Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

490 Chapter 
14 
Health Psychology: Stress, Coping, and Well-Being
A Jeep decorated with the Camel logo pulls up to a high school in 
Buenos Aires. A woman begins handing out free cigarettes to 15- and 
16-year-olds during their lunch recess. At a video arcade in Taipei, 
free American cigarettes are strewn atop each game. At a disco fi lled 
with high school students, free packs of Salems are on each table. 
(Ecenbarger, 1993, p. 50) 
Because the number of smokers has steadily declined in the United States, cigarette 
manufacturers have turned their sights to other parts of the world, where they see a 
fertile market for their product. Although they must often sell cigarettes more cheaply 
than they do in the United States, the huge number of potential smokers still makes it 
fi nancially worthwhile for the tobacco companies. The United States is now the world’s 
largest exporter of cigarettes (Bartecchi, MacKenzie, & Schrier, 1995; Brown, 2001). 
Clearly, the push into worldwide markets has been successful. In some Latin 
American cities, as many as 50% of teenagers smoke. Children as young as age 7 
smoke in Hong Kong; 30% of children smoked their fi rst whole cigarette before the 
age of 10 in India, Ghana, Jamaica, and Poland. The World Health Organization 
predicts that smoking will prematurely kill some 200 million of the world’s children 
and that ultimately 10% of the world’s population will die as a result of smoking. Of 
everyone alive today, 500 million will eventually die from tobacco use (Mackay & 
Eriksen, 2002).
One reason for the increase in smoking in developing countries is that their 
governments make little effort to discourage it. In fact, many governments are in the 
tobacco business themselves and rely on revenues from tobacco. For example, the 
world’s largest manufacturer of cigarettes is the China National Tobacco Corporation, 
which is owned by the Chinese government (Marsh, 2008).
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