Anne Landman's Collection
Project Lighthouse ad
Abstract
These two Tobacco Institute advertisements appeared in the 1970s to cast doubt on the link between smoking and disease by turning the focus of tobacco-related illness onto people's personality traits. The first ad says that lots of things have been blamed for causing disease ("bread, butter, milk, sugar, cigarettes..." ) and suggests that people who use these substances "unthinkingly and excessively" are "special types of people." The ad suggests that "hard drivers" and "perfectionists" may have "used up their inherited capital of resistance to disease." While the piece claims this is "still a theory," its underlying purpose seems to be to cast doubt on the scientific certainty of the link between smoking and disease.
The ads appear to be part of a project initiated in 1967 by the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company called Project Lighthouse, in which B&W hired the Tiderock Foundation to gather studies and personal commentary from scientists that cast doubt on the link between smoking and disease.
Fields
- Quotes
Statistics are the tools that scientists use, not to find answers, but to find clues. They recognize that they...may give as many false clues as true ones.
Statistics have misled us into thinking some foods were dangerous. They once led us to suspect that corn caused pellagra...Ultimately, of course, we discovered that corn had nothing to do with it. A lack of niacin causes pellagra.
We have been misled many times about diseases. It may be that we have been seriously misled about those diseases and conditions of middle and old age which still confront us: heart disease, cancer and the aging process itself.
They have been variously linked with nearly an endless list: bread, butter, milk, sugar, salt, fatty meat, potatoes, liquor, cigarettes, our sedentary society, and our environment. While research on all these continues, as it must, it may be that we are looking in the wrong direction...
...It is simply that the likelihood of developing disease may not result to much from any or all of these things but from the fact that the individual who uses them--and especially the one who uses them unthinkingly and excessively--is a special type of person.
He (although it may be a man or a woman) is a "hard driver," a perfectionist who sets high standards for himself and strives mightily to achieve them. He is more open and frank and, in some ways, more sensitive. While he demands more of himself, he is more tolerant of subordinates.
He suffers more, too, and this may be a key to his proneness to disease. He is under more pressure and stress to extend himself, and he is subject to more frustration and anger than the more easygoing.
At some point in his life, generally in late middle age, whether he drinks or not, smokes or not, the constant stress he has endured may have used up his inherited capital of resistance to disease.
While it is still a theory, it is one that many scientists find helpful and hopeful. It helps explain many otherwise contradictory figures--why, for instance, non-smokers as well as smokers get the same diseases. And it gives us hope that we may achieve a fuller understanding of ourselves and our human condition.
In the meantime, it is a timely reminder for all of us, and especially for those valuable "hard drivers" among us, whether smokers or no, that easing up life's tensions is not just enjoyable, it may be a necessity.
These facts and statements are presented in the belief that while scientific research will finally resolve the cigarette controversy, pressing issues of public policy require discussion of all sides of our present knowledge.
- Company
- Brown & Williamson
- Author
- "The cigarette makers of America"
- Recipient
- Presumed the general public (advertisement)
Document Images
