This Week in History, 1960: The Sun investigates Sweden’s welfare state, and a reporter quits smoking

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Myers then turned his attention to a Swedish campaign to get people to quit smoking. He noted that the government put a “thin blue line” on every cigarette, “35 millimetres from the butt end.”

“This is a warning from the cancer-conscious Swedish Tobacco Monopoly, that when the cigarette burns down to the blue line, the smoker has absorbed a specified load of nicotine and tar.

“If he smokes it any further, the smoker is warned, he’s increasing the hazard to his health. This makes it very difficult to enjoy his little vice. Who wants to smoke a cigarette that bears a built-in danger sign?”

Myers would know — he smoked 50 cigarettes a day.

“I couldn’t sit through a movie without a cigarette,” he wrote. “I smoked while I worked, while I ate, while I relaxed, almost while I slept.”

Myers decided to try a “Swedish cure” that “enabled 3,000 heavy smokers to turn their backs on the dirty, costly, dangerous cigarette habit.”

The cure involved taking a nicotine substitute called lobeline hydrochloride, which was injected into his arm over a 10-day period.

Myers said his immediate reaction after the first treatment was, “Thank God that’s over, now for a cigarette.”

“But no,” he wrote. “The nurse, smiling but firm, confiscated the two packs of cigarettes I habitually carried.”

Myers admitted he broke down and had a couple of smokes over the next 10 days. But his 50 smokes-per-day habit was broken down — and he left Sweden a non-smoker.

Newspapers were filled with cynics, however. The same day his story ran on quitting smoking, the main photo on The Sun’s front page was a fabulous Deni Eagland shot of 102-year-old Matilda Boynton puffing away on a cigar.

“She still smokes four cigars every day, does her own housework,” said the cutline. “‘Cancer?’ she says. ‘If I got it, I don’t know about it.’”

jmackie@postmedia.com