The National Smokers Alliance (NSA) was an organization created and funded by the PR firm Burson-Marsteller, hired by Phillip Morris, in 1993 to protest against anti-smoking legislation in the United States.
[2] An early example of astroturfing, the NSA employed stealth marketing tactics to give the appearance of grassroots opposition to anti-smoking laws.
[3][4] One of the NSA's members included famed talk show host Morton Downey Jr.;[5] however, he gave up smoking after being diagnosed with lung cancer in 1996 (and in doing so reversed his smoking stance to an anti-smoking one); he died of the disease in 2001.
[6] In 1999 tobacco company Philip Morris announced that it would withdraw funding after the NSA made an ethics complaint about John McCain.
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