When Philip Morris became the leading corporate sponsor of the Arts in the United States, thanks to its innovative chief executive officer, George Weismann, the slogan the company adopted was “It takes art to make a company great.” It was a way for them to burnish the company’s image, you have to as a maker of cigarettes, but the parody that my group DOC did “It takes art to make complacency great.”, really was an important reminder that, unless we are always as mindful of how these rogue industries operate they will keep going, and they’ll wait us out.

They are very dynamic, we tend to introduce a law, and once it’s passed we go away. Laws are static, corporations such as Philip Morris, you have to give them credit, are extremely dynamic and creative. And so it is with the tobacco industry in New York City as with everywhere else we thought we had them on the ropes, but in recent years the smoking rates have leveled off.

The introduction of electronic cigarettes has created a popular interest in vaping and wanting to not be included in laws prohibiting smoking. Since vaping doesn’t carry the same risk of having the combustible tobacco smoke, the argument is that we’re not causing any harm, certainly not to anybody else and we’re really not causing any odor that can spoil your evening. But the fact is that smoking has really leveled off but hasn’t declined to the level we had hoped it would be.

The good news is that public housing may be going smoke free thanks to leaders like Phil Konigsberg and others, and overall we have to say that effort to curb smoking and cigarettes promotion has been successful. But we must always be mindful of the fact that this industry remains as profitable as any. If you had purchased a share of Philip Morris in 1957 and sold it in 2007, you would have turned out to have held the most profitable single stock on the New York Stock Exchange, during that time.

The most addictive thing about tobacco, according to Dr. Ed Anselm, is the money; and that remains the problem with ending the tobacco pandemic.