Calling Dr. Killjoy

The major television networks coolly tuned out Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare in 1966. But the medical fellow they really wanted to get rid of--and could not --is a real-life Dr. Killjoy by the name of Donald Frederickson. Dr. Frederickson is a 34-year-old public-health official who began campaigning two years ago to change the TV image of cigarettes. Among his proposals: "admired characters" like Johnny Carson should stop smoking on camera, and TV series heroes should decline cigarettes offered them during climactic scenes. That, said Frederickson, might help dissuade the 4,000 young Americans who begin smoking every day.

Logging the Hours. There is mounting pressure from Washington against tobacco commercials, and television seems to be listening. The TV industry, which carried $208 million in tobacco advertising last year, now carries about one antismoking commercial for every three cigarette spots. Both NBC and ABC have increased the number of antismoking commercials in prime time, while two broadcast station owners --Post-Newsweek and Group W--have dropped cigarette advertising altogether.* Dr. Frederickson, however, still considers that inadequate. Last December he went on the air himself in a series of five 30-minute programs on WOR-TV, a Manhattan independent, called How to Stop Smoking.

The five Sunday-morning segments proved such a hit that last week they began rerunning in prime time. Six other cities--San Diego, Los Angeles, Boston, Hartford, Cleveland and Garden City, L.I.--have also signed up for the series, as have five New York State educational stations.

On the show, skillfully produced by WOR's Stanley Friedman, Frederickson turns out to be as telegenic as Kildare or Casey. Greeting home viewers and a studio panel of nine with a cheery "Hello, smokers," he does not order them to stop smoking in the first program. As a matter of fact, he tells them to keep it up. The catch: they must wrap a sheet of paper and two rubber bands around their cigarette packs to make taking out a cigarette complicated. Frederickson suggests that whenever his listeners unwrap, they also log the hour, their activity and mood at the time and just how desperately they needed that drag (on a one-to-five scale).

The next four shows in the series, taped last spring at weekly intervals, resemble Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Returning members of the studio audience discuss their withdrawal symptoms ("It was a bath of fire," moaned one man) and other problems (weight gain, anxiety). They also hear testimonials from ex-smokers. In addition, to make his message more visual and urgent, Frederickson projects film of cancer-riddled lungs or of an emphysema patient who does not have enough breath to blow out a match. From time to time, a Laugh-In-style "crawl" message crosses the bottom of the TV screen with a variety of warnings, such as "41% of heavy smokers die before 65."

Disbanding the Clinics. By the final show, taped last June, most of the studio panel said that they had kicked the habit. Since then, one-third of the original group has admitted to backsliding.

Frederickson concedes that neither a few TV sessions nor present techniques guarantee success. He stopped smoking himself at medical school (Cornell '61) and became an authority in the field as director of the New York City Smoking Withdrawal Clinic in 1967. But the nighttime free clinics he ran drew so many thousands that the budget-pinched health department had to disband them. Frederickson thinks that the only solution is TV seminars. He believes that stations have a "public responsibility" to provide the air time, and that the ratings will take care of themselves. According to a U.S. Public Health Service survey, says Dr. Frederickson, some 18 million Americans are aching to break the cigarette habit.

WOR-TV's idea and Frederickson may have become habit-forming: National Educational Television is currently preparing a similar series for the fall, and the Triangle Stations group is getting ready to telecast five-minute segments in a series called How to Quit Smoking. The program supervisor is former Surgeon General Luther L. Terry, who issued the 1964 Public Health Service report indicting cigarettes.

*Last week the Boston Globe announced that it "will cease publication of cigarette advertising, because accumulated medical evidence has indicated that cigarette smoking is hazardous to health."

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