CIGARETTES AND SOCIETY: A GROWING DILEMMA
THERE is no longer much question that cigarette smoking is a hazard to health; the medical evidence is overwhelming. The real debate now centers on what to do about it. That debate involves some fundamental issues, and they affect not only an industry that likes to call itself the nation's oldest--tobacco--but also several other major lines of business, notably advertising and broadcasting. More basically, the issues go to the heart of the concept of freedom at a time when personal freedoms are being expanded.
Should an industry be at liberty to promote a product that 70 million U.S. smokers want, even if it endangers life? What is the responsibility of the cigarette makers to the public? And what restrictive actions, if any, should the Government take against them? These questions are crucial in the growing controversy over cigarette smoking and selling.
A Confrontation
Last week the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee opened hearings aimed at providing some of the answers. Congress will need the answers soon. The Federal Communications Commission has voted 6 to 1 to ban cigarette advertising on radio and television, which it regulates, but it needs congressional approval to enforce such an act. The Federal Trade Commission wants to strengthen the current ineffectual warning on cigarette packs, which now reads
Caution: Cigarette Smoking May Be
Hazardous to Your Health.
If the FCC has its way, the new label will be
Warning: Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Health and May Cause Death from Cancer and Other Diseases.
Both the FTC and the FCC also urge that this warning be appended to all cigarette advertisements and commercials. This week Joseph L. Cullman III, chairman of Philip Morris Inc., will testify for the nine companies that make U.S. cigarettes. He plans to say that, should the mandatory warnings be extended to all ads, the industry will abandon advertising entirely.
Why do critics go after cigarette advertising rather than attempt to outlaw the product itself? In practical terms, any sort of Volstead-style prohibition of cigarettes would be impossible to legislate, and any such legislation impossible to enforce. For all the difficult moral and legal questions involved, the anti-tobacco forces consider a drive on marketing to be the best way to confront the cigarette.
The federal regulatory commissions would have the power to do what they want without congressional approval if Congress had not passed a cigarette-labeling act in 1965, which obliged cigarette companies to put the current warning sign on all packages. As a concession to legislators from the tobacco-growing Southeast, a clause was added that specifically "preempted" for Congress the right to rule on cigarette advertising. That was a lucky stroke for the industry, which has been shielded from further action not only on the part of federal agencies but also by a number of state legislatures where antitobacco bills are now pending. The preemption clause will expire on June 30, however, and Congress must then decide where to go from there.
Opposition to cigarettes has grown appreciably on Capitol Hill since 1965. About the only staunch supporters of the industry left are Congressmen from the big tobacco states, notably the Carolinas, Kentucky and Virginia. Many other Congressmen are worried about the health dangers, and sensitive to the growing movement to protect consumers --a major new trend in American life.
In purely economic terms, the stakes are high. The tobacco industry accounts for 1% of the gross national product, contributes half of its $8 billion annual sales to federal and local taxes and helps to support 85,000 manufacturing workers, 1,200,000 retailers and 700,000 farm families. Still, the question of regulation of cigarettes goes much beyond economics and has, in fact, created a curious liberal-conservative polarity. The conservative Dallas News accuses "the liberals in Washington" of crusading for "censorship, pure and simple." Adds the New York Daily News: "Nuts to you, Big Brother."
The controversy has more than its share of ironies, contradictions and curiosities. The Department of Health, Education and Welfare spends $2,100,000 a year to educate the public against smoking, while the Department of Agriculture annually pays out $1,800,000 in price-support subsidies to tobacco farmers. To enlarge tobacco exports, which contribute about $500 million a year to the U.S. balance of payments, Agriculture also promotes overseas sales. The Public Health Service encourages smokers to use filter cigarettes, but the Federal Trade Commission will not permit cigarette advertising that even faintly suggests that filters are preferable.
A Popular Social Cause
Washington is steadily increasing its efforts to retard the sale of cigarettes in the U.S. with the broadest and most direct campaign ever made against a legally marketable product. The U.S.
Public Health Service releases increasingly damning reports about smoking. U.S. Post Office trucks are covered with anti-cigarette posters (sample: "100,000 Doctors Have Quit Smoking"). The Department of Health, Education and Welfare distributes millions of pamphlets to public schools, warning of the hazards of smoking.
