USA has always been like that and was doing it decades ago; often claimed as “freedom”. A couple of years ago I downloaded this film in Dutch about the pirate broadcasters who used ships. Partly out of curiosity as I can now understand the language which I couldn’t 30 years ago, but I also wondered why many left wing European politicians did not like these pirates when [other than in the UK] they were often perfectly happy to license “youth radio stations” with the same music. The film was from 1969/1970.
On listening to recordings of a Dutch language pirate radio station; it soon became apparent that entire programmes were sponsored by American cigarette companies!
Mick Jagger mocks this in the lyics of “I can’t get no Satisfaction” so it was common enough on English speaking radio in 1965; but I don’t remember ever hearing cigarettes being advertised on UK radio in the 1970s (only for cigars, but these didn’t appeal to British youth). It appears cigarette adverts were also banned in NL (might have been some early
pan-European idea, like much safety related legislation) and taxes in NL were put up loads on manufactured cigarettes; which is (as well as tolerance of other “smoking mixtures”) why the Dutch tend to roll their own.
Even in the 1970s the concept of a foreign cigarette company openly sponsoring a programe on a radio station for youngsters would have horrified legislators across Europe (there were and still are stricter rules about sponsoring broadcasting) – some American companies would of course have tried to “disrupt” things by funding the pirate broadcasts. (by the late 1970s most of the pirates had legal stations, but tobacco ads remained verboden; the USA bought the Dutch tobacco companies instead).
You can AFAIK put any suitable chemical into a vaporiser; it is not “locked” to any one brand of nicotine + flavouring (or whatever goes into the things), making all the money, time and effort invested in cigarette branding irrelevant. Hardly surprising the USA don’t like this. Everywhere else in the world just wants the nicotine and gets on with it 😉
