“Smoking is up everywhere.”
“Up where?” Phil tilted his head toward the ceiling while Morris squirmed on a leather chair in the executive office.
Morris stopped moving around and gritted his teeth. “We caught on that smoking is bad and quit smoking.”
“And that’s bad?”
“That wasn’t enough. Now we hop all around the world talking other people into smoking.”
“And that’s bad?”
“Phil, you just don’t get it, do you? Yes, it’s bad, bad, bad. There’s nothing good about taking this poison and passing it off as some kind of a magic ticket and selling it around the world.”
“This sounds like a campaign speech. I’ll bet some numbers are about to surface.”
“Or some facts.”
“That would be nice.”
“Phil, more people are smoking more cigarettes than ever before. More than fifteen billion cigarettes a day!”
“I didn’t know that. But I did know that Americans are smoking less than ever and that our cigarette sales are down, down, down.”
“Yeah, but what if women woke up one morning and decided they wanted to smoke? Or what if somebody like us really got going with tobacco markets in China or India or Europe? In China they already smoke one and a half billion cigarettes every day.”
“But that’s only about cigarette per day per person. Maybe we should sell more cigarettes there. But you keep forgetting. You and I don’t belong to a global company any more. We’re part of PM-USA, and that’s all.”
“Phil, whatever name it is, I don’t want us selling cigarettes around the world! I hate nicotine and all its friends. It’s too deadly. All we can sell it for is the experience.”
“Even dying is an experience.”
Morris disappeared out the door.
http://www.who.int/tobacco/en/atlas8.pdf
