It is a well accepted medical fact that the body never—no matter how long you have been smoking— never becomes accustomed to the nicotine and coal tars in cigarette smoke. You could put it this way. The body has a desperate desire and need for drugs when the drug addict attempts "withdrawal." Quite to the contrary, the body actually feels and is better when the smoker stops smoking. The "withdrawal" in smoking is mental, not physical.

"BUT THE  DAMAGE  IS ALREADY DONE"

Again and again I hear people say something that I often said myself: "I've smoked so long that the damage is done. There's no sense quitting now."
None of us really believes that, of course. If we knew that the damage "had been done," and that we were nevertheless alive and kicking, we'd do everything on earth to stay that way. What we're saying, I suppose, is that it can't happen to us.

But suppose you happen to be pessimistic and fatalistic about this. Let's at least, then, set the record straight.
Men who stopped smoking had a lower lung cancer death rate than those who continued to smoke—this was shown by The American Cancer Society in a massive four-year study of 187,783 men, 50 to 70 years of age. The death rate from this cause was halved for men who had stopped smoking for from one to ten years, was even less for those who had stopped for ten years or more.

In a study of coronary artery disease—the disease that is the greatest single cause of death for American men—the death rate for men who had been heavy smokers, and had stopped for more than one year, was also dramatically lower.
The fact of the matter is that all evidence points to a longer, healthier life for the person who quits the tobacco habit.

Even if there weren't dramatic differences in death rates to report, we know that at least we'll all feel a great deal healthier once the cough and hoarseness and chest and abdominal pains and heartburn and indigestion are gone.

And if it weren't for just one thing, you could even stop tomorrow. But that "one thing" is the fact that you—and a hundred million Americans like you—are being subjected to a continuous campaign of what psychiatrists call "suggestion." You are being "conditioned."
You, good friend, are being bombarded hypnotically.

The next time you buy a carton of cigarettes—and it may very well be the last time you buy a carton of cigarettes!—look at the coins in your hand before you turn them over to the cashier.

Some of that money is going to go into advertising. Perhaps as little as three cents. Perhaps, if you're smoking one of the newer brands, as much as forty, fifty, or sixty-five cents. Generally, somewhere between five and fifteen cents.

That sum is your own little contribution toward keeping you smoking. I figured out once that my expenditures for group health insurance weren't too much higher than my contributions toward cigarette advertising; in a tidy sort of way, I was paying for my medical future coming and going.
A cent or two a day from each of us sort of adds up by the end of the year. In 1960, with your help and mine, the tobacco industry was able to spend almost $32,000,000 in newspaper advertising; $26,000,000 in magazine advertising; $76,900,000 on radio; $35,000,-000 on television.

And that doesn't take into consideration the other forms of promotion and advertising for which we—if I may use the expression—cough up our nickels and dimes: those lovely billboards along the highways, the pretty displays at the corner druggist, the engaging car-cards in buses and commuter trains.

The government's massive "Statistical Abstract" tells us that the tobacco industry is a four and a half billion dollar affair, and that its advertising budget in 1960 was 5.4 per cent of this sum. More than $240,000,000, in other words, or about a buck and a quarter per man, woman, teen-ager, child, and infant in these United States.

I'm not really objecting to the size of the industry. I imagine that the tobacco people contribute a lot in taxes; and if things keep going the way they are, we're likely to need a lot of help in building hospitals and things like that.

And I'm not even one of those who wants cigarette packages to be marked "Danger! Poison!" or "Not to be sold to minors under 21" or "Caution: Contains carcinogenic substances, including arsenic."

No, what concerns me is the hypnotic effect of all this advertising.
YOU'RE THE SUBJECT OF PLANNED "MEDDLING"

Psychologists define "suggestion" as "the process by which one person, without argument, command or coercion, directly induces another to act in a given way or to accept a certain belief, opinion, or plan of action."
* By 1962, this figure had mounted to $75,000,000 for television.

There's no conspiracy involved here, but the total effect of tobacco advertising is to "induce" us to smoke more by using what Vance Packard called "insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences" in an effort to "change our thinking habits, our purchasing decisions, our thought processes." Says Packard—the success of these large-scale efforts is "often impressive."

No self-respecting advertising man would call his efforts "hypnosis" or "suggestion," particularly since there is now a lovely phrase—"motivational research" —that can be used instead. But no matter what you call the process, it is summed up nicely in this line from The Wall Street Journal: "The business man's hunt for sales boosters is leading him into a strange wilderness, the subconscious mind." Repeat—"the subconscious mind."