Smoking & Advertising

For a huge chunk of the 20th Century, in fact pretty much all of it, cigarettes were advertised. Manly things, such as motorsports, football, boxing and...um...archery, attracted the attention of tobacco companies like cats to an allergic person in order to promote their addictive product.

The first people to say 'no' to cigarette companies advertising was, funnily enough, Nazi Germany. Apparently eager to keep their population alive well into old age. From here there was a huge gap and it wasn't until the late 1960's that the USA started taking the link between cigarettes seriously an advertising began being restricted from 1970, followed quickly by the UK. Other countries very slowly followed suit over the next 30 years and restrictions very, very slowly got tighter. It's not really until the last 15 years that things have drastically changed worldwide, especially in many Asian and surprisingly European countries. Latin America in general seems to have ignored most of this.