Tobacco.org

• Clearing air on cigarette ads  

There seem to be two Dr. Alan Blums.

One is a tweedy academic — the family medicine professor and director of the Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society at the University of Alabama who has devoted his dead-serious career to the prevention of tobacco-induced illnesses.

The other is the self-described “Bart Simpson of the anti-smoking movement” — the alter ago who donned a fake pharmacist’s lab coat Wednesday to help set up “Your Cancer and Drug Store,” an exhibition on tobacco advertising that opens today in the Buffalo Museum of Science. . . .

The approach reflects a lesson learned in 1977 when Blum, then a Miami hospital intern and nascent anti-smoking crusader, lost a contentious radio talk show debate with a tobacco industry spokesman while the host, Larry King, blew smoke in Blum’s face.

Ever since, “I’ve tried to bring some humor and satire to a depressing issue that many people take very seriously,” Blum said. The strategy has included “house calls” to tobacco festivals and “anything else we could do to ridicule the brand names.”

Satirical references abound in “Your Cancer and Drug Store,” which was gleaned from a trove of tobacco advertising and promotional materials that Blum started collecting 15 years ago and now fills 2,500 boxes in his Alabama center.

He started by buying items distributed by cigarette companies that a Connecticut store owner had accumulated over two decades. “He must’ve thought it had collectible value, but it cost more to ship it [to Alabama] than I paid for it,” Blum said.

From the outset his goal was to mount an exhibition that underscored the everyday irony of seeing tobacco products on the shelves of pharmacies that dispense drugs prescribed to combat cancer, heart disease, hypertension and other diseases linked to smoking.

“I wanted to do an over-the-top, walk-through exhibit,” he said, citing the role that drugstores have played in keeping America smoking. “I’m not going after individual pharmacies as much as the chains that own them.” . . .

By touring “Your Cancer and Drug Store,” he said, “you are looking at origins of cancer just as much as you would by looking through a microscope.”

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I wanted to do an over-the-top, walk-through exhibit. I’m not going after individual pharmacies as much as the chains that own them.
Prof. Alan Blum, on his Buffalo, NY, ad exhibit that explores the role that drugstores have played in keeping America smoking.

Your Cancer and Drug Store: One-stop shopping: prescriptions, cigarettes, urgent care and chemo.
Alan Blum's mock-drug store: an exhibition on tobacco advertising that opens today in the Buffalo Museum of Science.

• Now Showing | Smoking in the Dressing Room  

Photos by Susanna Howe

The tobacco-stained past, on display at Bird in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

In the wake of our recent mayoral election, let’s take a moment to remember New York before Bloomberg cleared the air in bars, clubs and restaurants by banning smoking. Sales of Febreze aren’t the only thing that plummeted in the city: according to the photographer Susanna Howe, no one wants to be pictured smoking anymore. “Even those people who you wouldn't think would be all squeamish about it dash to put the cigarette out when you raise the camera to your face,” she said.

And so she rushed to document her friends and favorite subjects before they quit. “Smokers,” an exhibition and video installation at Bird in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is a stylish, funny, even sexy look at the remaining few who aren’t waiting to exhale, such as the artist Phil Frost. Be sure to try something on in the V.I.P. dressing room, where Howe has created a video that goes as well with Margiela as it does with A.P.C.

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• Simpsons in smoking scandal  

D'oh! The Simpsons could be encouraging another generation of young people to take up smoking.

One of the most popular television shows in history contains a "large number" of tobacco-related scenes, say researchers who watched 400 episodes of the cartoon for science.

"We recorded 795 instances of smoking or references to smoking," says Dr Guy Eslick, a fellow of the International Union Against Cancer and honorary associate of the University of Sydney's School of Public Health.

"The most notable characters who smoked were Marge Simpson's sisters Patty and Selma, Krusty the Clown and Bart's school teacher Mrs Krabappel."

Dr Eslick assessed the first 18 seasons of the program and found the number of smoking references per season ranged from just over 10 to more than 60.

Smoking was presented in a "positive way" in just two percent of these cases, in a negative way in 35 percent of cases and neutrally in 63 percent. . . .

"Even instances of smoking being reflected in a negative way, particularly among young characters, could have an impact on promoting children to smoke cigarettes," Dr Eslick said.

The study concludes: "Viewing The Simpsons characters smoking may prompt children to consider smoking at an early age".

