My Smoking Confessional
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Sixty years ago I was the editor of the daily newspaper at college, and one memorable day in September, plotting the year’s business, we got word that the two big tobacco companies, R.J Reynolds and Philip Morris, were suspending all their ads in the college press. The news was greeted with dismay both by editors who smoked — “We’ll just die from something else,” they harrumphed — and by those who did not, equally affected by this big hole in the advertising budget. Sixty years!
Pffft! This past June, a member of Congress from California and 40 of her colleagues wrote to the publishers of several magazines protesting their publication of ads for a new variety of Camel cigarette.
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