By Elisabeth Rosenthal I still remember exactly where I was sitting decades ago, during the short film shown in class: For a few painful minutes, we watched a woman talking mechanically, raspily through a hole in her throat, pausing occasionally to gasp for air.
The public service message: This is what can happen if you smoke. I had nightmares about that ad, which today would most likely be tagged with a trigger warning or deemed unsuitable for children.
But it was supremely effective: I never started smoking and doubt that few if any of my horrified classmates did either. When the government required television and radio stations to give $75 million in free airtime for antismoking ads between 1967 and 1970 — many of them terrifyingly
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