Americans should be aware of the effects of advertising on their habits and lifestyles, and the advertising industry should exercise more responsibility in cigarette ads, said a University of British Columbia advertising professor last night.

Richard W. Pollay spoke on "Getting Away with Murder: The American Experience with Cigarette Advertising" in the HUB Auditorium at the second annual Donald Davis Lecture Series devoted to ethics and business.

"I think we should quit fooling ourselves that advertising is of no importance," he said. "It does provide a cloak of respectability. It does provide a sense of legitimacy."

Pollay said advertising inhibits the media and provides images of health that undermine the efforts of health education.

"It does help recruit a million adolescents a year. And there has been no evidence of any self-regulation," Pollay said.

Pollay equated cigarette advertising techniques with drug pushing.

"We do not perceive cigarette marketing as tantamount to drug pushing and yet in reality it is promoting the consumption of an addictive drug," Pollay said.

The Surgeon General's 1989 Report estimated the U.S. death toll in 1989 from cigarette addiction to be 390,000, Pollay said, which is nine times the number of deaths that resulted from traffic accidents during the same year. He also said that of all drug deaths, cigarette smoking causes over 80 percent of the deaths.

In a slide show depicting cigarette ads throughout history, Pollay showed the progression of the image of cigarette smoking. From 1950s ads that showed rebellion, new independence for women and self-reliant, independent men, Pollay moved to today's ads that refrain from showing smoke and concentrate on youthful people.

Everyone thinks that they are too sophisticated to let advertising influence them, but it does, he said.

"It's what I call the myth of personal immunity," he said.

Pollay also discussed the power of advertising on the media. Although reports of cigarette-linked cancer were released as early as 1952, he said, few magazines would publish them because so much of the revenue came from cigarette companies.

Chris Toigo (junior-English) agreed with Pollay.

"I think advertising ethics is a contradiction in terms. I definitely agree with him that the tobacco industry and the money they spend effects the content of magazines.