Question: When tobacco was first introduced, why did people think it was good for them?

Nathan Langford answered on 3 Jul 2012:

Hi Hannah,

As Allan said, smoking tobacco has been around for a long, long time. But just before the 20th century, there were two important technological steps which led to the enormous expansion of the modern form of cigarette. Firstly, someone invented a machine that could roll cigarettes about 50 times as fast as a person. Secondly, the invention of the colour lithograph allowed manufacturers to make attractive, colourful packaging for the cigarettes that could also be used to advertise them. That is when the advertising boom kicked off for cigarettes, and as radio and TV became more common during the 20th century, this gave tobacco companies the ultimate tool to advertise with.

In many ways, I don’t think it was really that people thought smoking was good for them. It was all about the advertising. Advertising has been strongly linked with the power and success of the tobacco industry. They made sure that they linked their products with famous sports stars, movie stars and politicians. They made smoking a status symbol – a must-have sign for a happy and successful life. If you watch any of the old TV ads about smoking, they’re all pictures of perfect couples and perfect families in perfect lives where everyone smiles and everyone is having fun. And they even did things like distributing “collector cards” with the cigarette packets to encourage people to buy them.

Cigarettes were also provided to soldiers as rations during wars. For example, the tobacco companies provided them to US soldiers during World War II – apparently, many, many soldiers returned from the war with serious nicotine addictions… and because of the terrible experiences they’d been through, no doubt they were a lot more vulnerable to the addiction and its effects.

But you are certainly right that there have been theories around that smoking is good for you. For example, in the early 20th century, tobacco companies started marketing cigarettes as cures for all sorts of conditions, from weight loss to asthma. For example, did you know that women were sometimes advised to smoke while they were pregnant, because it made them give birth to smaller babies? How crazy is that! They started advertising their brands using doctors (“the brand more doctors smoke”), etc.

Then, when evidence started coming out during the 1950s linking cigarettes to lung cancer, tobacco companies started making “filter cigarettes”, claiming they were safe. And they started aiming their advertising at children and younger people. Then, in 1964, the US Surgeon General released a comprehensive report on the hazards of smoking. In the US, this was when the government first started to restrict tobacco advertising. I don’t know when this started happening elsewhere. As I understand it, the evidence now suggests that tobacco companies knew about the dangers of smoking from quite early on… and they kept on denying right up until recently. It’s one of the big conspiracy stories of our time.

So the moral of this story is: be very careful about what you believe from advertising. Always be skeptical, always be critical – and always try to be aware of yourself to think about whether advertisers are trying to manipulate you in some way.

I believe that the growth of the marketing industry is one of the most influential and defining factors of our time. How much do you want to be influenced by advertising?

Cheers,
Nathan.