Watching the above reel of TV cigarette commercials from the early 1960s, one might get the impression that the product being peddled wasn’t really a cigarette, but more of a combination of perfume, cold tossed mediterranean salad, herb-infused lemonade and a good massage. Words like ‘flavorful’ and ‘relaxing’ and ‘rich’ and ‘fragrant’ and ‘mellow’ litter these handsomely shot ads. But let’s get real: I’m pretty sure that all present and past smokers will attest to the fact that not one of them is descriptive in any way of a cigarette. As a former smoker, I can tell you that cigarettes have no taste to speak of, burn your throat, make you nervous and jittery (while somehow giving you the illusion of relaxing you since the rapidly dwindling supply of nicotine in your bloodstream is being replenished) and tend to dissipate energy and thought process, not enhance it. But in the early 1960s the job of advertisers was to convince addicted smokers that they were not, in fact, addicts in search of a poisonous fix but connoissiuers of a very exotic product. Certain smokes are ‘distinctive’ ones. Others are ‘sophisticated’. Since these ads date back to the era before cancer was invented, no warnings were put in place to dampen the spirits of those who smoked. So is it possible that without the knowledge of smoking’s devastating effects, people really did think they were ‘delicious’, ‘flavorful’, ‘refreshing’ etc? Hard to tell from this distance. Most people who smoked in the early 1960s are by now either dead or knee-deep in dementia. Every so often you’ll run into a person in their 80s smoking a cigarette and appearing to enjoy it. Despite my better instincts I always find myself admiring their stubbornness and strong genes and wonder if they think that what they’re smoking tastes delicious…