Tobacco.org

• Jill Burcum: Breathe deeply and ponder this anniversary 

It had all the elements of a John Grisham novel: a crack legal team filing a long-shot lawsuit, a behemoth defendant peddling cancer-causing products, secret stashes of incriminating documents, and a mind-boggling, multibillion-dollar settlement. Yet Minnesota's landmark tobacco case was a real-life legal thriller. Ten years ago today, after a dramatic trial in St. Paul, the state settled with the nation's tobacco companies for more than $6 billion.

As Minnesota's sesquicentennial approaches, we're marking 150 years of statehood with wagon trains and faded photos of early settlers. But the 10-year milestone of the tobacco settlement reminds us that the state's more-recent history also offers much to celebrate, including the risk-taking legal pioneers who beat Big Tobacco. The Minnesota case not only paved the way for other states to settle, but blew once and for all the industry's smokescreen on how much it knew about the dangers of its own products.

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A Georgia Community With an African Feel Fights a Wave of Change 

During slavery, Sapelo was part of the plantation economy, but after the Civil War blacks began to buy land and formed settlements. Those were consolidated by the island’s last white owner, the tobacco heir R. J. Reynolds Jr., who forced black residents to relocate to Hog Hammock in the ’50s and ’60s, an act still remembered with bitterness.

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• William Stewart: Crusader against smoking  

"Caution - Cigarette Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Health." By today's explicit and bloodcurdling standards the warning that appeared for the first time on cigarette packs in the United States in 1966 was quaint in its understatement. But with those words William Stewart helped turn smoking - in the West at least - from emblem of cool into, almost literally, a deadly social sin.

Stewart was Surgeon General of the United States, the country's most senior public health official, between 1965 and 1969. In recent years, under the dominance of the conservative doctrine of "small government," the post has lost much of its former importance. But in that era, as President Lyndon Johnson pushed through his groundbreaking civil rights and public health legislation, the Surgeon General was a power in the land. . . .

Today the cigarette packet health warnings he helped pioneer in the US are positively tame by international standards. Across the EU, packets proclaim that "Smoking Kills", while many countries either have already, or are about to have, packets carry pictures of body organs damaged by smoking. In America, by contrast, there are merely rotating warnings printed on the side of the packet only, and in colours that do not clash with those of the product - with no updating since 1984.

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• New York Times Obituary is Wrong on Dr. Stewart's Role Regarding Cigarette Health Warnings 

Contrary to the obituary in today's New York Times, former Surgeon General Dr. William H. Stewart did not "put the first health warnings on cigarette packs," notes the public interest law professor who caused the first decline in US smoking by getting free time for antismoking messages on radio and TV.

"Although Dr. Stewart urged health warnings, he had no authority to order them," notes law professor John Banzhaf of George Washington University. In fact, the story is somewhat more complicated, he explains. . . .

Unfortunately, something that Stewart could not have anticipated -- but which Congress should have foreseen -- occurred. Years later the major tobacco companies were successful in defending themselves from law suits claiming that they failed to adequately disclose the dangers of smoking by arguing that they put on their packs exactly the warning Congress had required.

None of this should detract from Stewart's legacy, however, says Banzhaf.

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Tony Horwitz's Book 'A Voyage Long and Strange' Looks for Little-Known Stories of American History 

Tony Horwitz’s new book, “A Voyage Long and Strange,” is about the American history most Americans never learned, including the story of the short-lived, early-17th-century colony established on this windswept island eight miles west of Martha’s Vineyard.

The book starts with the Viking discovery of North America, dispels a number of myths about Columbus (a much lousier navigator than we were taught) and then traces the various Spanish and French explorations of America before turning to the English settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth. . . .

The Indians who met them on Cuttyhunk were "exceeding courteous, gentle of disposition and well conditioned," and made a very favorable impression, especially the women. "This is the rare story of gentle first contact between Europeans and Native Americans," Mr. Horwitz said. "Some of the other stories are pretty bleak. But here you get these wonderful details like 'drinking tobacco' together and descriptions of the natives as very 'witty.'"

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• William H. Stewart Is Dead at 86; Put First Warnings on Cigarette Packs  

eneral in the Johnson administration who put the first health warnings on cigarette packs and integrated the United States Public Health Service and many Southern hospitals, died on April 23 in New Orleans. He was 86.

His death was announced by the L.S.U. Health Sciences Center, including the Louisiana State University School of Medicine, which he directed from 1969 to 1974. . . .

