On second thought, I actually haven’t visited in 26 years, but at that time, I was blown away by how easy it was to purchase cigarettes in Germany, where all one needed was a fuenf mark coin. Vending machines were EVERYWHERE. And one could buy the best of the best, Lucky Strikes. That was a long time ago, but nowadays, I see that vending machines in Germany now require age verification, since you have to be 18 to buy them.
“Just because more children exposed to toy advertisements also pressure their parents into spending more money on toys doesn’t mean advertisements contributed to their desire for new toys.”
Yes, I see what you’re getting at, but the link here is … well, pretty direct. Can we attribute a direct, 1:1 link? No, that isn’t ever how the real world works. But a statistically significant difference strongly suggests that consumption of candy cigarettes and becoming a smoker are linked. This is probably through extremely intangible things like helping cement the idea that smoking looks cool or is a pleasurable activity with these people, something that is ultimately not measurable but can still be understood and predicted on a large scale. The one way of testing this out and finding better proof? Banning candy cigarettes and seeing if this changes over time.
What families were candy cigarettes allowed in? What did the parent think of the kid pretending to smoke a candy cigarette? Why did the kid want to pretend to smoke a candy cigarette anyway, who’s behavior were they mimicking?
I think candy cigarettes more likely correlates positively with a culture of smoking (in a neighborhood or household), and that this is the factor that influences both candy cigarettes and eventual smoking.
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For all you know, those kids who consumed candy cigarettes and grew up to become smokers may have had a genetic predisposition to stimulants (nicotine, sugar). So until proven otherwise, I will not assume candy cigarettes do anything other than rot the teeth of those who eat them.
A statistically significant number of kids who become juvenile delinquents also drank milk growing up. By your logic, milk is pretty obviously a cause of juvenile delinquency.
I agree that banning candy cigarettes would be a good start (although an even better start would be to ban regular cigarettes).
Now excuse me while I have another bite of delicious chocolate.
Sorry, but you don’t seem to understand what the statistics are saying here. There is a statistically significant difference in candy cigarette consumption as children between non-smokers and smokers. For your milk analogy to work, there would need to be a similar difference between juvenile delinquents and others, which I feel pretty safe assuming that there isn’t (though if there was, that would be a super interesting thing to study!).
And yes, there might obviously be other factors in play - which I was very explicit in pointing out. Honestly, you going the “for all you know” route given what my previous post said just feels like a bad-faith distraction tactic. Hopefully not your intent, but … yeah. The difference here is that you’re making unfounded assumptions - which may have merit, but we simply don’t have the data to say either way - while I’m saying that based on the data we have, and established knowledge of how cultural practices propagate and long-term habit-forming intersects with marketing (especially in children), it is reasonalbe to assume that this correlation has some causal aspect to it. Again: not a 1:1 relation by any means, but it truly isn’t much of an assumption to say that if children pretend to be cool adults (which is a huge part of childhood) by “smoking” “cigarettes”, that might predispose them to actually smoking actual cigarettes once those become available to them.
Right, but I’d argue that the culture of “smoking == cool adults” is more prevalent around the kids who are buying candy cigarettes, and that this culture may be the linked factor. Around here, I don’t see kids making the connection anymore between smoking and “cool,” because it’s not the teen/adult culture anymore. So those kids aren’t going to buying candy cigarettes, and are also less likely to smoke.
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Understood, thank you for the explanation!
Around here (UK) there is a high number of children equating vaping with cool, and while for adults vaping may be a pathway out of cigarette smoking, there is a concern that vaping may become a pathway into smoking.
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Yeah, absolutely. This kind of marketing-by-proxy is incredibly common across all kinds of industries. There’s hardly anything more profitable in the long term than instilling children with the idea that your product is a cool aspirational thing that they should incorporate into their mental image of “cool adulthood”. (Though there’s a point to be made about this being more effective with men than women, likely due to the social pressures of responsibility levied on women from early adulthood or even before that.) It’s arguably one of the most effective ways of recruiting lifelong customers. (And, to a seemingly ever-increasing degree, product designers and marketers work hard to reinvigorate those feelings of immediate/superficial childlike wonder in order to sell products to adults too, and the cycle goes on and on and on.)
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