US tobacco companies to run ads in newspapers and on television correcting years of lies about the 'benefits' of smoking

US tobacco companies have been ordered to run television and newspapers advertisements to correct lies they told over the course of the 20th century.

The 'corrective statements' are part of a 2006 judgment in which a US court found that tobacco manufacturers conspired to deceive the American public about the drawbacks of smoking and cigarettes.

The court has ordered the ads to be paid for by tobacco companies Lorillard Inc, Philip Morris USA, RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company and Altria Group.

According to the order, the ads will run in more than 50 newspapers and on major broadcasting networks. The companies must also buy full-page ads in the first section of each Sunday newspaper, and 260 television ads will be run for one year.

In 2015, $8.9billion was spent on advertising and promotion of cigarettes and smokeless tobacco combined.

However, tobacco companies will not have publish corrections online or on social media, mediums where four in 10 American now regularly get their news.

Experts say this was a delay tactic due to appeals over the original judgment.

'The tobacco companies' basic strategy for everything, whether it's science or regulation or litigation, is delay,' Stan Glantz, an expert on tobacco company strategy at the University of California, San Francisco, told The Guardian.

'They have used a lot of arguing about what in terms of the real world are trivial issues, to delay having to make these statements for 11 years – but it is what the tobacco companies do.

'The problem is the technology has moved on, and the statements are not in social media because it didn't really exist back then. But better late than never.'

The companies were first ordered to run the ads in 2006 by US district judge Gladys Kessler, who found that tobacco firms had caused 'a staggering number of deaths per year, an immeasurable amount of human suffering and economic loss, and a profound burden on our national health care system'.

Many of these deaths were found to be because of detrimental ad campaigns such as companies that tried to use 'physician endorsements' to encourage consumers to buy their products.

Camel began an ad campaign in the 1940s alleging that doctors gravitate towards Camel products, and Lucky Strike purported that '20,679 physicians' said that Luckies were less harmful to the consumer's throat than other cigarettes.

In the early 1930s, Lucky Strike also marketed their cigarettes to women as an appetite suppressant with the slogan: ''Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet'.

According to the CDC, more than 16 million Americans are living with a disease caused by smoking and cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the US.

(Daily Mail)