HEW has set up the National Clearinghouse for Smoking and Health, which turns out anti-smoking tracts for civic groups. Money from the "Smokehouse," as staffers call it, has started several local anti-cigarette projects. In Bakersfield, Calif., teen-agers have been given a $52,000 grant and professional help to prepare commercials, posters and bumper stickers (SMOKE, CHOKE, CROAK). The pilot project there has been so successful that it will be repeated in several other cities this fall. The director of the clearinghouse, Dr. Daniel Horn, a pioneer cancer researcher, urges medical men to deliver anti-smoking appeals while they treat patients in their offices. Horn figures that, in less than a minute, doctors and dentsts can recite enough evidence to frighten a smoker.
The campaign against smoking, though directed from Washington, has become a nationwide popular social cause. It has been joined by growing numbers of teachers, businessmen, movie and TV stars and sports heroes. A few television stations have voluntarily dropped cigarette advertising, and some ad agencies--including Ogilvy & Mather and Doyle Dane Bernbach--turn down cigarette business. Among the athletes, Skater Peggy Fleming, Quarterback Bart Starr and Outfielder Carl Yastrzemski star in American Cancer Society ads proclaiming "I don't smoke cigarettes." Doris Day and Lawrence Welk refuse to appear on TV programs sponsored by cigarette companies. Tony Curtis recently became head of a cancer society organization named I.Q. (for "I Quit"), which passes out lapel buttons to people who do so and dispatches public speakers to spread the antismoking message far and wide.
The Children's Crusade
The antismoking campaign has become something of a children's crusade; now it is the youngsters who try to persuade their parents not to smoke. Teenagers and children have been strongly influenced by the American Cancer Society and other private health groups, which send touring displays to schools, showing how lungs are affected by smoking. Most of all, young people have responded to the persuasive antismoking television commercials, which the FCC has ordered all stations to carry. "People used to call their cigarettes 'cancer sticks,' but they never really believed it before," says Dr. Charles Dale, a Chicago pathologist. "Now their kids are bugging them, so they can't even smoke in peace any more."
It is indisputable that Americans are losing some of their taste for smoking. Pollster Louis Harris reports that in the past four years the smoking population has declined from 47% to 42% of those over 21. One reason is that, in the same period, the number of Americans who believe smoking is a "major cause" of lung cancer has risen from 40% to 49%. Harris found that, by a ratio of 5 to 4, Americans favor restrictions on TV and radio ads for cigarettes. Significantly, those who are "most convinced" that cigarettes are dangerous tend to be people under 30. The polls confirm suspicions that smoking is encountering a psychological reversal among the young. Although cigarettes are still a staple of adolescence, they are no longer the props for manliness and sophistication that they once were.
The tobacco industry is suffering. In 1968, cigarette sales declined for the third straight year. The decrease, from 572.6 billion cigarettes in 1967 to 571.7 billion last year, seems minuscule. But it is disturbing to an industry that had been able to count on steady growth be fore the 1964 Surgeon General's report linked smoking to cancer. In 1968, per capita consumption of cigarettes among American adults dropped from 210 packs to 205. Overall industry profits remain high, but only because the tobacco men have been able to step up exports and sales of non-tobacco items.
A minor industry has developed to cater to the millions of people who want to stop smoking cigarettes. Ban-tron, Nikoban and other aids for quitters enjoy brisk sales. "Withdrawal clinics" have sprung up in several cities; they urge people to munch popcorn instead of smoking, emphasize the positive effects of quitting. Paul Newman and his wife Joanne Woodward are among the recent graduates of Sunset Boulevard's "Smoking Control Center," one of several $125 per course habit-breaking outfits that have opened lately in Los Angeles. Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley recently mailed circulars urging 36,000 city employees to attend similar clinics. Despite these efforts, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare estimates that only 45% of the people who want to quit really do so for as long as three weeks--and less than half of those are able to abstain for a full year.