The research is to be published in the Medical Journal of Australia, and today (Sunday) is World No Tobacco Day.

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• Días de humo 

Focused mainly in the development of the design of objects and the graph around the tobacco during century XX in Mexico, Days of smoke in addition it will show to historical antecedents as far as the consolidation and the social assent of a culture of the tobacco. A trip towards the past, towards which today already it is history and that allows us to generate stories and memories in nostalgia, around those days of smoke…

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• Mexico City smokers enjoy a bit of nostalgia 

For Mexico City’s smokers, who were recently deprived of the pleasure of enjoying their habit in restaurants, bars, offices and other public places, an exhibition celebrating the pleasure and history of tobacco might feel like someone’s blowing smoke in their faces.

But organizers of “Dias de Humo” (The Days of Smoking), which opened last week at the Museo Soumaya, say the intention is to celebrate smoking’s place in history, art and culture, not to encourage the habit.

Pre-Hispanic pipes, personalized cigarette holders and snuffboxes, newspaper articles, old television ads and publicity posters tell what is more than just the history of tobacco.

Some of Mexico’s most famed artists and public figures, such as José Guadalupe Posada, Frida Kahlo and José Clemente Orozco, are included in an exhibit that is really a kind of history of Mexico, using the tobacco industry and smoking culture as the organizing thread.

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• DAVIS: All I want for Christmas: cleaner air  

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the House (of Representatives), not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. House Bill 4163 had been through both chambers with great fanfare, and there was a great yell of triumph from the Campaign for Smokefree Air.

Children with asthma were wishing for the best, of visits to restaurants with clean air in their chests. And Mama in her apron could work for a living, without the worry of cancer the secondhand smoke was giving.

When out in the Capitol lobby, there arose such a clatter, the people all wondered just what was the matter? Ohio has done it, and Illinois, too, so many states were smoke free, why is it so hard for Michigan to do? . . .

So write to your lawmakers and tell them to compromise and vote; tell them you're watching and you're taking note. It's good for me and for you, good for health and business too; Be you naughty or nice, a smokefree Michigan is the right thing to do!

-- Dr. Ronald M. Davis, M.D, of East Lansing, who wrote this verse a year ago, died last month of pancreatic cancer.

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• Can Hollywood quit smoking?  

What, then, are we going to do about the century of screen smoking that sits enmeshed in the very best - as well as the worst - output of cinema over the last 100 years, and television over the last 60 or so? And how can we convincingly omit a practice that was almost universal at a period in time that new historical drama - such as Life On Mars US - might be attempting to depict?

Since 'retro' became so magnetic and profitable - from the sale of old US TV shows in large and affordable DVD box-sets, to actually setting a show like Life On Mars in one of the smokiest and grittiest periods of New York's 20th century history - this is about as thorny a problem for the anti-smoking contingent in Hollywood as it could possibly be.

In the Life On Mars pilot show, as our review noted, people are seen with lit cigarettes, but hold them as if they were incense sticks. Clinton-like, there's no obvious inhaling going on. You can almost see the elaborate storyboarding and political wrangling behind the depiction of smoking in Life On Mars US - the compromises, the arbitrators, the wrangling, and the legally-required presence of the New York Fire Department as soon as one of the shabby tecs lights up a herbal fake in an enclosed set.

By the most conservative estimates, 40% of male adults were smokers in the US in 1973. You can probably add a few percentage points for stress-driven jobs like police work, and loads of points for the criminal fraternity, so any cop drama set in that period is going to have to look smokey or it's going to have to look 'wrong'. . . .

The solutions for historical drama are not clear, but obviously you can't continue to have historical characters nursing cigarettes that they never smoke. Nor can you claim that all your characters fall within the non-smoking bracket in whatever period of history you're trying to depict - even the most rudimentary understanding of demographics won't support it. . . .

In the meantime the tobacco industry rubs its hands at the cultural loophole that lets historical drama fill the silver screen with a miasma of tobacco; for it, Hollywood's future is definitely in the past. . . .

But while 20-25% of the Western population still smokes, the tobacco paradox will continue to contribute to the problem in the form of legacy content; in what's already 'in the can', on our screens, our re-runs and in our DVD players. The struggle to get that 20% of smokers in the population down to 0% will still prove to be the (continuing) work of decades rather than years if we're to do it without another Volstead act. In the current depressed mood, bringing with it a wistful atavism for times and styles past, it's not the easiest moment for Hollywood to detox.

