This research paper summarizes the outcome of attempts to regulate the harmful effects of tobacco products, primarily cigarettes, through legislation and other measures. In general and until recently, tobacco products have been largely free of regulation and the most important forms of regulation have been administrative and judicial not legislative. However, for a variety of reasons, legislative regulation of the tobacco industry is likely to make it one of the most heavily regulated industries.
Since the Supreme Court broke up the American Tobacco trust in 1911, which it found to be a combination engaged in unreasonable restraint of trade and commerce under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, the American tobacco industry "remained under the control of the giants," a small number of large corporations with oligopoly market power. The first manufactured, mass-marketed cigarettes, Camels, were introduced in 1913 by R.J. Reynolds. The cigarette was an enormously successful consumer product which suited the temper of the times, much more popular than other tobacco products such as cigars and chewing tobacco. Kluger says that
"in the relative mildness of its aroma and convenience of its use, the smaller, quicker smoke was proving a good deal less objectionable to an increasingly urbanized society . . . by the second decade of the century, the cigarette was becoming the smoke of choice in high as well as low society."
According to Mollenkamp et al, by 1945, one half of all American adults smoked cigarettes, a fraction which would decline to 25 percent by 1997 due to concerns over the deleterious effects of cigarette smoking on personal and public health.
The giant companies which make up Big Tobacco have used primarily massive advertising and secondarily the introduction of new products to differentiate their brands, and to consolidate their hold on the marketplace. In 1993, the largest companies and their share of ...