 25 years as part of the settlement in 1998.
They have paid out according to a press release from Vermont's Attorney General office.
$175 billion.
So I think less than half of what they said.
And it's been a lot longer than 25 years now, right?
And one of the reasons why is because as part of the agreement, the tobacco companies, there are two...
Calculations that have to be taken into account.
There has to be an inflation calculation that adjusts for inflation so that the states are getting their actual value of the dollars that the tobacco companies agreed to, if that makes sense.
There's also a sales formula that they have to calculate every year to take into account the amount of profits that they're losing to companies that aren't part of the master settlement agreement and therefore aren't hamstrung by those payments.
Which means that in some cases, some years, there have been the sales calculation has been larger than the inflation calculation, right?
So the states have shouldered
The burden of competition for these tobacco companies.
Like the states took on that loss for the tobacco companies, which is just disgusting to me.
Yeah.
And, you know, when you just think about what's happened with the raising the cost of cigarettes, there's a lot of people that look at the settlement of like, well, now you're just getting like the tobacco companies aren't paying states like people who still smoke cigarettes are just funneling money through the tobacco companies to the states.
Yeah, that's a that's a great way to put it.
Okay, Chuck.
So one of the other things, the legacies of the master settlement agreement is it created a blueprint.
I think you said this kind of early on for other ways that states could get together and create real change against corporate malfeasance.
Specifically, again, in cases where there is harm that comes directly from using a product as directed or intended, right?
Not abusing it or something.
You're just using it like it's supposed to be used and you're being harmed.
So you have things like social media, opioids.
Climate change is a trickier one.
But fast food.
And the reason why also they fit this master settlement agreement framework is these companies are following like a lot of the same techniques that the tobacco industry laid down by starting back in the 50s.
Yeah, it's interesting because there are two playbooks.
On the one side, you have the government
Now that's like, all right, now we've got a playbook moving forward so we can sue Meta about social media and the harms to children and the fact that they know they're targeting children and harming children.
Or opioids, of course, with the pharmaceutical companies.
But then there's that other playbook, like you were talking about, where they end up getting sued, but Meta and the pharmaceutical companies were like, hey, you know what?
If we can get kids hooked on this stuff and market to children...
Then we can make a lot more money for our investors.
Yeah, a good example of that, not necessarily targeting children, but of just this completely screwing up the narrative for their own gain at the expense of people's lives.
The opioid pharmaceutical industry with opioids basically floated this idea called pseudo addiction, right?
To where the people who were supposedly addicted to opioids weren't actually addicted.
What was happening is that their pain wasn't being managed adequately.
That's why they needed to take more and were going around from doctor to doctor.
And the answer, the solution, was to up their dose.
Don't cut them off.
Don't put them in treatment.
Up their dose.
That's what they really need because it's not real addiction because you can't get addicted to opioids.
They actually publicly said stuff like that.
And I mean, that's cause to go after them alone, you know.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
Just as despicable as any of these huge corporations sort of issuing these really flimsy denials that the public just it just makes them look worse.
You know, the public doesn't buy this stuff.
Yeah, it's true now.
I think we did before.
Yeah.
You know.
Yeah, you're probably right.
You got anything else?
I got nothing else.
Yeah, I feel like this is in a suite of episodes we've done over the years.
Josh and Chuck take on the world.
Big industry.
Well, Chuck doesn't have anything else.
Chuck said the world and I said big industry.
So that combination obviously unlocked listener mail.
Hey, guys.
Amongst my favorite things, and that's favorite with an OU, so I think I know where Rebecca is from.
Or at least, you know, one of a few places she could be from.
One of my favorite things about stuff you should know is Josh's jokes that don't land.
Wow, all right.
Absolutely hates my jokes that don't land, by the way, so you should feel good.
Did she say that?
And counting how many... No, no, no.
Okay.
And counting how many times Chuck says, that's right, in an episode.
I guess I feel like I say sure more than that's right.
You say for sure, for sure.
Yeah, for sure.
But just one time I was adding a for sure to the first for sure.
For sure.
My absolute favorite thing, though, guys, has to be the interlude jingles before and after.
I love how the jingle always matches the theme of the show.
For example, the short stuff on the benefits of singing in a group.
Had the barbershop quartet.
Episode about Shakespeare had the green sleeve style jingle and schoolhouse rock had the queen style jingle.
My favorite one might have been the techno punk jingles on the cyberpunk episode, which was fantastic.
All that to say, shout out to Jerry and the folks who produced these.
They are appreciated.
And Rebecca, I'm glad you brought this up.
We said it a lot over the years, but it always bears repeating that, you know, these are written by stuff you should know listers and produced and performed.
And we just get these and people are like, hey, use this thing.
I made it as a love letter to the show.
And then Jerry does a great job of selecting the episodes where it has a nice fit.
So we always like reiterating this is how it works.
And Rebecca sends kindest regards and a PS shout out to Rebecca's twin sister, Lauren, who introduced Rebecca to Stuff You Should Know many years ago.
And they have been regularly discussing episodes weekly since.
That's awesome.
Yeah, thank you.
We love it when a family member or a friend turns somebody on to Stuff You Should Know and then they end up talking about it or listening together.
That's kind of the point.
That's how a community is formed, everybody.
Also, shout out to Dave and Ben, too, who also do a pretty boss job of selecting jingles, but I think Jerry's probably the GOAT.
Agreed.
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Hey, Portlandia fans.
Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here.
The dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form.
We're launching Podlandia AO Rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made.
And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life.
Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Kreisel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more.
Kyle is going for it here.
You fully improvised, not just words, but a song.
Well, I thought you were all going to write a song.
I remember you thinking that.
Yeah.
Listen to Podlandia, AAO Rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Naomi Osaka showing out.
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This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea.
Every week, the news gets worse, the world gets crazier, and Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem.
Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was?
If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men.
Do better or do less so I don't have to do so much.
I'm Yamanika and I'm out.
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