By Bruce Shawkey
Cigarettes: Bad, or good? I ran across the start of this interesting dichotomy in a June 1956 issue of Life magazine. In it was an article titled "New Cigarette Cancer Link," and later two cigarette ads, one for Marlboro, the other for Lucky Strike. Here is part of the article:
In the long-standing controversy over whether cigarette smoking causes cancer, a new report makes the case against cigarettes more convincing than ever. Dr. Oscar Auerbach of the veterans hospital in East Orange, N.J. has pored over 28,000 microscopic slides of lung tissue from 150 cadavers, analyzing them for cancer and the tissue changes leading to it. Next he compared his findings with his subjects' smoking habits. The results show that the degree of lung damage corresponds with the number of cigarettes smoked daily.
Then, later, we see these two ads:
It wouldn't be until 1971, 15 years later, until tobacco ads were banned from broadcast advertising, and restrictions placed on print advertising.
And let's talk about candy cigarettes and bubble gum cigars. There was a short article in a recent AARP magazine about them:
DO YOU REMEMBER CANDY CIGARETTES?
It was the worst idea for a sweet ever: Encourage kids to playact a filthy habit that could kill them. It started in the late 1880s with the hawking of cylindrical chocolate bars wrapped in paper to resemble cigarettes. Later, my boomer friends and I morphed into baby Brandos on our Sting-Rays, with red-tipped confections dangling from curled lips. Some kid-cigs upped the reality level, expelling powdered-sugar smoke. And if we wanted variety in our faux toxins, there was bubble gum chewing tobacco (Big League Chew) and bubble gum cigars (El Bubble). The stealth marketing worked. A 2007 study in Preventive Medicine showed that 22 percent of adult smokers started with sugar cigarettes as kids; only 14 per-cent of nonsmokers ate them. Of course, they've been controversial. In 1964 a vending association joined the chorus against fake smokes and warned that tobacco companies were "trying to lure youngsters into the smoking habit." But attempts to ban the products have gone nowhere, though they're now marketed as candy "sticks," without the telltale red tip.
