Smoke Signals: Global-warming activists can learn from the anti-smoking campaign

Smoke Signals: Global-warming activists can learn from the anti-smoking campaign
By Audrey Schulman

Twenty years ago, it seemed that virtually everyone smoked. You couldn't sit in a restaurant for five minutes without stinking of cigarettes for hours. Now, in state after state, even biker bars are going smoke-free.

Clearly, there's been a dramatic shift in the public's attitude toward smoking -- but it hasn't been an intellectual shift. Since the 1964 Surgeon General's report on the dangers of smoking, anyone tapping a cigarette out of a pack knew the possible health consequences. Still, through the combined magic of advertising and denial, for years the strongest image in many people's minds as they puffed away was Faye Dunaway romantically chain-smoking.

Over the past two decades, that image has changed. When a person fingers a cigarette today, she's more likely to envision a dying Yul Brynner denouncing smoking, or lying tobacco execs, or the Marlboro Man rasping for breath through a chest tube.

What's changed are the emotional images associated with smoking, the ones anti-tobacco activists worked so hard to publicize.

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http://www.grist.org/comments/soapbox/2004/02/03/smoke/



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