Posted 3/25/2008

TRAINING WHEELS FOR ADDICTION

There's good news and bad news on the smoking front.

The good: Cigarette sales in the U.S. are in long-term decline.

The bad: New, flavored small cigars are getting kids into smoking.

Consumption of the sweet little stogies has leaped 145 percent in the last ten years. There are three reasons for this rapid acceptance.

• Taxes on cigars are less than on cigarettes, making the little cigars cheaper. (Only about $1.50 a pack.)
• Sweet flavors like chocolate, vanilla, cherry, mint and honey make the small cigars taste-friendly to kids who are into pop, gum and ice cream – even Honey Nut Cheerios.
• By making smoking taste sweet, the little cigars serve as a gateway into serious cigarette smoking - and addiction.

Fundamentally, the small flavored cigars are training wheels for cigarette addiction.

How do I know this?

While there is little hard data available, the whole pattern has happened before.

For centuries, kids had difficulty moving from sweet drinks all the way to the bitter taste of beer. Boys, followed by girls, forced themselves to acquire a taste for beer in order to revel in the alcoholic buzz provided by the sudsy brew.

Then in the swinging sixties, California Coolers were introduced. They caught on immediately with teens. As volume rose, other producers came into the category with their versions of "wine coolers." Except there were two major differences.

• The new drinks were malt beverages, made like beer, not wine.
• The new drinks were sweetly flavored using the kinds of artificial flavors which appealed to girls (strawberry, blueberry and mixed fruit flavors).

The teens really gobbled up the new coolers. Now you could get the buzz without having to acquire the bitter taste for beer.

Girls in particular became susceptible to the siren song of the sweet buzz. Two or three coolers without the warning taste of alcohol, and a girl was soon out of it (or into it, as the case might be). Boys who had already migrated to beer would bring their girls wine coolers, hoping for the sweet buzz that preceded lower feminine resistance.

Thus the cooler became the training wheels for beer, whiskey and sex.

The lawyers for the companies marketing the coolers insisted that market research be restricted to drinkers who were 21 and over. Nobody in the marketing business wanted to get sued over all the teens getting drunk.

But the age curve charts exposed the lie. Starting at age 21, and progressing to age 30, cooler sales plummeted. By inference, you could assume that sales started with kids 12 or 13, and progressed sharply upward until age 18, when beer took over. It was at that point that sales started to collapse.

It was at that point that the training wheels fell off the beer wagon.

Will we have the same pattern with chocolate mini cigars?

Are the mini stogies the training wheels for something much worse?

And when the training wheels fall off, will the kids be in the unbreakable grip of cigarette addiction?

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