It wasn’t too long ago that anyone and everyone with a bully pulpit was going after Big Tobacco for doing such horrendous damage to America’s collective health. The culture put up a valiant fight against Big Tobacco and ultimately won. Guess what? There is a new kid in town: Big Weed.
Before you laugh, step back and ask yourself how you feel about smoking. If you don’t smoke, how do you feel about people who do? Do you consider tobacco to be one of the worst evils to have been perpetrated on society?
We have done a fantastic job of condemning smokers and the industry that supports them. Yet at the same time, we are collectively turning a blind eye to smoking weed. So it should be no surprise that there are now more pot smokers in America than there are tobacco smokers.
Pot Smoking on the Rise
Recently published survey data suggested that 16% of U.S. adults smoke marijuana. That is up 4% from the same time in 2021. By contrast, just 11% of U.S. adults are tobacco smokers. That is down 16% from the fourth quarter of 2021.
If Americans really believed smoking was the greatest evil since communism, why would the number of pot smokers in our midst continue to increase even while we continue keeping the lid on tobacco? The answer is as simple as this: our collective reaction to smoking really has nothing to do with smoking at all.
Human beings are highly influential creatures. We have a tendency to believe all sorts of messages if they are repeated often enough, even if they aren’t true. We go with the flow; we follow the trends; we say and think what we perceive everyone else is saying and thinking. Right now, anti-tobacco is trendy. So is pro-cannabis.
The States’ Tobacco War
The states were well aware of our tendencies to follow the crowd when they began their war on tobacco a few decades ago. They spent a lot of time and money fomenting public resentment against tobacco in order to file a huge lawsuit against the industry. Said lawsuit ultimately ended up in a gargantuan settlement worth billions of dollars to the states.
The strange thing is that lawmakers never wanted to extinguish the tobacco industry completely. There was too much tax revenue involved. They still don’t want to kill tobacco, which is why they continue to demonize nicotine vaping.
Meanwhile, many of the same lawmakers who sneer at tobacco smokers openly embrace pot smoking. Why? Because pot brings in a tremendous amount of tax revenue as well. More and more people are in favor of weed, so it’s a win-win. Politicians get votes and reap boatloads of tax revenue.
Smoking Pot Not Okay Everywhere
Fortunately, there are still small pockets of sanity. Take Utah, for example. Lawmakers in the Beehive State implemented a medical cannabis program back in 2019. As part of their program, they explicitly banned smoking pot.
A medical cannabis patient can go into the Deseret Wellness pharmacy in Park City and buy cannabis flower, but that flower cannot be smoked. It must either be dry heated or used as an ingredient in making homemade edibles. Here’s hoping Utah stands its ground against smoking.
In the meantime, the industry that is Big Weed continues pushing forward. With every passing day they seem to be selling larger volumes of pot to people more than willing to light up. Big Weed has become the new Big Tobacco. And in dozens of states and the District of Columbia, the powers-that-be don’t seem to care.
