While Big Tobacco's legions of lawyers are duking it out in U.S. court rooms, their management is trying hard to find new revenue sources for their products. But mostly, it is smoke-free. And even though the rate of smoking among adults has been in a steady decline, smoking has actually increased among teenagers the future customers of the tobacco industry. This trend of increased youth smoking is mirrored in the United Kingdom and Canada as well. The Marlboro man still rides Emerging market countries come in handy for the U.S. tobacco companies to make up for feared losses in the United States and elsewhere.
China is a prime example.
The average daily consumption of cigarettes in the People's Republic increased from one per person in 1952 to ten in 1992. Considering that China has a population of 1.3 billion, you can imagine that tobacco executives are salivating just thinking about the potential profits. This is where the folks from the embassy on the upper floor in our office building in Washington, D.C. enter the story. They are not Chinese by the way, but hail from Azerbaijan, one of the former Soviet Republics. As in most former USSR countries, smoking is widespread and far more accepted socially than in the United States or even Western Europe.