Cigarette Advertising

Cigarettes are the only product advertised which are lethal when used as intended. Indeed they are a product about which nothing good can honestly be said. They are highly addictive. The damage they do to health has been documented by more than 50,000 research studies. Smoking is the single largest preventable cause of death in America. Over 1,000 people die every day because of cigarette-related diseases. In the twentieth century, more people have been killed by tobacco than by war.

Nowhere is the distorted perspective of advertising a perspective that manages to screen out almost all unpleasant reality except the strictly personal (e.g., bad breath, facial hair) more obvious than it is in cigarette ads. Contradictions abound in the world of tobacco advertising. Youthful, healthy people frolic and play with no apparent worries whatsoever. "Alive with pleasure," proclaims the ads for Newports, as if to obliterate the haunting subtext, "Dead with cancer." Macho men owe their freedom and independence, indeed their very masculinity, to their Camels and Marlboros, although the evidence indicates that cigarettes are linked with impotence, lower testosterone count, and sterility.