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There is, of course,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], a palpable difference between types of cigarettes: there is the mild cigarette, the menthol cigarette,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], cigarettes rolled with stronger or lighter tobacco leaves. My Big Tobacco pal also tells me that around 30% of those who have been smoking cigarettes for ten years or more have changed their brand at least once.
For products (king size, mild, menthol, no-filter etc) that don’t really vary that much across brands — unlike, say, Wall’s strawberry ice-cream tasting different from Vadilal’s which in turn tastes different from Mother Dairy’s — 30% is a pretty low number for brand switchers. I can make out the difference in taste between kinds of cigarettes — the throat being the best judge — even if such an ability doesn’t always guarantee correctly identifying brands.
But taste wasn’t the only factor that made me loyal to my old brand. Qualities such as availability (in shops or in other people’s pockets), price (tied to my own capacity to spend) and personal ‘deciders’ such as packaging (I prefer buying ten-packs to 20-packs or single sticks, as they provide the illusion of me being in control of the number I smoke and because they make a smaller bulge in my shirt pocket) played their parts.
Which brings me to the question of why I have shifted cigarette brands. Considering I settled on my new brand because it pretty much tastes the same as my old one, the answer could lie in the ‘intangibles’: After years of mostly decline,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], it would appear smoking rates in New Jersey are on the rise, ever so slightly. In its recently released State of Tobacco Control report for 2010, the American Lung Assocation says the number of adults who smoke in New Jersey rose last year to 15.8 percent. It had been 14.8 percent in the 2009 report.
The 2010 report also showed the smoking rate among New Jersey high schoolers rising to 17 percent. It had been 14.3 percent. The data was culled from federal surveys through the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that were done in 2009. Such numbers would seemingly provide reason for the state to expand its anti-smoking and smoking cessation programs. But, because of the $11 billion deficit in the state budget last year,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], New Jersey slashed its funding for such programs in July from $7.6 million to just $600,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych],000.
This despite the state still bringing in about $1 billion in 2010 from taxes on cigarettes and a 1998 legal settlement with the big U.S. tobacco companies, and despite the state having a near total ban on indoor workplace smoking. In light of all this, those who are passionate about combatting smoking in the Garden State are wondering what will happen to smoking rates in New Jersey in the years to come, as the tobacco companies continue to spend more than $200 million a year to market an expanding line of products here.
“Although we don’t know much about the health effects of e-cigarettes,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych],[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], they are by far the most popular smoking alternatives and cessation products on the market,” said lead author John Ayers, a doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His group monitored English-language Google searches in the USA, Canada,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], the UK and Australia from January 2008 until September 2010.
They compared searches for e-cigarettes with searches for a nicotine lozenge and for cessation products like nicotine patches, nicotine gum and the drug Chantix (varenicline). Between July 2008 and February 2010, searches about e-cigarettes increased sharply in all nations, especially in the United States. “We found that e-cigarettes were more popular in U.S. states with stronger tobacco control,” Ayers said. This, he said, suggests that consumers are using e-cigarettes to either bypass smoking restrictions or to quit when faced with restrictions.