NICOTINE IS AN OLD RD FOE

By 1952, Americans were smoking approximately 3.94 trillion cigarettes annually, or 2,500 for every man, woman, and child. It’s a shocking number today—2.5 times what adults burn through now—but it shocked a few people in the smoke-filled 1950s too. One of the most affected was Dewitt Wallace, cofounder of Reader’s Digest. Wallace was himself a two-packa-day smoker, but he had long worried about the media’s luring people into unhealthy behaviors. He refused to run advertisements that profited from vices. “I don’t want to feel that we are taking an active part in introducing millions of people to smoking and drinking,” said Wallace. He also used the magazine as a kind of antitobacco bullhorn. Way back in 1944, RD published “Are You a Man or a Smokestack?” by a writer who’d quit smoking and wanted to share his secrets. In 1952, the magazine ran “Cancer by the Carton,” a reprint from the Christian Herald. “What gives grave concern to publichealth leaders,” the story said, “is that the increase in lung cancer mortality shows a suspicious parallel to the enormous increase in cigarette consumption.” The famous surgeon general’s report that first warned about the dangers of smoking wouldn’t appear until 1964, but “Cancer by the Carton” made an enormous impact. This single story, published in the most-read magazine in the world, is widely credited with slowing smoking rates—and, ironically, giving rise to filtered cigarettes as a potentially “safe” alternative. Still, RD never gave up the fight, especially when it came to protecting young people. A 1963 story, “... And Slow Death,” was a particularly searing indictment of teen smoking and the tobacco industry— and of magazines that helped “harvest a larger crop of victims” by taking cigarette ads. The next year, the American Cancer Society awarded the magazine its annual citation for distinguished service. Also that year: The surgeon general himself, Luther Terry, quit smoking. The antismoking campaign was thick in the air, and Reader’s Digest led the way.