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• Big Tobacco’s Spin on Women’s Liberation  

Why do nearly one-fifth of women in America smoke? The answer goes back to an event almost 80 years ago on Fifth Avenue, which is often regarded as one of the most successful P.R. stunts in American history.

This sometimes overlooked piece of history has surfaced again because of an exhibit of historic cigarette ads at the New York Public Library's Science, Industry and Business branch at 34th Street and Madison Avenue.

The show, "Not a Cough in a Carload: Images Used by Tobacco Companies to Hide the Hazards of Smoking," which opened this week, was curated by a doctor, Robert J. Jackler, whose mother, a smoker, died of lung cancer. . . .

Recognizing that women were still riding high on the suffrage movement, Mr. Bernays used the equality angle as the basis for his new campaign. He convinced a number of genteel women, including his own secretary, to march in the 1929 Easter Day parade down Fifth Avenue and light up cigarettes in a defiant show of their liberation.

One woman who lit a Lucky Strike told the reporter from the New York Evening World that she “first got the idea for this campaign when a man on the street asked her to extinguish her cigarette because it embarrassed him. ‘I talked it over with my friends, and we decided it was high time something was done about the situation.’” . . .

The Times published an article the next day on the Easter Parade, with headline saying in part, "Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of 'Freedom'"

“Within a year, it became acceptable for woman to smoke outside," Dr. Jackler said. . . .

Marketing cigarettes for women continued with the introduction of Virginia Slims in 1968, which for decades used the theme “You’ve come a long way, baby” as an allusion to the feminist movement.

“There is a bump in women’s smoking in the 1970s," Dr. Jackler said.

That increase has shown up now, he added, as more cases of "lung cancer and emphysema, because they started smoking in the '70s because of the Virginia Slim ads." . . .

But last year, R. J. Reynolds introduced Camel No. 9s

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• A Chapter of Dutch Art History Ends: A Tobacco Factory Closes, Sheds its Collection  

Cigarette-maker BAT has built up an impressive collection of modern art at its factory in the Dutch town of Zevenaar over the last 50 years. The art was used to keep workers from getting bored. But now the factory is closing, the art is up for auction and many are unhappy.

Cigarette brands Peter Stuyvesant and Lucky Strike will no longer be made in the Dutch town of Zevenaar. The closure of the British American Tobacco (BAT) factory marks not only the end of a major source of employment in the area but also the final curtain for an unusual piece of Dutch art history.

At the end of the 1950s, factory director Alexander Orlow started hanging works of art among the cigarette-making machines. The workers needed something interesting to look at to stave off boredom and increase their productivity, he felt.

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• When Doctors, and Even Santa, Endorsed Tobacco 

From the 1920s into the 1950s, cigarette ads featured endorsers as varied as babies, Mickey Mantle, doctors and even Santa Claus. An exhibit of these campaigns is on display at the Science, Industry and Business Library in New York and is also online. . . .

Documents from the George Arents Collection on Tobacco from the archives of the Science, Industry and Business Library will also be on display. The exhibit was seen in cities like Boston and San Francisco before arriving in New York. . . .

An exhibit that opens on Tuesday in New York presents cigarette ads from the 1920s through the early 1950s in an effort to demonstrate what has changed since then — and what may not have.

The exhibit, of hundreds of print ads and television commercials, is titled “Not a Cough in a Carload: Images Used by Tobacco Companies to Hide the Hazards of Smoking.” The first part of the title is borrowed from a slogan for Old Gold cigarettes, a brand that subsequently boasted in its ads of being “made by tobacco men, not medicine men.”

•

The exhibit will be on display through Dec. 26 at Healy Hall at the Science, Industry and Business Library of the New York Public Library, 188 Madison Avenue, at 34th Street. It can also be viewed online (tobacco.stanford.edu).

The exhibit is the brainchild of Dr. Robert K. Jackler of the Stanford School of Medicine, who described himself in an interview as “an accidental tourist in the world of advertising.”

More Articles in Business » A version of this article appeared in print on October 7, 2008, on page B3 of the New York edition.

