British American Tobacco Company: "The progress of the tobacco trade…is certainly one of the most curious that commerce presents. That a plant originally smoked by a few savages, should succeed, in spite of the most stringent opposition in church and state, to be the cherished luxury of the whole civilised world; to increase with the increase of time, and to end in causing so vast a trade and so large an outlay of money; is a statistical fact, without an equal parallel."
F.W. Fairholt, "Tobacco: Its History and Associations", 1859.
Views on tobacco perhaps haven’t changed much since 1859 – or since even longer ago.
Now, however, we are focused on the future.
Today, with universal awareness of the health risks, a billion adults worldwide make the choice to smoke. Governments globally earn almost twelve times more revenue from tobacco than shareholders. The industry supports 100 million jobs. Hundreds of thousands of farmers choose to grow this resilient and reliable crop. Tobacco is legal, and even the most vocal activists are at pains to stress that they are not abolitionists.
A real-world view suggests that, in the foreseeable future, many millions of adults will continue to consume tobacco. A growing world population and rising incomes broadly suggest increased consumption, but we see this offset by trends for smokers to consume less per day, to quit, and to modify their consumption to accommodate changing approaches to smoking in public places.
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