Originally published at IntellectualCapital.com
By K. Daniel Glover

With the midnight hour fast approaching, a man sat in front of his television set alone. He wept as the quartet of cowboys, a symbol of masculinity to all the men who had admired them for years, faded off his screen. He knew he would never see them again, and he had Congress to thank for the start of this new era on Jan. 2, 1971.

The man — whose story is told by Pulitzer-prize winning author Richard Kluger in his 1996 history of the tobacco industry, “Ashes to Ashes” — was Jack Landry, once a top advertising official at tobacco giant Philip Morris. And the new era that continues to this day, the one that moved Landry to tears, is one that relegated the Marlboro Man to the pages of magazines and newspapers and bucked him off the airwaves.

The ongoing war against tobacco advertising, the latest salvo being a proposed settlement between government and the industry, has its roots in a battle that began in the mid-1960s and achieved its greatest regulatory milestone 27 years ago this month: the enactment of a law that banned the advertising of cigarettes on television and radio.

Making a case for an advertising ban
The Surgeon General’s office fired the first shot in 1964, when it issued a groundbreaking report on the link between smoking and diseases such as lung cancer, chronic bronchitis, emphysema and coronary artery disease. That report spurred congressional action. By mid-1965, President Lyndon Johnson had signed into law the first federal anti-smoking legislation, a law that required this warning on the labels of all cigarette packages: “Caution: Cigarette Smoking May be Hazardous to Your Health.”

By that time, the tobacco industry had earned a reputation as a less-than-honest, albeit effective, advertiser, wrongly boasting of the positive health effects of its products. The Federal Trade Commission sought to eliminate the most outrageous advertising claims, but pro-tobacco forces in Congress had limited the FTC’s powers. For example, the1965 cigarette labeling law contained language that prohibited local, state and federal agencies from requiring the law’s new health warning in cigarette advertisements.

Cigarette makers tried to blunt criticism of their advertisements by promising to police themselves. They announced the creation of a Cigarette Advertising Code in 1964 to deflect charges that companies were targeting the nation’s youth as future smokers, and the National Association of Broadcasters launched its own Advertising Code Authority. But tobacco foes soon exposed those codes for what they were — efforts at self-protection, not the much-ballyhooed self-regulation.
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