When Mike Doonesbury was asked to create an ad campaign aimed at teenage smokers, he suffered a morality crisis, and the hallucinatory Mr. Butts was the result.

But Doonesbury often bends the line between fantasy and reality, and it was not long before Mr. Butts was being treated as a real person, interacting with other characters and even testifying before Congress for the Tobacco Institute.

He honestly cannot see that there is any connection between cigarettes and cancer, downplays the effect of nicotine addiction, and he is fully convinced that smoking will help make kids cool.

[1][2] He also appeared on hundreds of trashcans on Santa Monica, California's beaches as part of that city's awareness promotion of their new anti-smoking ordinance in August 2005.

Mr. Butts was also a pseudonym (inspired by the Doonesbury character) of a then-anonymous informant who in 1995 sent 4,000 pages of incriminating Brown & Williamson tobacco company documents to researcher Stanton Glantz.