Like Father, Like Son

I could well have been that freckle-faced little boy on the sign handing a carton of Chesterfield cigarettes to his dad.  My father, Leon Blum, MD, who had been a high school athlete, took up smoking Chesterfields as a medical student. Doubtless as a result of his ever-present cigarette, he suffered a heart attack before he was 50 and died at 60.

Throughout the 20th century and to the present day, millions of fathers have succumbed to heart disease, emphysema, and lung cancer due to smoking, even as the tobacco industry denied that smoking could even cause a cough.  Meanwhile, cigarettes were advertised on billboards in almost every sports arena and stadium, as well as day and night on TV and radio until banned from the airwaves by Congress in 1971. For the next 30 years, newspapers and magazines  became the main outlet for cigarette advertising, along with tobacco industry sponsorship of sports and the arts.

Whether in the form of cigarettes, cigars, or spitting tobacco, nicotine is a potent addiction that the tobacco industry has always downplayed. Today the major cigarette manufacturers Philip Morris International (PMI), Altria, and BAT, who claim to have recognized the devastating toll taken by smoking, are recruiting a new generation to the pleasures of nicotine through non-combustible tobacco products under the guise that these vaping devices or electronic cigarettes are much safer. (Safer than what? Fresh air?)  PMI is promoting its transition from cigarettes to e-cigarettes in full-page advertisements in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as through its Foundation for a Smoke-Free World.

We’ve seen the tobacco industry’s going-out-of-business sale many times before, beginning with “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers” by the Tobacco Industry Research Council in 1954, in which cigarette makers pledged to assist “the research effort into all phases of tobacco and health.” The result was an endless race to promote implicit health claims for “low-tar” brands and an endless array of filters that would presumably prevent the inhalation of anything that could cause harm. Philip Morris even pulled all of its Marlboro cigarettes off the shelves in 1994 after traces of cyanide were found in some of the filters. Two months later the cigarettes were back on sale, presumably much safer than before.

Giving your dad a carton of cigarettes for Father’s Day may sound like a sick joke, but for more than half a century after Washington state celebrated the first Father’s Day in 1910, tobacco companies promoted their products as the perfect gift. This exhibition features tobacco advertisements and other ephemera that exploit the bond between father and son and the association of smoking with manliness.

Alan Blum, MD
Director
The University of Alabama Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society
ablum@ua.edu