The Anti Ads
For most of its momentum, the crusade against cigarettes is indebted to a regulatory windfall: the antismoking ads that are broadcast free on TV and radio under the FCC's "fairness doctrine." The ten-year-old doctrine, designed to ensure airing of opposing views on controversial issues, had never been applied to the advertising of a product until 1967. Then the FCC ruled that broadcasters must devote "significant" time to antismoking messages, meaning one of them for every three cigarette commercials.
The ads have proved devastating to the industry. They are prepared by the American Cancer Society and other groups, often with volunteer help from top ad agencies, and they usually have more punch than regular commercials. Cigarette ads must pass the industry's self-policing advertising code, which assures a certain blandness by ruling out appeals to youth and suggestions of athletic or social prowess. Often, pro-and anti-ads appear in startling juxtaposition. The American Tobacco Co. sponsors network broadcasts of NBC-TV's Laugh-In, but viewers can get the antismoking side during local station breaks.
The anticommercials themselves are sometimes just the reverse of cigarette ads; the smokers are miserable instead of happy, look stale instead of springtime-fresh, cough instead of smile. By far the most chillingly effective ad is an appeal by Actor William Talman, a longtime three-pack-a-day smoker. Talman, who played the prosecuting attorney in the Perry Mason series, looks gaunt and ill as he appears onscreen with his family. He tells viewers: "I have a family consisting of six kids and a wife whom I adore, and I also have lung cancer, which means that my time with this family I love is so much shorter." He died last August, six weeks after the commercial was taped.
The Power of Just One Man
Tobacco men who are pained by such advertisements can blame one man. He is John F. Banzhaf III, the 28-year-old lawyer who, almost singlehanded, is responsible for all the free air time given to the antismoking messages. It was Banzhafs "citizen's complaint" to the FCC about cigarette ads that prompted the commission to dust off the fairness doctrine. Banzhaf had almost idly come across that "little loophole," as he calls it, while working at a Manhattan law firm. He was astonished at the response from the FCC, which ordered broadcasters to make room for antismoking ads. "All it took was a letter--there were no hearings," says Banzhaf. "Suddenly, I created a $75 million business"--which is what the free air time given to the antismoking messages is worth.
Banzhaf quit his law firm (one of its clients was Philip Morris) and moved to a Washington flat five blocks from the headquarters of the Tobacco Institute, the industry's Washington lobby. He organized a nonprofit foundation called ASH (for Action on Smoking and Health), which monitors radio and TV to see that antismoking ads are shown and distributes information on smoking and health. Bachelor Banzhaf is authorized to draw a salary of $20,000 a year but manages to get by without it, living on his salary as an instructor at George Washington University Law School. He won a court test on the fairness case last fall, and ASH will provide the $25,000 or so that he figures he will need to fight the industry's Supreme Court appeal in the fall.
Prospects for Congress
The immediate task of Congress is to determine what to do when the cigarette-labeling law's pre-emptive clause runs out in June. Congressmen can take any one of three courses:
I) They can extend the present law.
The cigarette industry is lobbying for that because the law would block further action by the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. One measure of the industry's diminished power on Capitol Hill is that the best it can hope for is a continuation of what it fought so adamantly in 1965. In the House of Representatives, 29 Congressmen have sponsored bills to extend the law.
2) They can pass new laws regulating the sale or advertising of cigarettes. Bills calling for more controls have been put forward by 54 sponsors in the House. Most of the bills are similar to a measure sponsored by the leading opponent of cigarettes in the House, California Democrat John Moss. He would toughen the cigarette label and order it into all ads, as the FTC urges, and he would also empower the commission to limit the length of cigarettes. That would probably shorten the future of the new 100-mm. cigarettes, which generally have more tar and nicotine than the king-sized brands.
3) They can simply do nothing. If the labeling law's pre-emptive clause expires, the FCC and the FTC would be free to take almost any action they wish. This possibility particularly excites the critics of cigarettes. No cigarette bills of any kind are pending in the Senate, where sentiment against smoking is even stronger than in the House. Washington's Warren G. Magnuson, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, and Utah's Frank Moss, head of the subcommittee on consumer affairs, promise that no bills will appear.
