Part Five

Unfortunately all good things must come to an end, and I started to get a bad reputation.  In 1930 researches in Cologne, Germany made a statistical correlation between cancer and smoking, and in 1938 Dr Raymond of John Hopkins University reported that smokers do not live as long as non-smokers.  The American Cancer Society started gossiping about me trying to warn people about the dangers of smoking, but luckily for me they couldn’t actually find definite evidence to link smoking with cancer.  So this rumour didn’t effect the general public, that was until when in 1952 Readers Digest published ‘Cancer by the Carton’, detailing the dangers of smoking.  This encouraged other horrible reports about me to appear and smokers started to take notice which meant not everyone fancied me anymore, and sales dropped.
In 1954 this guy called Richard Doll published some research about the link between smoking and lung cancer. This research was done on doctors and when it was published doctors everywhere gave up smoking in huge numbers. Oh no the writing was on the wall for me!
1954 was a bad year for me and my family; it was also the year that the first law suit was filed against one of the manufacturers!
The tobacco industry tried to clear my name and make me look good (well of course they did, I can make them money), and in response to what was happening, in 1954 the major tobacco companies formed the Tobacco Industry Research Council to counter all the growing health concerns.  They started to advertise big time the filtered cigarettes and low tar brands saying that they were healthier to smoke, and it worked sales were booming again.
This was starting to become like a boxing match, because there was another big blow to come in the early 1960’s when another committee formed, the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health.  Responding to political pressure and more and more scientific evidence suggesting possible dangers of smoking, a 387-page report in 1964 was produced, titled ‘Smoking and Health’.  The main points highlighting the many dangerous chemicals in cigarette smoke and that the average smoker is 9 times more likely to get lung cancer.