Word: tobacco
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...