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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