Smoked: Why Joe Camel Is Still Smiling (The Read & Resist Series)

By Mike A. Males

Book Overview

If we just keep kids from starting to smoke, we'll have this tobacco problem licked, right? Wrong. In Smoked, journalist Mike Males takes you on a tour of the co-optation of a political movement.From the 1960s to the late 1980s, anti-smoking campaigns were designed and run by health activists -- creating major declines in smoking by all age groups. But in the 1990s, political interests took up anti-smoking as a vote-winning crusade, replacing sound health, tax, and regulation strategies with a politically-driven agenda stressing popular sloganeering and calculatedly ineffective programming against teenage smoking.The failures of this approach (which neatly meshes with industry efforts to promote smoking as adult, thereby enticing teens to smoke) have prompted recent calls for a return to effective tax-and-regulate measures. Without them, argues Males, the vote-winning crusade is nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1567511732
• ISBN13: 9781567511734
• Release Date: September 1999
• Publisher: Common Courage Press
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 4.4" x 7.2"

Customer Reviews

Short and sweet...

What I found most interesting about this paper (calling it a book is an exaggeration) is that it focuses its lucid and rabid attacks where they belong: on the hopelessly flaccid anti-smoking lobby and not the tobacco industry itself. If anything, Males's charts, graphs, and refreshing commentary gave me a grudging respect for the industry's ability to use bribery, politics, and moral outrage to make everyone fall into step.In the end, though, Smoked didn't change my ambivalent feelings toward tobacco. Partly this was because Males's uncharacteristically general discussion of the financial `cost' of smoking contributed to my suspicion that it's a myth. I was left wondering if increased healthcare costs are more than offset by the early deaths of users, the fact that tobacco is the most heavily taxed consumer product in the world, and the hundreds of thousands of jobs the industry creates. Of course there are the incalculable human costs, but hey, lots of things are bad for you.The anger you take away from these pages will more likely be aimed at the anti-smoking lobby, which has missed every opportunity to actually reduce tobacco use and in many ways have allowed themselves to be manipulated into promoting it. Tobacco is not a public health issue in the U.S., it's a political issue. And as such, it will always be with us.

Where's Dr. Koop when we need him?

Whatever happened to the smoke-free society we were supposed to have by 2000? The author's thesis (which he convincingly backs up with facts and figures) is that we've been bamboozled by the tobacco industry. Instead of the sensible campaigns (led by Everett Koop, for example) to make smoking (by anybody!) socially inappropriate, which actually did bring smoking down, the tobacco folks are now concentrating on a campaign to criminalize teenage smoking..... this gets adult smokers off the hook and has actually increased teenage smoking by making it an "adult" thing to do! No wonder Philip Morris sponsors all those anti-teen-smoking ads: they've actually increased smoking more than the old cigarette ads did! Should be required reading for members of Congress (though I'm not optimistic that it will have much impact, alas).