Category Archives: Marlboro

One of the original Marlboro Man dies at 90

November 15, 2019 Pepe Lepew

An interesting story about one of the very first “Marlboro Man,” who actually never smoked a single cigarette. He died last week at the age of 90. It’s a neat story.

Bob Norris was approached by Philip Morris ad executives (I imagine Don Draper out of “Mad Men” in his grey suit out in the high plains…) in the 1950s while he was talking to John Wayne outside of a ranch in Colorado. It’s debatable whether he was the first-ever Marlboro Men, but he had a nice run of 12 years of being in magazine ads and billboards in the 1950s.

Here’s a neat story of why Morris quit doing the ad campaign, even though it made him a lot of money. One of his kids got old enough to ask him about “If you don’t approve of us smoking, why are you in cigarette ads.” Norris claimed he quit modeling as the Marlboro Man the day after that.

Bob Norris might have had the longest life of the several real-life cowboys who played Marlboro Men over the decades. Six of them — SIX — died of tobacco-related illnesses, including one who died at the age of 52 from lung cancer. Three others died of lung cancer, one at the age of 72 and the other at 73, and a third died of COPD. So many Marlboro Men died of smoking that Marlboros became known as “Cowboy Killers.”

So Norris outlived them all. Unfortunately, for 12 years, he didn’t really think about the morality of what he was doing (back in his day, few people gave much thought to the morality of cigarettes, frankly) but he came around. And that’s what’s important.

Big Tobacco, marijuana, Marlboro, Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds

Could Big Tobacco evolve into Big Pot?

November 23, 2014 Pepe Lepew

I’m glad someone did an article on this (NBC News) because frankly, this is something I’ve been wondering about myself for the past couple of years.

With a total of four states now with legal marijuana (Colorado, Washington, Oregon and Alaska), might the day come when pot sales will be controlled by huge corporations, perhaps even a single massive mega-corporation?

Boy, there are dollars to be made there. Billions upon billions of them. Too much profit to keep Big Business out for long. It’s legal now for about 18 million people in the U.S. — and I guarantee that number will continue to escalate, maybe a LOT and maybe soon. California might be next in line to legalize pot.

According to NBC:

“My concern is the Marlboro-ization or Budweiser-ization of marijuana,” said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. “That’s not what I’m fighting for.”

“It’s a cultural thing,” said Keith Stroup, founder of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, the country’s oldest consumer pot lobby. “All of us have at least a little bit of discomfort with the corporate stuff.”

Which brings me to big tobacco. “Marlboro-ization.” I’ve long suspected that Big Tobacco is keeping an eye on the effort to legalize pot … and drooling in the process. The tobacco industry has been in a long, slow decline for about 20 years now. So the industry will have to diversify. One way to accomplish this is by selling more cigarettes overseas — but the gargantuan market of China is off-limits because the Chinese government doesn’t want American tobacco companies taking over its state-owned market.

So, that leaves … marijuana. I would not be shocked. Not in the slightest if RJ Reynolds or Philip Morris got into the marijuana-selling business in the next 10 to 20 years. Pot advocates see it looming on the horizon. They mention beer companies, too.

NBC News:

“Beer, wine and tobacco people—I’ve met with them all,” said Allen St. Pierre, the executive director of NORML, which is above all a consumer rights organization. He doesn’t love the idea of Big Pot, but he believes it will help guarantee that users get a quality product at a fair price.

He recalled two lunches in Washington, D.C., (one at DC Noodles, the other at Pizza Paradiso); several office visits; and a grand tour through Savor, the district’s popular beer and food conference.

“It’s been so surreal,” he said, reflecting on more than two decades as a marijuana lobbyist, all of it spent outside the warm circle of the other vice industries.

“I always dreamed of these meetings,” he added. “I pictured balding guys, with comb-overs, red suspenders, eating in quiet restaurants—and lo-and-behold that’s what they’ve been.”

The article focuses pretty heavily on the alcohol industry and whether beer and spirits distributors might want to get involved in the marijuana business someday, or if they see marijuana simply as a competitor.

