It’s no coincidence that in 2018 Altria, which owns the Marlboro brand, invested $1.8 billion in a cannabis company and $12.8 billion in JUUL, a nicotine vape product.
Big Tobacco has been planning for this moment for decades.
A 1983 industry list titled New Product Ideas, made public as part of a court settlement, reveals that tobacco companies even then were anticipating the opportunity to blend marijuana into cigarettes if the government legalized cannabis. Now tobacco behemoths are pouring billions of dollars into the new legal marijuana industry, seemingly determined to target marijuana consumers and patients as their next prey. We don’t have to let them.
Announcing a comprehensive bill to legalize marijuana last week, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said, “We don’t want the big tobacco companies and the big liquor companies to swoop in and take over.” As public health activists — an inaugural Massachusetts state marijuana commissioner and a tobacco regulatory science and health disparities researcher — we agree.
Tobacco companies are convicted racketeers who knowingly misled the public with false claims about their products for decades. Most of us can picture it: rich men in a boardroom examining a graph of profits from cigarettes, a product that kills up to half its users, scheming new ways to chemically alter products to be more addictive and new populations to target.
Shaleen Title and Andy Tan Tan – Boston Globe – 2021-04-08.
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