Tobacco & Alcohol
Tobacco and alcohol advertisements are extremely popular targets for regulation. Both products can cause death or injury, and both are subject to attack by activist groups opposed to those products. Much debate has surrounded ad regulation proposals for these products.
Many critics have argued that ads cause consumption of these products, and that the harmful impact of these goods can be diminished by curtailing or severely restricting the ads. Others counter that there is no real evidence that the ads cause consumption and that it is the product, not the advertising, that is the danger, so it is the product that should be regulated. Central to this debate is the question of whether the First Amendment would allow such regulation.
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(c) 1997-2009, Jef I. Richards, Texas Advertising, The University of Texas at Austin