I’m focusing a bit more on the Big Tobacco aspect, because frankly at this point, I think it’s more likely Big Tobacco would get involved in pot rather than beer companies.

My old pal Stanton Glantz (one of the most prominent anti-tobacco crusaders of the past 30 years) is quoted extensively in the story.

NBC News:

Tobacco executives, meanwhile, have been studying the marijuana industry for years, according to Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. His research has drawn an 80-million page archive of tobacco industry documents, spanning the 1960s to the late 1990s. Many of the documents reference softening pot laws, rising use, and the dual threat/opportunity of a third major vice industry.

In early 1970, for example, an unsigned memorandum distributed to Philip Morris’ top management read, “We are in the business of relaxing people who are tense and providing a pick up for people who are bored or depressed. The human needs that our product fills will not go away. Thus, the only real threat to our business is that society will find other means of satisfying these needs.”

“These documents reveal that since at least 1970, despite fervent denials, three multinational tobacco companies, Phillip Morris, British American Tobacco, and RJ Reynolds, all have considered manufacturing cannabis cigarettes,” according to an investigation by Glantz and two colleagues, published this summer in Milbank Quarterly, a peer-reviewed journal of public health.

Make no mistake. Pot will be legalized, if not everywhere in the U.S., than in most of the U.S. And I’m predicting sooner rather than later. The political will to keep it illegal is slowly caving. And it is big, big, big business, a multi-billion business. You can be damned sure Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds are thinking about it.

The question is … would that be a bad thing?

In my mind, only if they completely abandoned the scourge of the 20th century — tobacco.

Bill O'Reilly, Marlboro, Marlboro Man

Bill O’Reilly claims he could’ve been a Marlboro Man

April 19, 2014 Pepe Lepew

Bill O’Reilly — yeah, the right-wing gasbag on Fox News — claims he was once offered a job modeling as a Marlboro Man back in the 1970s. (Good thing for Bill that he turned it down, because Marlboro Men tend to die.)

Bill used this bombshell to rag on marijuana. He said that while he supports the government’s efforts to fight tobacco use, government — and society as a whole — is implicit in encouraging more marijuana use.

I’m not a big marijuana advocate, but Billo is wrong for three very huge reasons — 1) tobacco kills 440,000 people a year, while marijuana kills ??? a year 2) tobacco is physically addicting for everyone who uses it, while only a small percentage of pot users become addicted (and it’s more a psychological addiction than physical) and 3) every study that has been done on the subject shows that pot does not cause lung cancer.

I love this quote from Billo:

Smoking marijuana is quite the opposite. That’s on the rise, as pot use is considered cool in many circles, and above all it is political correct,” he said.

Yeah, guess what, man. It’s uptight squares like you ripping on pot that just makes it more cool. You know, they figured this stuff out in the 1970s, get with the times.

bill O'reilly 1999 — Bill O’Reilly 1979, studmuffin

Of course, what he’s really saying is liberals love pot but hate cigarettes. Again, read above, pot, for all of its negative issues (and I believe there are negatives to pot, again, I’m not a big advocate of it) is a) NOT killing 440,000 Americans a year, 2) NOT physically addictive like nicotine and 3) Does NOT cause lung cancer.

So, it’s a stupid argument, even for Bill O’Reilly.

Altria, COPD, Marlboro, Marlboro Man, Philip Morris, phillip Morris

Yet another Marlboro Man dies from smoking

January 27, 2014 Pepe Lepew 1 Comment

Incredible, yet another “Marlboro Man” dies from smoking. By my count, that makes four.

Eric Lawson, who portrayed the iconic Marlboro Man cowboy in Marlboro ads from 1978 to 1981, died this week of COPD at the relatively young age of 72. He appeared in anti-smoking ads after he worked for Philip Morris.

Lawson joins Marlboro Men models Wayne McLaren, Dick Hammer and David McLean, all of whom died of lung cancer. McLaren testified in favour of anti-smoking laws many years ago and Philip Morris tried to claim he was never a Marlboro Man model, but McLaren still had pay stubs calling him the Marlboro Man (what, a tobacco company LYING…?)