KFOG's Peter Finch presented this on his weekly Fog Files. It's an exhibit of cigarette advertising around the time the tobacco companies started to get wind of medical problems. In a stroke of genius, they used the now tired line of "More doctors smoke X brand..." Of course, physicians were not allowed to advertise at all or they'd lose their license, so the "doctors" were straight out of central casting, as they are for most of the pharmaceutical adverts currently on tv (except the artificial heart guy on Lipitor). This was before the time when the AMA or other prestigious medical organizations even considered suing the tobacco companies, and before lung cancer, emphysema, COPD, heart attacks, and all those other nasty diseases were definitively linked to smoking.
Among the first cancer victims of smoking: Sigmund Freud (mouth cancer) and Ulysses Grant. I selected the John Wayne ad as he got lung cancer, of course, and had one of his lungs removed. He went on to live quite a while after that, and died of lung and stomach cancer in 1979. But then, he was exposed to fallout from nuclear testing in Nevada during the filming of one of Howard Hughes' movies, so perhaps there was more to the cancer thing than just smoking.
The exhibit is from Stanford physician Robert K. Jackler's personal collection, which he started when his mother got lung cancer.
My sister would be perfect for an ad, plus, she's in advertising. She's tiny and has a stressful job, and her 30-year old husband is waiting for a heart transplant. SHE SMOKES LIKE A TRAIN. She's been smoking since she was 13. Her response to my diagnosis (me, the nonsmoker in the family) was to smoke 5 cigarettes in a row. She loves to smoke, especially while she drinks. Her evening routine consists of drinking half a bottle of wine while she smokes (out in the driveway) and talks on the phone. She calls me every night, in various stages of drunkenness, and I hear her inhale at regular intervals.
Her husband's cardiologist has admonished her to stop smoking, as her husband can't be exposed to the chemical cloud that smokers carry. She frets about this, as she feels she'll really need to drink, and when she drinks she likes to smoke, ergo she may need to give up drinking. Here is a person planning to be miserable. With the help of other smokers in her office who state she's grouchy when she tries to quit, she'll never be successful.
Only one of eight smokers get lung cancer. The other seven get other stuff, like the pulmonary diseases I mentioned, heart attacks, other types of cancer (yes, it contributes greatly to colon and bladder cancer), etc. But, as luck would have it, she'll live to be 80. And me, miss health-conscious former athlete, will not make it 10 years. I shouldn't jinx myself though. I still have plenty of fight left.
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KFOG's Peter Finch here.