In the late 1980s, Joe Camel was my guy.
My first incentive to smoke Camels was economic. I hadn’t preferred them to any other brand on offer from the vending machine at the pool hall of my early teens. But then I realized when you had the unfiltered cigarettes, people didn’t ask you for them as much. Camels were, in my opinion, the best to be had right then and there.
I was already smoking filtered Camels by the time R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company released Joe Camel into the United States consciousness in 1988, and as soon as the tuxedo-clad cartoon character was emblazoned on T-shirts, I was wearing them. I had them in different colors, a walking billboard anywhere I went. Friends would ask where I got them, and I’d point them to the local convenience store where they were sold, prepackaged with two packs of Camel Lights.
You also got a pack of Camels when you bought the Joe Camel coffee mug. There was a Camel-logo Bic lighter, a hoodie, a sweatshirt. In the 1990s there was even “Camel Cash” with which to buy these items.
After tobacco advertising was banned from televisions in the early 1970s, print campaigns were all the rage—magazine ads, billboards. Also merchandise. My generation took our cartoons seriously, and gladly bought up the swag and smoked our backs out. Joe was cool and we were too.
Back then it seemed to me like people were just drinking the Kool-Aid when they talked about evil people sitting around a table, plotting the most profitable ways to introduce carcinogens to minors. The kids a few years behind me were already smoking, so it seemed to me that the game was to get a bigger share of the existing market, not to expand it. Surely the next generation would have been introduced to cigarettes anyway, with or without Joe?
Anti-vaping advocates will often point to Old Joe Camel and the bygone era of Big Tobacco advertising.
In 1997, the Federal Trade Commission would rule that Joe Camel was a violation federal law. Pressure had been mounting for a couple of years. Kids were buying the shirts even though they weren’t old enough to buy the product, legally that is. The FTC alleged that Joe Camel was intended to introduce the next generation to cigarettes, rather than poach consumers from competing brands.
“R.J. Reynolds has conducted one of the most effective advertising campaigns in decades,” stated FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Jodie Bernstein in May 1997. “Joe Camel has become as recognizable to kids as Mickey Mouse. Yet the campaign promotes a product that causes serious injury, addiction and death. It appeals to our young people. It is illegal and should be stopped. Joe Camel must grow up or go away.”
And he did, if not exactly willingly. The campaign was pulled and the T-shirts became kitschy memorabilia. Kid-friendly cigarette-hawking cartoons were banned from print ads entirely.
According to the FTC, Joe Camel made Camel cigarettes even more popular with minors than with adults. I don’t think Big Tobacco or anyone else should be marketing cigarettes to kids. But despite all the chatter about how Joe Camel got so many more kids to start smoking, from my perspective it seems more that he just got them to start smoking Camels. If he hadn’t come along, would they not have smoked something else?
Research is somewhat mixed as to what effect advertising actually has on youth smoking rates. The impact of another factor seems more clear, however. It’s the same thing that mattered most to my younger self when I was weighing the vending machine options at the pool hall: price. At the end of the day, access to the product is what matters,
Anti-vaping advocates will often point to Old Joe Camel and the bygone era of Big Tobacco advertising. They’ll say that vape manufacturers, including some of the companies that sell cigarettes, are using those very same tactics to irresponsibly drive an increase in youth vaping.
They leave out that while youth vaping has indeed become a thing, youth cigarette smoking is decreasing at the same time. Daily youth smoking—which, unlike vaping, actually kills people—has now fallen to a rate well below 1 percent.
There’s a taboo to condoning youth nicotine use of any kind. But what’s happening in the real world is that a new generation is choosing a much less harmful alternative to combustible cigarettes. My generation was just choosing between equally harmful brands.
The point of the outcry over Joe Camel and marketing tobacco to minors was supposed to be protecting them from harm. Since then, the public health mission seems to have shifted to protection from nicotine. If vape marketing took some of the market that would otherwise belong to cigarettes, isn’t that a good thing?
Top image (edited) via United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation. Inset image via Washington State Office of the Attorney General
The Influence Foundation, which operates Filter, has received unrestricted grants from Reynolds American, Inc. Filter’s Editorial Independence Policy applies.