Smoke gets in your eyes: More NC young adults lighting up

The bartender slams down her tequila shot, a pack of Marlboro Reds, and tosses a lime at her.

“It’ll be $12.00. You need a match?”

Smith nods and sends the shot back as fast as she can. She tosses the matches in her purse and heads to the smoking patio to light up.

“When there’s so much chaos and uncertainty in the world around us can you blame people for not caring about one or two cigarettes on a weekend?” said Smith. “I know it's bad for me and it’s not a great justification, but it’s where I’m at.”

For Smith, a 22-year-old Chapel Hill native, the shot and cigarettes have that whiff of careless rebellion tobacco ads have long promoted. But this scene is also a jarring reminder that after decades of anti-smoking campaigns and declining cigarette sales, smoking is on the rise, particularly among young people.

Is smoking an easy sale in North Carolina?

It always has been.

The Tar Heel state maintains one of the lowest taxes on tobacco nationwide, at $0.45 per 20-pack, the 47th lowest tobacco tax in the country. Compare that to the District of Columbia at $4.98 for a pack of 20.

The state is still one of the nation’s top tobacco producers, harvesting 252 million pounds of flue-cured tobacco. The estimated portion of annual tobacco industry marketing expenditures spent for North Carolina each year is $391.6 million out of the $8.4 billion nationwide.

With prices so low and marketing so high, it’s no wonder young North Carolinians have such easy access to cigarettes. Goldstein says price matters a lot when it comes to addiction, so much that tobacco companies have even used coupons and discounts to attract buyers.

“What we can say is that we have seen different approaches of those trying to addict people to those products. And this would include an increase in the marketing and price discounts to help reduce the price of these products,” said Goldstein. “And we know the single greatest determinant of use is the price.”

While price is a large contributor, Goldstein says social media and “nicotine-fluencers” might be causing even more trouble.

Tobacco companies have always used celebrities and fake medical endorsements to hook the American public on their products. But, to evolve alongside the twenty-something demographic, companies have turned to social media to promote smoking. These “nicotine-fluencers” are paid by tobacco companies to work cigarettes and vapes into their online aesthetic, creating an appealing look of what the 2022 smoker looks like.

“Everyone I know who smokes knows how horrible they are for you,” said Smith. “A lot of people just smoke to fit the new look of the cool, edgy smoker we see on social media.”

Tobacco companies had a hand in creating this edgy character. The industry has used perfectly staged social media posts and event sponsorship to deliberately attract young people and work smoking back into mainstream culture. This is especially true of e-cigarettes and vapes.

Smith said that while she once thought vaping was only a cessation tactic, she now more associates them with partying and younger smokers.

“When I was younger I totally bought into cigarettes being disgusting cancer-causing, the education worked,” says Smith. “But starting with a few kids vaping in high school, it became easier to find nicotine, over the past couple of years the look associated with smoking has changed.”

But today, Smith and others students who spoke to UNC Media Hub agree that the look of vaping feels very “un-cool” in comparison to a pack of Marlboro Reds. To them, cigarettes have a more appealing look than any Juul or Puff Bar.

“I will hit a vape every now and then but it has always felt kind of fake,” said Smith. “I would much rather just have a real cigarette and taste tobacco over some mint-flavored plastic stick.”

Smith said she associates vapes with addiction and partying, where cigarettes instead provide a more mysterious look.

But Goldstein says this way of thinking doesn’t quite add up.

“If you ask most people when they started if they think they would be addicted, everyone would say no,” said Goldstein. “You have social smokers, and those people aren’t going to have the same level of health problems as those who are smoking heavily, but do they think that there is going to be a free ride?”

Whether it is months of isolation, an already existing addiction, boredom, or anxiety, the pandemic has contributed to an increase in unhealthy coping behaviors, Goldstein said.

“Certainly, the stress of the pandemic, the social isolation, the mental health challenges have contributed to an increase in substance use broadly, “he. “And it's not just nicotine, it’s also alcohol and opioids, it’s across the spectrum and so we cannot isolate tobacco specifically from that.”

Young people acknowledge that their stress surrounding the future lessens their willingness to invest in it. Smith said one of the main reasons they smoke has nothing to do with advertisements or a lack of education, but instead a lack of motivation to care about the uncertain future.

So, how does tobacco prevention go up against this fatalism? Goldstein said the current public health environment is struggling to mobilize fast enough to work against this new smoking culture.

“Part of it is these things are so new and they're happening so fast it is so difficult,” said Goldstein. “Let’s look at COVID and see how slow the public health movement moved to deal with this, so think about devising a public health campaign for tobacco prevention.”

Some of the new tactics tobacco control organizations like the Truth Initiative have tried to target young people through social media ads.

“One of the issues is the target of those ads, someone who is already using and is addicted to tobacco, those ads are not going to be really influential, because addiction is not going to respond to a message to quit easily,” said Goldstein. “We know that true stories by people from North Carolina, that just say their experience, is probably one of the most effective ways of dissuading the true consequences of this.”

Caroline and her friends have collected on the sidewalk outside, dimly lit only by a streetlight and passing cars. They laugh together in the cold air, exchanging warmth and stories from their evening out. Smoke clouds and the passing of a single shared lighter backdrop their laughs. This smoke circle is a scene found outside bars throughout time.

But the impact of smoking is not glamorous.

When asked what would get her to stop smoking, Smith said an ad or a doctor probably wouldn’t work, but a friend might.

“I think if someone I love sat me down and told them I was hurting them by smoking, I would feel awful,” said Smith. “Because if it was my brother or my roommate, not some doctor I don’t know, I would probably care.”