On the Defensive
The prospects are for a bristling fight in the House, where debate will intensify from now until the end of June. While the outcome is by no means certain, the industry's cause has been damaged by the retirement of some effective friends in Congress, notably Kentucky's Senator Thruston Morton. Nor have tobacco men particularly helped themselves by their response to the issue of smoking and health. The Tobacco Institute refuses to concede that much more than a health "controversy" exists. One reason for the industry's reluctance to concede a link between smoking and disease is its fear of health-hazard liability suits.*
The industry's rather elaborate public relations effort has been something less than smooth. Manhattan's Hill & Knowlton, the world's largest public relations firm, had been tending the industry's image for 15 years, but it quit a few months ago in disagreement over fundamental tactics. Hill & Knowlton had engineered the defensive, low-profile approach, under which the industry minimized its public involvement in the health controversy. That put the firm at odds with some industry chiefs, who thought that it was time for a more aggressive approach in promoting the case for cigarettes.
The tobacco industry's main medical spokesman, Dr. Clarence Cook Little, is an 80-year-old retired biologist who headed the predecessor of the American Cancer Society in the 1930s. As chief of the industry's Council for Tobacco Research since 1954, he has steadfastly maintained that evidence linking smoking and disease consists largely of statistical associations, which cannot "prove" a causal relationship. The tobacco men ridicule the notion that cigarettes alone could be responsible for the two dozen or so diseases with which they have been associated. Much more research, they say, must be done on such factors as air pollution, urbanization and the stressful emotional environment that goes with it. Genetic and behavioral factors may be involved in causing disease, they contend. The Tobacco Institute cites surveys showing that smokers are unusually energetic, marry more often and drink more liquor and black coffee than nonsmokers. Smokers, the Institute concludes, are a "different kind of people" who are perhaps more susceptible to sickness. Supporters of the industry also point out that cigarette smoke has never induced lung cancer in laboratory animals, and that no one knows the mechanism by which smoking causes cancer.
Effects of a Blackout
While that is true, other medical men point out that the statistics have reached an impressive total and continue to grow. They are backed up by laboratory evidence. Experiments, often sponsored by the industry, are continuing with mice, dogs, baboons and other animals. Tests on chickens at Arthur D. Little Co. in Boston have shown that smoke gases temporarily paralyze the tiny, hairlike cilia that normally keep foreign matter clear of the lungs. Other animal research has identified a number of suspected carcinogens in cigarette smoke. At the House hearings last week, U.S. Surgeon General William Stewart repeated his conviction: "I think we have established cause and effect in lung cancer. I don't think there is any question about it."
Scientists have produced evidence that suggests links between cigarette smoking and a variety of other cancers--of the lip, larynx, esophagus and bladder --as well as ailments as varied as peptic ulcers and psoriasis. The U.S. Public Health Service reports that non-smokers on the average live four years longer than two-pack-a-day smokers, and eight years longer than four-pack smokers. Small wonder that last month, when the Tobacco Institute sent out a press release disputing the cigarette opposition, so few newspapers printed the story that the industry had to buy space to run the release in full-page newspaper ads.
Tobacco men raise an economic argument in their defense, correctly pointing out that their industry is a large source of taxes, exports and jobs. Congressmen from tobacco states warn that any actions damaging the industry would force Negro field hands out of jobs and cause them to move North, further swelling the ghettos and relief rolls. The economic problem is real enough, and manufacturers are dealing with it partly by continuing the diversification drive that has brought them into such areas as liquor and clothing, soft drinks and pet food. Reflecting the trend, RJ. Reynolds and American plan to drop "Tobacco" from their corporate names.
Yet the fears of deserted farms, silent factories and mass migrations of workers are exaggerated. Nobody in Congress expects or even calls for an outright ban on the sale of cigarettes; the painful memories of Prohibition are still too clear for anything like that. The current debate focuses not on sales but on advertising and promotion.
What would be the effects of an advertising blackout? Complete or partial bans on cigarette ads are in effect in Britain, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, Rumania, Poland, Russia and Bulgaria--but people continue to smoke. In Britain, the Labor government struck cigarette advertising from TV in 1966, from magazines and newspapers in 1967. Last year, as cigarette sales stubbornly reached new highs, the government abolished games, coupons and other forms of promotion. Britons persist in smoking cigarettes in record numbers and, as usual, right down to their fingertips.
