FROM Red Square to Times Square, from the computer trains of Tokyo to the Australian outback, the world’s smokers are on the defensive.
The warnings are everywhere on cigarette packets, billboards, and on television “Caution: Smoking Can Be Hazardous to Your Health”. And if smokers don’t get the message, there are laws to keep them from lighting up.
You can’t book a seat in the smoking section on domestic flights in the Soviet Union or Australia. There are none, even on the nine hour trip from Moscow to the Siberian city of Khabarovsk or the six hour hop from Sydney to Perth,
Moscow’s Red Square is perhaps the only outdoor smokeless zone in the world, where smoking is banned to show respect to Lenin, whose embalmed body lies in a Mausoleum there.
In the United States, the Los Angeles suburb of Beverly Hills has passed an ordinance banning smoking from all restaurants and most public areas. Smoking bans have been instituted in San Francisco and will go into effect in New York.
But despite curbs on smoking in the United States government health warnings, bans on some flights and in government offices, no television advertising exports of American blend cigarettes have ever been higher.
About 100 billion U.S. cigarettes were sold abroad last year, finding a two billion dollar market in Japan, Taiwan, Greece and South Africa, among other countries.
Article extracted from this publication >> January 29, 1988
