Cigarette Ad Ban Sought

The advisory council to the government’s National Institute on Drug Abuse voted to recommend a ban on all cigarette advertising and promotion, citing smoking’s role in hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. The council voted to write Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret M. Heckler to urge that she support legislation to enact a ban. The U.S. surgeon general estimates that 340,000 Americans die each year from lung cancer and other diseases related to smoking, and says smoking is the single largest cause of cancer in the United States.