In the U.S., a complete ad ban would wipe out many new brands struggling to reach profitability. On the other hand, an FCC ban on broadcast advertising would save the manufacturers the $225 million or so a year--about three-quarters of their total ad budgets--that they spend on TV and radio. They would invest that money in many ways -- in other advertising media, in such promotions as games and coupons, in acquisitions, and in raising their already generous dividends. Those possibilities have aroused new investor interest in the long-depressed tobacco stocks, and many of them have enjoyed a modest rally over the past few months.
The most immediate effects would certainly be felt by the three major networks and by the nation's independent TV and radio stations. In anticipation of some sort of restriction, CBS has already set up its 1969 budget without including the $59 million -- 11% of total revenues -- that it took in from cigarette commercials last year. President Frank Stanton expects that CBS would eventually find other advertisers to take up the slack, but a blackout would certainly hurt other broadcasters. If the British model held true, tobacco ads might eventually be banned from magazines, which depend on them for about 31% of their income, and from newspapers
A Worrisome Precedent
Even cigarette critics concede that there is no precedent for restricting the marketing of any legal product. The possibility of such a restriction raises sensitive questions about the future of other manufacturers, including gun makers and dairymen (some of whose products are a prime source of cholesterol). Many Congressmen are worried about setting an example that might be a form of censorship, but these same men would be in favor of stricter warning labels, not only on cigarette packages but also in ads. At last week's congressional hearings, Surgeon General Stewart said that he favors more explicit and more broadly applied warning labels instead of a flat ban on broadcast advertising. Even FCC Chairman Rosel Hyde somewhat softened his position and told the committee that he would be willing to forgo the ban if Congress ordered health warnings "in every bit of advertising, in print or radio or television." Of course, that would rule out the need for a ban. As Philip Morris' Cullman indicated, few if any manufacturers would be willing to spend money to advertise that cigarettes may cause "cancer" and "death."
The dilemma that cigarettes pose for society has reached its current state partly because many crusaders are pursuing an oblique and unsatisfactory approach to the problem. A ban on broadcast advertising makes little sense so long as cigarettes remain legal. Such a ban would mean that new and perhaps "safer" brands would be difficult to market.
It can be argued that the present problem would not be so acute if the industry had practiced more self-policing back in the 1950s, when the health question began to be raised in earnest. In fact, since the early health scares, cigarette tar and nicotine content has declined by about 40%, according to the Public Health Service, through the use of filters and milder tobaccos. Research goes on, despite some powerful obstacles. Not the least of them is that "advances" in filter design often make cigarettes so tasteless or tough on the draw that no one will buy them. Such has been the fate of the once-bally-hooed Strickman filter, which is now marketed in Canada and is selling poorly. Overall, however, the industry could have spent much more on developing safer tobaccos, better filters and other means of reducing the dangers of smoking--and it can still do so today.
A wiser alternative might be for Government to take over financing of research, possibly by increasing taxes on cigarettes, and intensify its campaign to educate people on the hazards of smoking. Another constructive step would be for Congress to order that the tar and nicotine content must be listed on all packs and in ads. If the dangers of cigarettes are only half as serious as most medical experts believe, the nation should settle for nothing less than a comprehensive federal drive to find causes and cures.
Government regulation of cigarettes will continue to increase. Philip Elman, one of the Federal Trade Commission's five members, argues that the Government has to take unusual actions because cigarettes pose a unique problem. "Cigarettes cannot be compared with such products as automobiles, butter or candy," he says. "Cigarette smoking is, without question, the greatest single public health problem this nation has ever faced." That may be an extreme view. But there is no denying that so long as men smoke--and that will probably be for a very long time--there will be no simple solution.
*No tobacco company has ever lost such a suit; there are not any known out-of-court settlements. Two years ago a New Orleans jury ordered American to pay $250,000 damages in the case of a heavy smoker who had died of lung cancer in 1962, but two weeks ago American won a reversal on appeal.
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