How times change

I’ve been listening to a faboo collection of 1952 Dragnet radio shows on my daily commute. More about that some other time (and about my general fascination with Dragnet). Instead, what fascinates me are the ads …

Dragnet was sponsored by Chesterfield, and among various other tag phrases, such as “Much Milder!” there was, for the 1952 radio audience, great news: science proved that smoking was safe (or, at least, not bad for you, but it was couched as “scientific support for smoking”).

Chesterfield — rather, a “respected” consulting organization hired a medical specialist and his team to monitor a set of smokers, folks who’d smoked an average of 10 years, and who smoked their “normal” number of cigarettes daily during the study, somewhere between “10 and 40.” The smokers were given Chesterfields, of course, and, at the end of the six months, the specialist, having examined and X-Rayed the folks from the neck up, reported (as voiced by a bold baritone in the radio ads):

“It is my opinion that the ears, nose, throat and accessory organs of all participating subjects examined by me were not adversely affected in the six-month’s period by smoking the cigarettes provided.”

“Of course, we missed the various spots on their lungs — or, at least, we decided it just wasn’t worth mentioning …”

Over and over the ad runs in each episode, repeating or summarizing that finding, and further restated by Jack Webb (who died of a heart attack in 1982) in that cool, measured, just-the-facts-ma’am voice of his. It’s funny, in that kind of Try Not To Think About People Hearing That And Using It As An Excuse To Start Or Continue Smoking sort of way.