Part 1 of 5. A special UPI report on the state of smoking in America.
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Cigarettes remain the world's most effective weapon of mass destruction.
In the United States alone, directly and indirectly, cigarette smoking kills more than 10 times as many people per year as highway crashes. Yet smoking's ravages would be much worse today had the dangers of the habit not been exposed 40 years ago.
On Jan. 11, 1964, U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry issued a report concluding that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer. At the time, more than half of all adult men smoked, the only non-smoking sections were in movie theaters and even television's most popular animated series at the time, "The Flintstones," featured Fred and Wilma reminding viewers that "Winston tastes good, like a (tap, tap) cigarette should."
Cigarettes and the perception that smoking made the user sexier, smarter and happier were stamped on the national consciousness by 1964, said Charles Clift, a professor of telecommunications at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. The slick print ads and high profile television spots, "were powerful, compelling messages," he told United Press International. This point was driven home a year ago when Clift and his wife, both former smokers, visited a museum exhibit devoted TV ads for cigarettes.
"Those messages got to us and if there were cigarettes available, we would have been smoking," he said.
Although in 1964 cigarettes were sold in vending machines found in establishments ranging from laundromats to restaurants and even hospital lobbies, they no longer are so readily available. In the four decades years since the landmark surgeon general's report, the vanishing cigarette machine is just one sign of the cultural shift that has slowly overtaken the smoking landscape in the United States.
In 1964, 43 percent of U.S. adults were smokers; today the figure is 23 percent.
In 1964, it was hard to find a non-smoking section in a restaurant; today entire states have banned smoking in all restaurants and workplaces.
According to the Web site of the American Nonsmokers Rights Foundation, 266 municipalities have banned smoking in either restaurants or workplaces. In addition California, New York, Florida, Delaware, Connecticut, Utah and South Dakota have imposed statewide bans.
Along with nearly a 50-percent decrease in the percentage of smokers, the per capita consumption of cigarettes also has fallen, from 4,345 per person per year in 1963 to 1,979 in 2002.
All of this represents the good news, but it has been achieved through a long, hard battle that is far from over.
During the 1950s and into the 1960s, celebrities such as John Wayne and Rock Hudson promoted Camel cigarettes, while Ronald Reagan -- then known only as an actor in movies and television -- touted Chesterfields. Tobacco was king and few questioned its power. For example, the Camel News Caravan, a national news show in the 1950s "had two policies: it couldn't show anyone smoking a cigar -- except Winston Churchill -- and it couldn't show any 'No Smoking' signs," Clift said.
By 1970, the last full year of television and radio cigarette advertising, tobacco ads represented about 10 percent or $220 million of the ad revenues of the big three networks -- CBS, NBC and ABC, Clift said. That stopped with the final televised cigarette pitch -- a Virginia Slims commercial -- broadcast at 11:59 p.m. on January 1, 1971, on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show."
"The Federal Communications Commission held off on the ban until Jan. 2, which gave the tobacco companies a chance to advertise on the (football) bowl games," he said, adding that beer companies quickly filled the sports broadcast ad gap created by the exodus of cigarettes.
"The surgeon general's report was a watershed event," said Tom Glynn, director of cancer science and trends for the American Cancer Society in Washington, D.C. "It was about a year before the impact of the report took hold. After 1965 the numbers did begin to go down. They didn't fall off a cliff. One of the groups it hit the hardest was physicians, who were among the country's highest smokers. They did drop very quickly after 1964. The physicians led the way," he told UPI.
Taking the lead involved some curious turns, however. All through the 1970s, the American Medical Association created smoking and non-smoking sections at its meetings and in the mid-1980s two top officials of the AMA -- Dr. Harrison Rogers, then president-elect, and Dr. F. William Dowda, an AMA trustee -- jointly owned a tobacco farm.
The anti-smoking movement was slow to catch on in other venues. Well into the 1980s, people could light up as their airplane left New York City and chain smoke all the way across country -- or around the world. The airlines did not even begin segregating smokers and non-smokers until well into the 1970s and none banned smoking until 1988, when the California legislature unilaterally outlawed smoking on flights within the state.
Also in 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill that banned smoking on short flights and in 1990 smoking on all U.S. domestic flights was prohibited. In 1995, Delta Airlines, the first major carrier to comply with the California ban, outlawed smoking on its international flights to become the first smoke-free airline.
Just as attitudes about smoking have changed over four decades, so have the economics of smoking. Cigarettes cost pocket change in 1964 -- less than 30 cents a pack. Today, cigarettes cost about $3.50 a pack, but in some places --New York City, for example -- the cost is $7.50, more than the cost of a whole carton in 1964.
One thing has not changed in 40 years, said Jeffrey Wigand, visiting professor of ethics at the University of Houston in Texas and a former vice president for research at Brown and Williamson, one of the nation's largest tobacco companies.
Wigand was the so-called "Insider," whose story was told in the 1999 movie of the same name. Wigand shook the tobacco industry by revealing on the TV program "60 Minutes" how the companies had doctored and hid data on the health dangers of smoking and how they had manipulated the nicotine content of cigarettes.
Wigand told UPI the tobacco companies are still trying to seduce children into smoking.
"Think about how profound Surgeon General Terry's report would have been if he had the information that the tobacco companies were hiding -- the danger of second-hand smoke, the knowledge that filters didn't work," he said.
Wigand said recent advertisements televised by tobacco giant Philip Morris -- purporting to tell people how to quit smoking -- should be taken off the air. He said the advertisements lead viewers to the Internet where tobacco company propaganda thrives.
Glynn said the tobacco-makers are now spending more of their advertising budgets promoting cigarette smoking at events rather than in television ads or print advertising.
Clift said the TV/radio advertising ban actually has created a bonanza for the tobacco companies because they learned how to spend advertising dollars in ways that reach their target audiences directly.
"For example, in just about every city the tobacco companies have hired young people whose job is to visit bars and hand out (free) cigarettes and coupons," he said. They also have used direct mail campaigns effectively. For instance, R.J. Reynolds sent Christmas presents to college students: glossy calendars with a year's supply of Camels' coupons.
Though the tobacco companies actively market to the so-called twenty-somethings, Wigand said they remain most interested in teens, who have the potential to become customers for decades. Moreover, he charged, the companies remain completely unconcerned with public safety.
Wigand said the companies have known for more than 15 years how to make a cigarette that will not cause a fire if someone falls asleep while smoking. But only one state -- New York -- has passed legislation requiring those safe cigarettes to be used. About 1,200 people die each year in fires caused by cigarette smoking.
Cigarettes kill most effectively when used as intended, however. Lighting up and inhaling deeply claims 450,000 American lives each year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta reports that since Surgeon General Terry's report, more than 12-million deaths in the United States have been attributable to smoking.
The World Health Organization estimates that in developed nations, 100-million people have died from tobacco during the 20th century. The WHO estimates the total for the 21st century will reach 1 billion.
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Peggy Peck is based in Cleveland and Ed Susman is in West Palm Beach, Fla. They cover health and medicine for UPI Science News. E-mail [email protected]
