Tobacco Documents Online

This hysterical advertisment against British Airways (authored by the Tobacco Advisory Council, an organization similar to the Tobacco Institute in the U.S.) was concocted in 1988 after the airline banned smoking on short flights.

The headline of the ad announces, "British Airways Grounds All Smokers."

The tag line states,

"Yesterday, seat belts. Today, strait jackets. Where on earth will Britians smokers be tomorrow?"

This 1969 newspaper ad ridicules public health authorities' warnings about the dangers of smoking by comparing historical beliefs that tomatoes were poisonous to warnings about tobacco. The portrays such advice about tobacco as nothing more than "a vicious, unfair attempt to destroy a great American agricultural industry." The ad ran in an unknown number of newspapers around the United States in June,1969. (PM 2010008815) Such ads no doubt contributed to extensive public confusion in the U.S. about the hazards of smoking, in spite of the industry's contention that "everyone knew" about these dangers.

The entire text of the ad:

"100 years ago the tomato was considered "poison'

In the 19th Century the tomato was considered poisonous...children were warned to enjoy its beauty but not to taste it. Today we know the tomato is not only delicious but an excellent source of vitamins A and C.

Now we are being told that tobacco is poison. The propaganda mills grind out dire warnings based on "research." These warnings simply ignore other bodies of research which flatly state "no proved link" between tobacco and diseases of the lungs and heart. Several independent health agencies use the tobacco scare to raise huge sums of money.

There is good reason to think that within a few years we will look back and laugh about "the great tobacco scare of the 1960's," In the meantime, there is a vicious, unfair attempt to destroy a great American agricultural industry, affecting the livelihood of millions of people.

Think about it!

For further information write,

Tobacco Associates, Inc. P.O. Box 2873 Raleigh, North Carolina 27602 (Representing over 200,000 tobacco farm families in Virginia, The Carolinas, Georgia and Florida.)

In 1992 the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) completed its risk assessment, "Respiratory Health Effects of Passive Smoking: Lung Cancer and Other Disorders." The report said that widespread exposure to secondhand cigarette smoke in the United States presented a serious and substantial public health impact. More specifically, EPA concluded that secondhand smoke (also known as environmental tobacco smoke, or ETS) is a human lung carcinogen, responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths annually in U.S. nonsmokers.

The U.S. tobacco industry fought the EPA's risk assessment in part by trying to discredit the EPA's report. This document is one of a series of ads proposed by the ad firm Young & Rubicam for the tobacco industry to help stop people from believing EPA's risk assessment.

The ad says the EPA's Risk Assessment on secondhand smoke is as believable as someone saying that Elvis Presely didn't die, but was abducted by space aliens.

The ad was part of a much larger presentation Y & R prepared for the industry in 1993 called "ETS Issue Language Exploratory." (A Doc-Alert posting on Y& R's "ETS Language Exploratory is at http://tobaccodocuments.org/landman/2501342686-2697.html) The purpose of the "ETS Issue Language Exploratory" was to develop terminology that industry supporters could use in public discussions about secondhand smoke that would "Help [the industry] forestall further smoking bans and restrictions in public/work places." Y&R suggested using terms like "indirect smoke" and "incidental smoke" to describe tobacco smoke pollution. Y& R repeatecly uses the term "incidental smoke" is its Elvis ad.

The entire 64-page "ETS Issue Language Exploratory" document can be seen at http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/zjc81f00

Text of an ad run by the Tobacco Institute