Smoking rates in the UK have been falling for decades,
but at the same time cigarette companies are making more money than ever.
They'll tell you they are moving away from cigarettes and towards healthier alternatives,
but if you look a little closer that's nowhere near the full story.
So, what's really behind big tobacco's big profits?
Cigarette makers are in a bit of a bind.
Public opinion against smoking has swayed so far that they essentially can't endorse their own product.
So, to stay relevant they have engineered an image overhaul.
As a company, we have embarked upon a path of achieving a smoke-free future.
So the bulk of their marketing in the UK would suggest that they are moving towards
healthier alternatives like vapes.
But if you look at the financial reports, profits from these new products don't come
anywhere near what traditional cigarettes bring in.
From what we can see from their company accounts, the clear majority of their profits
still are earned from combustion tobacco products such as traditional cigarettes.
So it's basically like printing money because it's basically nicotine wrapped
in various layers of paper and all of those sort of things are cheap to make,
but they can sell them for a very high price, because people are addicted.
In 2015, the main six tobacco manufacturers earned more profits than
Coca Cola, Walt Disney, FedEx, Google, McDonald's and Starbucks combined.
And you don't make that kind of money in a smoke-free world.
So despite their product killing most of its users, they are soldiering on.
And with every new hurdle, their tactics have to get a little smarter.
So, tax increases on tobacco are a big problem for the manufacturers.
Increasing taxes is the most effective policy we have for reducing smoking.
They should increase the cost of cigarettes.
We have done steadily and it works.
I want to ask some people how this has impacted their smoking habits
and if you have been affected by high prices, then let us know in the comments below.
Has the price changed since you guys started smoking?
Yes, definitely. Ridiculous.
It's like, quadruple the price.
It used to be like £6.30. Now they are like at least £8.60.
Super expensive, super expensive.
What is that price increase?
The government taxing it all the time, trying to cut down on smoking.
Do you know who's doing it?
I don't know actually, probably the government to kind of discourage it.
Actually, a lot of the price increases are coming from the people making the cigarettes.
Oh, bloody big tobaccos again. I feel shafted.
Between 2013 and 2015, the government increased taxes across all price brackets of cigarettes.
At the same time, the manufacturers hiked their prices for premium cigarettes
by another 53 pence.
But for a pack of the cheapest cigarettes they actually took money off, six pence to be exact.
It's called price-shifting and it's a way for manufacturers to keep their profits up
overall without losing the smokers who can't afford a price rise.
And by maintaining the availability of cheap tobacco, they are also reducing motivation to quit.
This means especially the poorest smokers will miss out on the benefits of a tobacco tax.
It's keeping profits up for now but there's a flaw in the plan.
Two-thirds of long-term smokers will actually die due to smoking-related ills.
So the tobacco industry has a fundamental problem.
A lot of their existing consumers will die, so other existing consumers will quit.
So to continue to sell cigarettes over time, they need new people to start smoking.
So, finding new customers is pretty tricky if you can't advertise, market
or even display your products in a shop.
But luckily for manufacturers, this whole world of opportunity has opened up.
When you're looking at a heavily regulated industry, that still have billions of odd dollars to spend,
what better tool is there than social media where they can access billions of young people
on platforms that are very underregulated in this area?
An influencer working for the cigarette brand Lucky Strike shared this document with Caroline's team
which is basically a contract.
It tells them when they should post to their followers,
how many posts they are expected to do,
the hashtags they are meant to use and the general cool images that they are supposed to be promoting.
This was completely secret marketing, you know.
These were not influencers who were saying: 'Here is a post I was paid to promote.'
This was part of an industry-wide strategy to make smoking look cool again
to an entire new generation of people online,
to make it look like smoking was all over your news feed and to make it look like smoking was normal.
These tactics work as a short-term fix, but they can't keep big tobacco in business forever.
With a customer base that won't stop dying, what they really need is a clean slate.
So, where do you find millions of people who haven't been bombarded with anti-smoking campaigns?
They're targeting markets in Asia, in India, Indonesia, south-east Asia,
Africa and so they are shifting the epidemic away from the developed countries
into the less developed countries.
They're doing all of the things that we have made illegal in the UK.
They advertise, they market to children, they put their products in places
where consumers are going to see those brands.
They try to make those products seem glamorous and very western, so they make people want to
engage in this smoking behaviour.
So I've been exchanging a few emails with Sarah Boseley, she's the Guardian's health editor.
She's done loads of work about big tobacco's shady tactics in the developing world.
Definitely Africa has been targeted.
When you started looking into it, what did you find?
There's a lot of lobbying by the industry.
A lot of it was quasi threats, they were putting government ministers under pressure
trying to persuade them not to pass the legislation.
We actually got hold of various letters from tobacco companies
using legalistic language to government ministers who simply don't know as much about it
as the companies do.
So they are saying: 'Look, you are going to be in breach of international regulations,
risks having damaging consequences on Togo's economy and business environment.'
So you know, your country is going to go down the pan if you bring in plain packaging.
Obviously not true.
Do you think that there is potential for smoking rates in, for example, Kenya
to be as high as they once were in the UK?
Unfortunately, I think, there is every possibility that smoking could take off,
but the World Health Organisation is doing all it can to urge the governments on to impose restrictions,
so there is a chance that this could be nipped in the bud and I just really hope it is.
So every year there's 350 million miles of cigarette smoke.
That's enough to make a continuous chain of cigarettes from the Earth to the Sun and back
with enough left over for several round trips to Mars.
It's the most successful business enterprise in the history of human civilisation,
as well as being the most deadly.
If you are a smoker or an ex-smoker, please let us know about your relationship with cigarettes
and whether learning about big tobacco changes how you think about smoking.
Thank you for watching and, if you want to see more videos from the Guardian,
don't forget to like and subscribe.