Here’s a camel Ad 1963 that encourages you to smoke after every dish. A crisp Waldorf salad and then a blended turkish? Or say, how about some creamy soup and then a fresh Camel to ease digestion? The possibilities are endless!

The Reader’s Digest piece that brought the whole lung cancer smoking causation to the fore, the one that Don and Lucky Strike folks fretted about in the pilot, came out about 4 years before the above pictured ad. So even after the influential article, the paradigm of ‘smoke because it’s good for you!’ hadn’t quite shifted.

Some background on the idea of smoking being bad for you:

In 1954, an organization called the TIRC (Tobacco Industry Research Committee) was formed to investigate “the growing health scare” related to smoking. They published a piece that ran in 43 newspapers entitled ”A Frank Message to Cigarette Smokers”, part of which stated:

“RECENT REPORTS on experiments with mice have given wide publicity to a theory that cigarette smoking is in some way linked with lung cancer in human beings.

Although conducted by doctors of professional standing, these experiments are not regarded as conclusive in the field of cancer research. However, we do not believe results are inconclusive, should be disregarded or lightly dismissed. At the same time, we feel it is in the public interest to call attention to the fact that eminent doctors and research scientists have publicly questioned the claimed significance of these experiments.

In 1957, the Surgeon General declared there to be a link between smoking and cancer, stating, “It is clear that there is an increasing and consistent body of evidence that excessive cigarette smoking is one of the causative factors in lung cancer.” Many medical journals stop carrying advertisements for cigarettes at this time.

So there was indeed an awareness that smoking was not, per se, good for you anymore, but attitudes would take a while to change.

• image via Footnotes Lifeblood Raza Syed