War on Smoking?

By 1946 cigarette smoking and the smoking of other tobacco products was everywhere in the United States. The biggest cigarette manufacturer, to increase sales and ward off stop smoking campaigns made the bold and unsubstantiated claim that more physicians smoked their top brand - Camels - than any other cigarettes in the nation. 

An advertisement for Camels in 1949 showed photos of noteworthy throat specialists that they did not name, saying that they could not link Camels to any throat irritants.

Two celebrities - variety show host Arthur Godfrey, and journalist broadcaster Edward R. Morrow were public smokers. Godfrey even endorsed it, with his program's sponsorship by Chesterfield cigarettes and his sign off at the end of each program, when he called himself  "Arthur buy-them-by-the-carton Godfrey." Morrow was never seen on the air when he wasn't puffing away on his cigarette. Both later died of lung cancer.

Deaths attributed to lung cancer had increased five fold in the U.S. by 1950, and at that time the Journal of American Magazine started a serious stop smoking campaign by its publication of documentation that nearly all lung cancer patients known at that time had been smoking cigarettes for a long time.

In 1953 a few people did stop smoking - three percent of smokers to be exact. This was a result of an article published by researcher Ernst Wynder who studied mice and found that he could actually induce cancer by giving them tobacco smoke to inhale. Cigarette manufacturers countered, however, with full-page ads in nearly 500 newspapers that said that no one had proven that smoking was a cause of lung cancer. Their claim was that smoking gave relaxation, enjoyment and even solace to smokers.

The Marlboro Man ad campaign began in 1954, a Phillip Morris campaign to equate cigarette smoking and virility. Curiously enough, the American Medical Association had previously been an avid publisher of cigarette commercials. In 1954 it made the decision to no longer accept ads from tobacco companies. It went from touting smoking to stop smoking quickly.

The tide of opinion was turning quickly on smoking, as 1958 studies indicated that nearly half of Americans were convinced that smoking caused lung cancer and were trying to stop. The Journal of American Medicine now began to publish many articles proving the health problems associated with tobacco smoking. In 1959 the U.S. Surgeon General published findings of the U.S. Public Health Service that cigarette smoking causes cancer.

Mild warning labels on cigarette packs were introduced in 1964 and the stop smoking campaign dropped the numbers of U.S. smokers by two percent. By 1968 Gallup poll results indicated that 71 percent of the nation's residents were convinced that smoking caused cancer. In 1971 tobacco advertising was banned from broadcast, as an effort to help stop smoking.

The first city to legislate its stop smoking campaign was San Francisco when, in 1983, it banned smoking in the workplace. Two years later 88 other cities had followed San Francisco's example. In 1988 people were forced to stop smoking on airplane flights that were shorter than two hours. In 1990 all domestic flights were smoke free, and in 1998 California again led the legislative way by banning smoking in public bars.

Although many thousands have stopped or tried to stop smoking, nearly 200,000 U.S. residents still die each year due to tobacco related cancers and other lung diseases.