Restrictions
In June 1967, the US Federal Communications Commission ruled that programmes broadcast on a television station which discussed smoking and health were insufficient to offset the effects of paid advertisements that were broadcast for five to ten minutes each day. In April 1970, the US Congress passed the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act banning the advertising of cigarettes on television and radio starting on 2 January 1971.The Tobacco Advertising Prohibition Act 1992 expressly prohibited almost all forms of Tobacco advertising in Australia, including the sponsorship of sporting or other cultural events by cigarette brands. All tobacco advertising and sponsorship on television has been banned within the European Union since 1991 under the Television Without Frontiers Directive (1989). This ban was extended by the Tobacco Advertising Directive, which took effect in July 2005 to cover other forms of media such as the internet, print media, and radio. The directive does not include advertising in cinemas and on billboards or using merchandising – or tobacco sponsorship of cultural and sporting events which are purely local, with participants coming from only one Member State as these fall outside the jurisdiction of the European Commission. However, most member states have transposed the directive with national laws that are wider in scope than the directive and cover local advertising. A 2008 European Commission report concluded that the directive had been successfully transposed into national law in all EU member states, and that these laws were well implemented.Some countries also impose legal requirements on the packaging of tobacco products.
Beginning in December 1952, the magazine Readers Digest published "Cancer by the Carton", a series of articles that linked smoking with lung cancer.In 1954, the British Doctors Study, a prospective study of some 40 thousand doctors for about 2.5 years, confirmed the suggestion, based on which the government issued advice that smoking and lung cancer rates were related. In January 1964, the United States Surgeon Generals Report on Smoking and Health likewise began suggesting the relationship between smoking and cancer.As scientific evidence mounted in the 1980s, tobacco companies claimed contributory negligence as the adverse health effects were previously unknown or lacked substantial credibility. Health authorities sided with these claims up until 1998, from which they reversed their position. The Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, originally between the four largest US tobacco companies and the Attorneys General of 46 states, restricted certain types of tobacco advertisement and required payments for health compensation; which later amounted to the largest civil settlement in United States history.Social campaigns have been instituted in many places to discourage smoking, such as Canadas National Non-Smoking Week. From 1965 to 2006, rates of smoking in the United States declined from 42% to 20.8%. The majority of those who quit were professional, affluent men. Although the per-capita number of smokers decreased, the average number of cigarettes consumed per person per day increased from 22 in 1954 to 30 in 1978. This paradoxical event suggests that those who quit smoked less, while those who continued to smoke moved to smoke more light cigarettes.