"Study: Cigarette makers targeted women" -- CNN Headline, May 31, 2005.

"How unfortunate that the industry used these findings to exploit women and not help them. Cigarette designs and ingredients were manipulated in an effort to make cigarettes more palatable to women and to complement advertising allusions of smooth, healthy, weight-controlling, stress-reducing smoke," Jack Henningfield of Johns Hopkins University and colleagues wrote in a commentary.

Henningfield apparently thinks that people go into marketing to help people. How delusional can you get? The primary function of marketing is to seperate people from their money. While it's easier to do so if you provide them a real world benefit, that isn't always the case (ie: extended warranties, undercoating).

You can't always blame the snake oil salesman. There is an old idiom that says, "a fool and his money are soon parted", and I think that the fool should share some of the blame.