Such myth-making is always deceptive and often harmful to the consumer. In the case of cigarette advertising, however, it can be truly dangerous. It further convinces cigarette smokers, young people, and the entire society that this drug is benevolent and essential to one's happiness and success. It creates in our society a climate of denial. Most important of all, tobacco advertising spuriously links the use of tobacco with precisely those attributes and qualities in life such things as happiness, wealth, prestige, sophistication, success, maturity, athletic ability, virility, creativity, sexual satisfaction, and others that the habitual use of drugs usually diminishes and destroys.
Cigarettes remain among the most heavily advertised products in the nation.
The tobacco industry spends over two and a half billion tax-deductible dollars a year in the US alone on advertising and promotion of its products. At the same time, the industry ironically attempts to deny that this advertising has any effect on consumers. They insist that they do not target nonsmokers or young people and that the whole point of all that advertising is simply to get smokers to switch brands. In fact, only 10 percent of the nation's 55 million smokers switch brands in a given year. It is obvious that the tobacco industry needs to recruit aggressively new smokers to replace those who die or quit.