A Double Dose of Caution About Cigarettes and Cancer

Although teenagers may be the last people who would want to watch a program on the scourge of teen smoking, a show this afternoon on KCOP-TV Channel 13 smashes the mold of the ho-hum do-gooder documentary and gets across a vital message about quitting tobacco in an absolutely riveting hour of television.

And airing tonight is the first episode of “Cancer Wars,” a four-part PBS historical review of how considerations of money and politics have shaped cancer research and prevention since World War II. It emphasizes tobacco’s prime role in the world’s cancer burden, thus serving as a sort of stately intellectual companion to the afternoon’s revved-up offering for teens and their families.

Using a hip filmmaking style reminiscent of the best of MTV, “Smoking: Truth or Dare?” follows several teenagers who smoke or use snuff and are presented with the likely, unimagined consequences of their habits. They observe the autopsy of a longtime smoker who died of lung disease, meet elderly emphysema patients who don’t even have the breath to walk, and view horrific slides of mouth cancers.

Stunned and disgusted at how prolonged tobacco use can ravage the body, the youngsters vow to quit.

It is hard to imagine that anyone watching the show would not want to do the same. And as a new federal study released Friday showed, the goal of reducing teen smoking has never been clearer. In that survey of more than 16,000 teens, 36% who tried smoking eventually had a cigarette-a-day habit, and while most had tried to quit, only 13.5% succeeded.

The power of “Truth or Dare?” is that it goes beyond statistics and scolding and gives a vivid sense of why kids smoke, what it takes to get them to quit--and, perhaps most important, to keep them from starting. We watch two girls burst into tears when a doctor shows them computer-enhanced images of the wrinkled, sagging faces they would perhaps get if they kept smoking. They promptly throw their cigarettes in the trash.

The fascinating technique of confronting young people with ugly truths about their risky behavior and capturing their wide-eyed responses was pioneered by the executive producer, Arnold Shapiro, in his 1978 documentary “Scared Straight,” in which juvenile delinquents learned about the realities of prison life from hardened inmates. “Truth or Dare?” is plenty chilling in its own way, providing a much-needed and surprisingly engaging counterbalance to pro-tobacco messages pervading society. Because it’s smart, it’s much cooler than the ads and movies that glamorize smoking.

Although “Cancer Wars” casts a wide net, covering everything from cancer quackery to recent discoveries in genetics, the main thread concerns the tobacco industry, purveyor of the leading cause of preventable death in the developed world.

Tonight’s episode begins, perhaps surprisingly, with the Nazis, who were the first anti-smoking advocates. In 1941, Nazi scientists opened the Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research in Jena, Germany. With funding authorized by Hitler, they conducted careful studies showing that cigarette smoking was the major cause of lung cancer. Evidently, Hitler was going to ban cigarettes after the war.

But the Nazis’ warnings about smoking were buried in the rubble of the war, according to the filmmakers, and were only recently brought to light by a Penn State historian, Robert Proctor, whose book “The Cancer Wars” serves as a model for the series.

The moral of the story, Proctor seems to argue, is not simply that bad people sometimes do good research; rather, it is that political events can overwhelm important scientific findings. It would be another decade before British scientists linked smoking and lung cancer, and two decades before the United States surgeon general report nailed down many of the diseases caused by smoking.

The “wars” of the title refer to more than Big Tobacco’s battles with health and legal authorities. There is President Richard Nixon’s “war on cancer,” which seems so naive in retrospect; the skirmishes between mainstream cancer doctors and those peddling unorthodox, unapproved nostrums like laetrile, some of whose smiling victims are here poignantly portrayed; and the vexing disputes between academic scientists on the causes of cancer. A particularly effective sequence shows one TV newscast after another hailing studies claiming to link cancer (erroneously, it turns out) to numerous products and chemicals, coffee included.

Overall, though, “Cancer Wars,” produced by Jenny Barraclough, is a victim of its own sweeping ambitions. One moment we are learning about tobacco-control efforts in India, the next we are watching an experimental cancer therapy in Michigan. All the clever hopscotching left this viewer unsatisfied. Compared to the jazzy “Truth or Dare?,” this PBS offering feels stodgy, academic and muddled.

Still, it does remind one that there is more to the dread disease than biology, that politics shapes public health.

* “Smoking: Truth or Dare?” airs at 5 p.m. today on KCOP-TV Channel 13.

* Part 1 of “Cancer Wars” airs at 10 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28. Part 2 follows on June 1 and Parts 3 and 4 on June 5.