In Part One We Talked About What Happens Inside Your Brain When You Smoke

The Dopamine Spike

The Receptor Upregulation

The Memory Trails That Outlast The Habit By Years

The Brain Does Not Wake Up One Day And Decide It Wants To Be Addicted

Something Has To Make The First Cigarette Look Worth Trying

For Decades, That Something Was A Camera

OKAY BACK FROM A SMOKE BREAK 🚬

From The 1930s Through The 1950s

Tobacco Companies Did Not Leave Hollywood To Chance

They Paid For It Directly

Brown And Williamson Paid Actors

Philip Morris Negotiated Product Placements

RJ Reynolds Ran Campaigns Built Around Studio Photographs

Ronald Reagan Appeared In Chesterfield Cigarette Advertisements

John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper

The Faces That Defined American Masculinity For A Generation

Were Either Paid To Smoke On Camera Or Photographed Doing It For Trade Advertising

Brown And Williamson Internal Documents Made Public During Litigation Showed A Deliberate Strategy

Associate Smoking With Characters The Audience Wants To Be

Not Addiction

Aspiration

The Tobacco Industry Understood Something The Neuroscience Would Confirm Decades Later

You Do Not Sell A Drug By Describing What It Does To Your Body

You Sell It By Showing People What Kind Of Person Does It

In 1998

The Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement

Prohibited Direct Payments To Studios For Product Placement

What It Could Not Do Was Undo Sixty Years Of Cultural Encoding

In 2012, The Journal Pediatrics Published A Study

Examining The Relationship Between On Screen

Smoking Exposure And Adolescent Initiation

Adolescents With The Highest Exposure To Smoking In Movies

Were Approximately Three Times More Likely To Initiate Smoking

Than Those With The Lowest Exposure

Three Times

A Separate Analysis By Researchers At The University Of California San Francisco

Found That Approximately 37 Percent Of Teen Smoking

Initiation Can Be Attributed Directly To On Screen Exposure

The CDC Used This Data To Estimate That Smoking In Movies

Has Caused Approximately 6.4 Million American Children To Become Smokers

The Projection For How Many Of Those Children Will Eventually Die From A Tobacco Related Illness Is Two Million

This Is Not A Study About Impressionable Kids Who Did Not Know Better

This Is A Study About How The Human Brain Processes Social Information

At Any Age

There Is A Network In The Brain Called The Mirror Neuron System

It Was First Documented In

Macaque Monkeys By Giacomo Rizzolatti At The University Of Parma In The 1990s

When A Monkey Watched Another Monkey Reach For An Object

The Neurons That Would Fire If The Watching Monkey Were Reaching Fired Anyway

The Brain Simulates What It Observes

In Humans This System Is More Complex

It Is Involved In Empathy

Imitation, And Crucially In Identity Formation

When An Adolescent Watches A Character They Admire Light A Cigarette

In A Moment Of Tension Or Freedom Or Sex

The Brain Does Not Passively Register An Image

It Runs A Simulation

What Would It Feel Like To Be That Person In That Moment

The Limbic System Tags The Simulation With Emotional Valence

This Becomes A Template

Before The First Cigarette Is Ever Lit In Real Life

The Brain Has Already Run The Scene Dozens Of Times

The Dopamine System That Will Later Be Hijacked By Nicotine Has Already Been Primed By The Image

The Image Does Not Cause The Addiction

It Removes The Resistance To Starting

After The 1998 Settlement

Tobacco Representation In Hollywood Films Did Not Disappear

A 2007 Analysis Found That 87 Percent Of The Top 25 Grossing American Films Still Depicted Smoking

The Method Changed

Characters Were No Longer Handed Specific Branded Packs On Camera

They Simply Smoked

Peaky Blinders. Mad Men. Stranger Things. Saltburn

The Cigarette In Modern Media Has Become A Shorthand

Complexity. Rebellion. Sexuality. Intelligence Under Pressure

The Aesthetic Did Not Die With The Regulation

It Evolved Into Something The Regulation Could Not Touch

A 2022 Report By The Truth Initiative Found That Streaming Platforms

Including Netflix, Hulu, And Amazon Had Increased

Depictions Of Tobacco Use Compared To Prior Years

The Audience Getting The Heaviest Exposure Is Between Thirteen And Twenty Four

The Same Window When The Brain Is Most Susceptible To Identity Shaping Through Social Observation

The Same Window When The Neurological Reward System Is Most Plastic

The Tobacco Industry Spent Sixty Years Building An Image

The Image Outlived The Industry's Ability To Legally Promote It

Now The Culture Maintains The Image For Free

That Is Not An Accident Either

That Is A Very Good Investment Still Paying Returns