An advertisement from 1930 asserts that 20,679 physicians say that Lucky Strike cigarettes are less irritating.
Girls said that plain-pack cigarettes were less likely to help them stay thin.
Philip Morris USA, ordered to pay $10.1 billion for misleading Illinois smokers into believing light cigarettes are less harmful than regular ones, appealed the verdict yesterday to the Illinois Supreme Court.
A class-action suit brought by 1.1m smokers accused the tobacco giant of deceiving consumers into thinking that "light" cigarettes were less harmful than regular ones.
They proposed this on the theory that the promotion of low-tar-and-nicotine cigarettes was less objectionable to opponents of cigarette advertising than the promotion of the high-tar-and-nicotine variety.
The plaintiffs, more than a million smokers, convinced the judge that despite federally mandated warnings, they had been fraudulently misled by Philip Morris into believing that light and low-tar cigarettes were less harmful.
In the suit, the plaintiffs claimed that the tobacco giants subsidiary, Phillip Morris USA, defrauded customers by suggesting that Light brand cigarettes were less harmful than their full-flavor counterparts.
In more than 40 countries, cigarette companies are now prevented from using terms like "mild", "light" and "low-tar" since these perpetuate a common misunderstanding among smokers that such cigarettes are less harmful.
The underlying claim made by the government is that over a 50-year period the tobacco industry has engaged in a campaign of fraud, "material misrepresentations, half-truths, deception and lies that continue to this day," all to minimize the health effects of smoking and to suggest that so-called light cigarettes are less harmful than they actually are.
Smoking cigarettes was less popular, with only 18.7% of the kids reporting they had ever smoked; 5.7% currently.
