For Your Own Good The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health

Abstract

Abstract The vigilance against deviation from the correct portrayal of smoking is accompanied by absurd rhetorical excesses, even in supposedly sober scientific journals. JAMA’s [Journal of the American Medical Association’s]vociferousness on the issue of smoking ... may be an attempt to make up for past sins: The journal carried cigarette ads until 1953, and the AMA [American Medical Associationl accepted research money from the tobacco industry in the 1960s and 1970s, during which decades activists accused the organization of inexcusable timidness on an important public health issue. Since the 1980s, however, JAMAhas been second to none in its denunciations of tobacco. A 1986 editorial compared smoking-related deaths to Nazi genocide, calling for “a declaration of all-out war” to save “the victims of the tobaccoism holocaust.”A 1990 editorial, this one by a former CDC director, said tobacco executives and the advertising firms that work for them “daily make the decision to kill for money, to become ‘hit men’ on a colossal scale.”Picking up on the same theme in yet another JAMAeditorial, then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Sullivan called revenue from tobacco advertising accounts “blood money.”

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