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• "Nicotine Nazis strike again": a brief analysis of the use of Nazi rhetoric in attacking tobacco control advocacy  

FORCES, a smokers’ rights organisation, uses similar strategies, as their tactics include "constantly linking anti-tobacco activists either to fascism/Nazism/communism or to some sort of criminal conspiracy against smokers and those people sympathetic towards FORCES’ causes".75 (Unlike earlier "smokers’ rights" groups where information in tobacco industry documents demonstrates often undisclosed funding and management by the tobacco industry, the documents are silent on FORCES.23 24 76–78) As of December 2007, the FORCES archives portal (http://www.forces.org/Archive/) documented this endeavour with 85 online newspaper articles or commentaries including the word "Nazi", 61 including "fascism", 31 including "Hitler" and 23 including "Gestapo" (out of a total of 3724 articles on the tobacco debate).79 As such, the tobacco industry’s efforts to popularise the images and rhetoric of Nazism have successfully penetrated the popular media, including sources with no identifiable ties to the tobacco industry80–87 (fig 388). Nazi imagery is also appearing in the new media, such as www.youtube.com, a potentially fruitful social networking site for tobacco marketers.89 Between October and December 2007, this website published 19 short videos using extensive Nazi imagery to attack and ridicule tobacco control interventions, including the Irish smoke-free legislation, and organisations like Action on Smoking and Health (fig 4). . . .

* Historically accurate or not, the tobacco industry has drawn connections between tobacco control and authoritarianism, evoking the rhetoric and symbolism of Nazi Germany. The tobacco industry has used and promoted Nazi and health fascism rhetoric in the United States and United Kingdom and around the world for decades and successfully penetrated the popular media, including sources with no identifiable ties to the tobacco industry. Identification and monitoring of the use of extremist imagery and rhetoric are crucial to counter this strategy.

CONCLUSION

Nazi and health fascism rhetoric has been used and promoted for decades by the tobacco industry around the world. Against the background of Proctor’s suggestion that the use of Nazi rhetoric would increase with stronger tobacco control efforts,5 the current use in Germany is neither new nor a purely German phenomenon, but probably a sign of increasing strength of Germany’s tobacco control movement. The use of Nazi and health fascism rhetoric can be regarded as part of an institutionalised practice of the tobacco industry and its front groups to discredit tobacco control activities and prevent the introduction of effective policies. "Playing the Nazi card" is an established strategy developed first in the United States and the United Kingdom, then widely used around the world, so far, predominantly outside countries with a Nazi or fascist history. This imagery is now simply being applied in Germany.

The tobacco industry is far from abandoning this strategy. Capitalising on fears of terrorist attacks in the Western world, this rhetoric is increasingly receiving a new focus, as more and more articles aim at the "Antismoking Ayatollahs" and the "theocracy of the Tobacco Taliban," especially in the British Isles. The tobacco control community should identify and monitor the use of extremist imagery and rhetoric by the tobacco industry and its front groups, to unveil their strategies and counter their attacks on effective tobacco control and its advocates. It remains to be unveiled if the Tobacco Taliban will one day replace the Nicotine Nazi. In the meantime, such rhetoric should not deter public health advocates (and the media) from educating the public about the adverse effects of tobacco use and secondhand smoke.

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• PROCTOR: On playing the Nazi card 

FOREST (Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco) once offered my 1988 book, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, for sale as "vital" for understanding "the statist and paternalist world view of the Nazis" and "the health fascism of contemporary anti-smoking and ‘health’ lobbies".3 Schneider and Glantz rightly conclude that the industry’s interest in such matters has nothing to do with German history, nor with the realities of fascism, but rather with an opportunistic effort to do whatever it can to keep selling cigarettes.

The industry’s reductio ad Hitlerum is superficial, and ahistorical. The Nazis excelled at rocketry—does this mean that the Apollo mission was ballistic fascism? Many Nazis urged fitness and health through exercise: is jogging therefore athletic fascism? The fact that healthful or progressive policies were occasionally endorsed by the Nazis does not mean they are inherently fascist or oppressive.

The industry and its allies push the Nazi analogy, but they never probe it very far. They never point out that the German cigarette industry collaborated closely with the Nazi government (in confiscating tobacco firms in occupied territories, for example), or that tobacco taxes provided a massive source of revenue for the Nazi state. They never point out that the "Brownshirts" had their own brand of cigarette—the "Sturm-Zigarette"—or that tobacco taxes helped prop up the Nazi state (more than half of all storm-trooper income, for example, was from tobacco taxes). . . .

