The New York Times
Tuesday, March 20th, 2007
pg D5
The Story
The Summary:Cigarrette weren't always smoking cancer sticks, once they were something even doctors did to be cool.
Allan M. Brandt, a medical historian at Harvard, insists that recognizing the dangers of cigarettes resulted from an intellectual process that took the better part of the 20th century. He describes this fascinating story in his new book, “The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America” (Basic Books).
In contrast to the symbol of death and disease it is today, from the early 1900s to the 1960s the cigarette was a cultural icon of sophistication, glamour and sexual allure — a highly prized commodity for one out of two Americans.
Back in the day where cigarette's weren't bad for you, when mom stayed home and baked apple pies, dad had a good job (but didn't go to college) and Jr. was a football star. There was so much we didn't know back then, and so much we wish we still didn't know. It's an interesting phenomena how something so desired in the age of the nuclear family has become so horrible in our "age of sin." It's hard to imagine the days when schools had smoking rooms, and no one had a "smoke free class of" shirt. (My class of 2003 was indefinately NOT smoke free)
The years after World War II, however, were a time of major breakthroughs in epidemiological thought. In 1947, Richard Doll and A. Bradford Hill of the British Medical Research Council created a sophisticated statistical technique to document the association between rising rates of lung cancer and increasing numbers of smokers.
The prominent surgeon Evarts A. Graham and a medical student, Ernst L. Wynder, published a landmark article in 1950 comparing the incidence of lung cancer in their nonsmoking and smoking patients at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis. They concluded that “cigarette smoking, over a long period, is at least one important factor in the striking increase in bronchogenic cancer.”
It started in the 1940s, but we didn't have no-smoking laws until just recently. (It really is nice to go into a bar and NOT have smoke everywhere. I like not smelling too bad when I come home at night.) People still didn't know the dangers of second-hand smoke, and no one had made the nicotine connection yet.
In the 1980s, scientists established the revolutionary concept that nicotine is extremely addictive. The tobacco companies publicly rejected such claims, even as they took advantage of cigarettes’ addictive potential by routinely spiking them with extra nicotine to make it harder to quit smoking. And their marketing memorandums document advertising campaigns aimed at youngsters to hook whole new generations of smokers.
This is when the "smoke-free" class and other anti-smoking campaigns began. It fit right in with Nancy Regan's "war on drugs." (This is your brain, this is your brain on drugs) People began to understand the dangers of smoking, finally.
Apparently, the judge, Gladys Kessler of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, agreed. Last August, she concluded that the tobacco industry had engaged in a 40-year conspiracy to defraud smokers about tobacco’s health dangers. Her opinion cited Dr. Brandt’s testimony more than 100 times.
Dr. Brandt acknowledges that there are pitfalls in combining scholarship with battle against the deadly pandemic of cigarette smoking, but he says he sees little alternative.
“If one of us occasionally crosses the boundary between analysis and advocacy, so be it,” he said. “The stakes are high, and there is much work to be done.”
According to the American Lung Association, 20.9% of adults were current smokers in 2004. According to the article, 50% of Americans smoked back in the day. That's a start. Smoking has become something that people who live in trailer parks do, not high-class individuals, people with money don't smoke anymore. It'll come around, and no one will smoke, eventually.
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