The Tobacco Harvest

In the 1980’s, so successful is cigarette advertising to women in Britain that despite acknowledged health-risk factors, smoking among women has dropped by only a fifth in the past 15 years, compared with a drop of one third for men.a As a result, “lung cancer is now killing nearly as many women as breast cancer, and more and more women are suffering from ‘male’ diseases of the heart and chest,” reports London’s The Sunday Times.

But in Britain, where cigarette manufacturers trade in a “struggling market,” the hard sell continues in printed form, particularly in women’s magazines. Why there? Simply because “women form an extremely lucrative source of income,” observes The Sunday Times. When an advertiser is employed to sell a commodity, morality does not necessarily come into it.