Arguments of this sort can, in fact, already be found in the 1930s, when the German tobacco industry ridiculed anti-tobacco activists as "fanatic psychopaths" . . .

One of the great challenges of tobacco control is to come up with new and imaginative ways to think about how and where to intervene in the causal chains that lead to smoking. Visitors from another planet would probably be astonished by our willingness to tolerate mass death on a scale exceeding any other preventable cause of death. . . .

virtually all tobacco control efforts are directed at preventing consumption rather than preventing production. The industry has managed to direct most of our attention onto consumer choice (or information), leaving the means by which cigarettes are spun forth into the world unexamined, unhampered. Few people can even imagine the inside of a tobacco factory, fewer still know anything about how or where the world’s cigarette-making machines are made (clue: check out the Hauni company in Hamburg). . . .

until we broaden our imagination, and the media through which it is expressed (film! contests! public art!), we should not be surprised to have the world still think of tobacco harms as "old news" and tobacco control as tyranny.

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[U]ntil we broaden our imagination, and the media through which it is expressed (film! contests! public art!), we should not be surprised to have the world still think of tobacco harms as "old news" and tobacco control as tyranny.
Noted cultural historian Robert N. Proctor.

• Leave Constitution at the door: Rights like free speech don't extend to 'public' online spaces  

Dutch photographer Maarten Dors met the limits of free speech at Yahoo Inc.'s photo-sharing service, Flickr, when he posted an image of an early-adolescent boy with disheveled hair and a ragged T-shirt, staring blankly with a lit cigarette in his mouth.

Without prior notice, Yahoo deleted the photo on grounds it violated an unwritten ban on depicting children smoking. Dors eventually convinced a Yahoo manager that - far from promoting smoking - the photo had value as a statement on poverty and street life in Romania. Yet another employee deleted it again a few months later.

"I never thought of it as a photo of a smoking kid," Dors said. "It was just of a kid in Romania and how his life is. You can never make a serious documentary if you always have to think about what Flickr will delete." . . .

First Amendment protections generally do not extend to private property in the physical world, allowing a shopping mall to legally kick out a customer wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a smoking child.

With online services becoming greater conduits than shopping malls for public communications, however, some advocacy groups believe the federal government needs to guarantee open access to speech.

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• SHESTAK: I went to view tobacco history, but all I saw was a smokescreen 

I have this gnawing feeling that there's something not quite right about the Duke Homestead Tobacco Museum. Even in Durham, a city built by tobacco, it's generally agreed upon that smoking is, and was, bad for you, no?

Then why did my recent visit to the Duke Homestead leave me feeling like I'd just walked through a mock exhibit on tobacco where the joys of nicotine are still cherished? . . .

Alison Holcomb, assistant site manager, said I am not the only person to take issue, particularly with the lack of medical history. "We know it's no longer a debate," she said. The staff wants to update the exhibits, but "it's just a matter of getting funds," she said. As a state-funded organization, the museum constantly petitions for money to improve its services.

"The goal is to have everything you could possibly include, but no museum is perfect," she said. "It's still a very valuable place for people to come visit." In the meantime, temporary exhibits address those discrepancies. The staff is choosing now between a new display on health and one on slavery.

Which brings me to another key issue I have with this museum: Slavery is all but ignored. . . .

For all of those people who died due to their addiction, and those who were left behind, there should be some acknowledgement that in the end, all of those advertisements of rugged cowboys, skinny ladies and animated camels brought much more harm than good.

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• Smokers make an exhibition of themselves  

An exhibition of the history of smoking and how addicts have coped with the ban on lighting up in public places opens this week in London.

Entitled The Big Smoke, the exhibition starts at the Museum of London on Tuesday - exactly one year since the English ban was introduced.

The display includes a tube containing one week's worth of cigarette butts collected in the City of London from one square mile of stressed-out City workers.

In a free display that lasts until September 21, the museum looks at the implications of the ban, from those that welcomed it, those that suffered as a result of it and the extra measures taken by others to deal with it. . . .

London was the centre of the tobacco trade from its first introduction to Britain in the mid-16th century. Elizabethan explorer Sir Walter Raleigh became a committed pipe-smoker and popularised the habit.

By 1614 there were 7,000 tobacconist's shops in London, with smoking hitting the height of popularity in the 19th century.

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