Cigarette Maker Phillip Morris Has A New Year’s Resolution

When I was just 13 years old, I, like many of my friends at the time, had parents who smoked cigarettes. It was the early '90s, smoking wasn't quite taboo yet; ashtrays were in almost every room of the house.

My mother would often leave her pack of Marlboro Lights on the kitchen table, and unbeknownst to her, I would steal one on occasion, and then run to the woods to smoke it. At first, I hated it, the taste, that awful cough that would follow, but I was certain I just "wasn't doing it right".

After I "properly learned how to inhale", I become a cigarette smoker, not heavy by any means, but nonetheless, a smoker. After almost two decades of foolishly sucking toxic chemical laden smoke into my lungs, I quit cold turkey last September and have not looked back.

Losing lawsuit after lawsuit in the late '90s and '00s, tobacco giants like Phillip Morris and R.J. Reynolds were forced to increase cigarette prices, (the total price of a pack varied depending on what state you lived in and how much tax it charged). Eventually, and for the better, people simply could not afford to buy cigarettes anymore.

Price, combined with ever growing mainstream knowledge of just how overwhelmingly UNHEALTHY cigarettes are for you, smoking rates in the U.S. started to decline. In 2002, my home city of Lynn, MA banned smoking in bars and restaurants. Progress!

Let's fast forward to 2018, shall we, tobacco company Phillip Morris International recently announced that it's re branding to focus on "smoke-free products". Check out this article on nypost.com

Society expects us to act responsibly, and we are doing just that by designing a smoke-free future.

Phillip Morris wants vapes and e-cigarettes to replace cigarettes completely, even though the World Health Organization warns that "smoke-free" replacements are still harmful to one's health.