Society Finds Cigarettes a Tough Foe to Snuff Out
Science would not be enough to win the public war against tobacco, but it was a start.
By the time the tide finally turned, anti-smoking forces and the cigarette companies had spent almost 30 years waging the scientific and public relations equivalent of an arms race. For every new report on the health hazards of smoking, the tobacco companies refined and supplemented their advertising. Whenever the government sought to restrict smoking, the industry mined legal loopholes and increased its campaign contributions.
The 1964 release of the first U.S. surgeon general’s report on the dangers of smoking set the cycle in motion. The 387-page document definitively established smoking as a primary cause of lung cancer and linked it to heart disease, emphysema and other ailments.
But if Dr. Luther L. Terry was clear about the effects of smoking, the surgeon general was unwilling to say what should be done about it.
Science alone would not force a retreat by the tobacco industry, provoke government regulation or separate some 65 million American smokers from their cigarettes.
The industry, which had withheld its own troubling findings from Terry’s panel, called for further research. And smokers barely acknowledged the dangers of their nicotine habit; after cigarette sales declined a negligible 2% in 1964, they picked up again the next year.
The industry’s advertising was a far more effective weapon than the government’s efforts to expose and disclose. Even the warning labels on cigarette packs--the original wording softened by the industry--failed to dissuade many smokers.
They had only to go to the movies, turn on the television--until the government banned cigarette commercials in 1971--open a magazine, see a billboard or attend a tobacco-sponsored event to get a more comforting and glamorous message.
Smoking is macho, quintessentially American, the Marlboro Man told them. Women were told that shame-free smoking proved they had come a long way. Later, Joe Camel suggested to youths that smoking was fun and cool.
In the meantime, the industry and the federal government achieved an uneasy but profitable truce. For more than a decade, the government was largely silent on the subject.
That changed in 1982 when another surgeon general, Dr. C. Everett Koop, made the first significant addition to the anti-smoking arsenal: the bully pulpit. He called the effects of smoking “the most important public health issue of our time,” and declared cigarettes “the chief single, avoidable cause of death in our society.”
Koop’s leadership in turn spawned a mass anti-smoking movement. Backed by studies showing that even secondhand tobacco smoke caused cancer and other diseases, nonsmokers forced the adoption of local and state laws restricting smoking in public places.
Yet by 1988, when Koop issued a surgeon general’s report classifying nicotine as an addictive drug, some 48 million Americans remained hooked.
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In 1994, other key anti-tobacco pieces began falling into place. The regulatory fervor of Food and Drug Administration chief David Kessler and the political savvy of a Los Angeles congressman, Democrat Henry Waxman, prompted the first substantive investigation of tobacco companies. Public hearings provided an indelible image of a duplicitous industry deep in denial.
Thirty years after the release of Terry’s surgeon general’s report, and after hundreds of other studies had confirmed the dangers of smoking, executives of seven leading tobacco companies stood before Waxman’s House committee and, one after the other, raised their hands and swore that nicotine was not addictive and that there was no proof that smoking caused cancer.
A month later, Mississippi Atty. Gen. Mike Moore launched a landmark lawsuit against the industry to reclaim his state’s smoking-related health care costs. State after state joined the action; tobacco companies eventually were undone by their own documents, which showed they had long known of smoking’s health risks.
By late 1998, after the industry’s massive lobbying and advertising campaign doomed a more costly settlement bill in Congress, the tobacco companies had agreed to pay 46 states a total of $246 billion. The settlement also required industry-financed anti-smoking campaigns and the removal of cigarette billboards. In March 1999, the 70-foot-high Marlboro Man that had towered over Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip for 17 years rode off into the haze.
As the century ends, the anti-smoking battle is far from over. While the smoking rate for American adults declined 42% from 1965 to 1995, from 1988 to 1996, the rate for youths climbed 88%. And smoking causes almost one in five American deaths, about 400,000 a year. The industry, however, has made concessions. In October, Philip Morris Cos. acknowledged the links between smoking and disease and noted that “there is no safe cigarette.”
