How Thanksgiving 1966 Saved Millions of Lives

WASHINGTON - Nov. 28, 2024 - PRLog -- Thanksgiving is a day when Americans give thanks for many different things, but Thanksgiving of 1966 was especially important.

It led to hundreds of millions of dollars worth of anti-smoking messages on radio and TV which saved millions of lives by persuading smokers to quit.

The story is told in:
The Man Behind The Ban On Cigarette Commercials (https://banzhaf.net/about/ManBehindTheBanReaders%20Digest.pdf)
in THE READER'S DIGEST."  It begins this way:

"ON THANKSGIVING Day, 1966, a 26 year old New Yorker settled down before his television set to watch a professional football game. The network interrupted to carry a commercial which pictured handsome, rugged men confidently smoking cigarettes in an outdoor western setting.  to John F. Banzhaf III, it was the final outrage. Citing the commission's "fairness doctrine," which requires broadcasters to present all sides of controversial subjects, he argued . . ."

that the Fairness Doctrine should be applied to cigarette commercials.  The FCC agreed with him, and said that for every three cigarette commercials they ran, radio and TV stations had to provide free broadcast time for at least one anti-smoking message.

The result was an unprecedented barrage of anti-smoking messages which more than overcame the paid advertising for this deadly product.  These warnings about the dangers of smoking persuaded millions of smokers to quit, eventually savings hundreds of billions of dollars in health care costs, and causing the first ever decline in U.S. per capita cigarette consumption.

Indeed, another article written at the time said that young Banzhaf had probably saved more lives than any physician alive; an accolade which led this just-minted lawyer to successfully defend the decision in court against the industry's highly paid lawyers.

After just a few years of seeing their market shrink because of the Banzhaf anti-smoking commercials, the major tobacco companies ran crying to Congress to ask it to ban cigarette commercials so that broadcasters would stop providing free time for these very effective anti-smoking messages.  Ads for cigarettes disappeared from the nation's airwaves in a puff of smoke beginning on January 2, 1971."

Banzhaf went on to become a law professor who began the nonsmokers' rights movement which led to smoking bans around the world, and to the 50% health insurance surcharge on smokers under Obamacare.

He went on to help win the biggest and most important legal settlement ever. It banned cigarette billboards and the use of cartoon characters such as "Joe Camel" to advertise cigarettes, and led to Banzhaf being called "a Driving Force Behind the Lawsuits That Have Cost Tobacco Companies Billions of Dollars," and "The Law Professor Who Masterminded Litigation Against the Tobacco Industry."

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