How and Why Big Tobacco Targets Vulnerable Communities

In 2020, the USC Keck School of Medicine published a 38-page report titled “Cancer in Los Angeles: Lung Cancer” that detailed lung cancer data trends by race/ethnicity in Los Angeles County from 2000 to 2017. What they found was that people of Color, notably non-Hispanic Black, Vietnamese, and Filipino populations, had notably greater age-adjusted incidence rates of invasive lung cancers when compared to White populations living in Los Angeles, despite making up only a minority percentage of the population.