Ye Olde Mind-Body Problem

In accordance with the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act, all advertisements for tobacco products in the United States must include one of these four Surgeon General’s warning labels:

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, and May Complicate Pregnancy.

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health.

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Cigarette Smoke Contains Carbon Monoxide.

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Smoking by Pregnant Women May Result in Fetal Injury, Premature Birth, and Low Birth Weight.

All four warnings must be used with equal frequency, but tobacco companies can choose when to use each warning. In compliance with the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act, advertisements feature each of the four Surgeon General’s warnings with the same frequency—about 25 percent each. However, in the study sample of 52 ads in eighteen magazines, the warning to pregnant women occurs far more often in the ads in men’s magazines (Sports Illustrated, Esquire, GQ), 53 percent of the time, while this same warning occurs in only 20 percent of the ads in women’s magazines (Mademoiselle, McCall’s, Ms., Vogue, Working Woman).

The warning that cigarette smoke contains carbon monoxide occurs in 37 percent of the ads in women’s magazines but occurs in none of the ads in men’s magazines. The advertisements featuring the carbon monoxide warning usually feature youthful, carefree, and less serious-appearing women. Carbon monoxide is a poisonous gas that interferes with the body’s oxygen-carrying mechanisms; advertisers apparently assume that women, especially young women, are less apt than men to know this fact.

The magazine with the most cigarette advertisements, Mademoiselle, has a young, female audience. Eighty-eight percent of smokers start before age 20, and the only group that smokes more now than it did 20 years ago is adolescent girls.

Tobacco companies appear to manipulate the use of the Surgeon General’s warning to render them as ineffective as possible, mitigating the purpose of the warning by often using the warning they presume the reader is most likely to ignore.

Whenever I reread this précis for a poli sci paper Laurie wrote eons ago, I never fail to be moved by her belief/hope that the actions human beings take might be based to any degree whatsoever on rational thought. All the evidence points to the fact that they’re not (cf. anorexia). My father being, of course, the exception: he took up pipe smoking in the early ’50s (in photo-album pictures from that period he looks improbably dignified), but he gave it up immediately after realizing, during a tennis match, that it was cutting down on his wind.