Television Reviews : ‘Smoking’: The Message Is Loud and Clear

Is another 30 minutes on television about the dangers of smoking really necessary?

Yes, if “Smoking: Everything You and Your Family Need to Know” (10:30 tonight on HBO cable) has its facts straight. Among its assertions: that 50% of American women are unaware that there are dangers to smoking while pregnant, and that the tobacco industry needs 1,000 new smokers a day--recruited mainly from the young, of course--to replace the 1,000 people who die every day from tobacco-related illnesses.

Premiering on the 25th anniversary of U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry’s 1964 report linking cigarette smoking with lung cancer, the half-hour is a straightforward but concise and vibrantly produced presentation of the case against tobacco, with the attack led by current Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop.

Without resorting to gross-out scare tactics (like the blackened lungs many of us were shown in high school films), the program hammers home the message that cigarettes kill.

The show focuses on one particular cancer victim but is enlivened by comments from smokers and non-smokers, and by funny and chilling ‘50s TV ads for cigarettes.

It is flawed only by some heavy-handed, droning synthesizer music and Koop’s gung-ho attitude. The surgeon general sometimes seems willing to cloud anything even minutely positive about tobacco consumption when he addresses the question of pipe and cigar smoking by beginning in this confusing manner: “I think a lot of people kid themselves into thinking it’s safer to smoke a pipe or cigar than a cigarette. It’s true that they are not as dangerous as cigarettes but. . . .”

Huh?

But the essential message here comes across loud and clear, and maybe it’s a message that isn’t being heard by young people amid all the Just Say No-mania over far less lethal drugs. If you smoke cigarettes or are considering trying the habit, consider the program’s final fact:

“Tobacco smoking kills more Americans than AIDS, heroin, crack, cocaine, alcohol, car accidents, fire and murder combined.”