Cigarette Advertising

IN THE 1980s and 1990s, the duplicitous behavior of the tobacco industry increasingly attracted public criticism and was exposed in several trials and lawsuits. Vast sectors of the public opinion questioned the legality of smoking, and thus questioned its advertising: why should a deadly product be marketed as a pleasurable commodity? On the other hand, a considerable number of people felt that the demand for an increased regulation of smoking was an infringement on their freedom of choice. Bans on cigarette advertising, they claimed, conflicted with the 1st Amendment to the Constitution. The battle over tobacco products and their marketing rages on and, significantly, this debate has spread outside legal courts into popular culture, from the cartoon strips by G. B. Trudeau and the popular, Oscar-nominated film The Insider (1999), starring the actor Russell Crowe fighting against the beasts of the tobacco industry.

To those who argue for stricter regulation of the tobacco industry, cigarette advertising is synonymous with deceptive advertising, and thus with crime. Various sources have stressed that the tobacco industry's conduct has been extremely misleading. While all its internal papers and documents from the 1950s onward have acknowledged that smoking is addictive and that use of tobacco products causes cancer and death, the industry has adopted a range of advertising tactics which rejected its own findings. The aim of these campaigns has been to convince the public that there is still doubt about the harmful effects of tobacco or that the effects have been exaggerated.

In this way, argue those in favor of a ban on cigarettes and their advertising, the industry is simply trying to keep its profits, stop harsher government legislation and discourage lawsuits from patients suffering from supposedly tobacco-induced illnesses. An important collection of documents internal to the tobacco industry which would support this view is published under the collective name of The Cigarette Papers (1996).

The documents were originally sent to Professor Stanton Glantz at the University of California, San Francisco. The sender remained anonymous and only identified itself as Mr. Butts, the nightmarish character in Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury cartoon strip embodying Mike Doonesbury's sense of guilt for considering to work on cigarette advertising.

[Page 166]Although concerns about cigarettes and their advertising have become particularly prominent since the 1970s, the history of cigarette advertising has always been caught between the dichotomy of pleasure and danger. The first promotion scheme for cigarettes dates back to 1875 when producers Allen & Ginter introduced in their cigarette brands, Richmond Straight Cut No. 1 and Pet, picture cards to harden the pack and protect the cigarettes. The cards featured photos of actresses, baseball players, Native American chiefs, and boxers and were extremely popular.

Yet, even from these early times, smoking was a controversial issue. In 1898, Tennessee Supreme Court banned cigarettes, ruling that they were “not legitimate articles of commerce, being wholly noxious and deleterious to health” and indicting their use as “always harmful.” Washington, Iowa, Tennessee and North Dakota outlawed the sale of cigarettes in 1900. These concerns about how healthy smoking actually was reflected on advertising campaigns: the baseball player Honus Wagner ordered American Tobacco Company to take his picture off their Sweet Caporal cigarette packs, fearing it would lead children to smoke.

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