Dr. Stewart also prepared an influential three-part report, "Health Consequences of Smoking," released from 1967 to 1969, as the second salvo in a series of surgeon generals' reports that helped change smoking from social norm to social stigma.

Dr. Luther L. Terry, Dr. Stewart's predecessor, began the campaign with the 1964 report that the death rate from lung cancer for men who smoked cigarettes was almost 1,000 percent higher than it was for nonsmokers.

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• William H. Stewart; Surgeon General Condemned Smoking 

William H. Stewart, 86, who as U.S. surgeon general from 1965 to 1969 led the federal anti-smoking crusade and called for warning labels on cigarette advertising and who used the introduction of Medicare to desegregate hospitals throughout the country, died April 23 of kidney failure at Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans.

Dr. Stewart was a career Public Health Service officer who became surgeon general one year after his predecessor, Luther L. Terry, released a landmark report that drew an explicit link between smoking and lung cancer and other diseases.

Expanding on the 1964 report, Dr. Stewart commissioned studies that hammered the tobacco industry by spelling out the toll that cigarettes exacted in lost productivity, disease and early death. Many of his recommendations, including stricter warning labels on cigarette packages and advertising, were adopted despite fierce opposition. . . .

He fought to toughen the Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965, which affixed a warning on cigarette packages saying that smoking could be "hazardous to your health."

He maintained that it was "indefensible" for the tobacco industry to advertise cigarettes "in a context of happiness, vigor, success and well-being without even a hint appearing anywhere that the product may also lead to disease and death."

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Cherokees comply with tobacco taxes 

After years of violating a tobacco compact with the state, Cherokee-licensed smoke shops are being pressed to sell properly taxed cigarettes with in the Tulsa area, a Tulsa World investigation shows.

Meanwhile, smoke shops licensed by the Creek Nation continue to sell low-tax cigarettes in the Tulsa area without a tobacco agreement with the state. Tulsa, a high-tax zone, requires an 86-cent compact stamp.

The Tulsa World purchased cigarettes last week at 22 area smoke shops or stores. The stores are affiliated with the Cherokee, Creek and Osage nations and are in Glenpool, Sapulpa, Sand Springs, Broken Arrow, Claremore and Tulsa.

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Editorial: At a loss - Fire reinforces importance of history 

For 100 years, the Imperial Tobacco Warehouse cut a striking figure on the Greenville landscape. . . .

The three-story warehouse that once housed the most powerful of the tobacco companies in the city was laid to ruin, declared a total loss in an early estimation. Fire investigators hope that a cause of the fire can be pinpointed, though the effort may be complicated in the ashes that remain.

The loss of that prominent landmark represents an unfortunate moment for the city. The building harkens back to an important era in the community's growth, when tobacco ruled the landscape and its cultivation defined the local economy. At one time, the Imperial Tobacco Company was the leading purchaser of the golden leaf for export in Greenville.

That era faded as the inherent danger of smoking was acknowledged, and Imperial left the city in 1978. And that building, like most area tobacco warehouses, offered only a fading reminder of time consigned to history.

The revitalization effort now under way in Greenville intends to breathe new life into the old Tobacco Town area, and some believed the Imperial warehouse would play a vital role. . . .

While Greenville should balance those decisions with a desire to protect history, this week's fire reminds the community how fragile and fleeting its links to the past can be. And it should encourage work to preserve the rich memories that places like the Imperial warehouse represent.

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SKC: Scientist tells of research on safer cigs 

Twenty-eight years ago, scientist Victor DeNoble was sitting around with a bunch of drunk monkeys when the telephone rang.

Executives with Philip Morris, the giant tobacco company, wanted him to come to work for them.

DeNoble was studying alcohol addiction at the time - hence, the drunk monkeys, including his favorite, Sarah - but Philip Morris wanted him to apply his knowledge of addiction to nicotine.

Specifically, they wanted him to create a man-made chemical to replace the nicotine in cigarettes.

The reason?

It takes nicotine just seven seconds to go from the lungs to the heart to the brain. . . .

"They told me, 'We kill 130,000 people a year with heart attacks,' " DeNoble told a crowd at Salish Kootenai College on Thursday. "I said, 'You kill 130,000 people a year?' And they said, 'Well, we don't kill them, but the nicotine does.' "

The problem for tobacco companies, DeNoble said, is that if you removed nicotine from cigarettes, no one would smoke. You wouldn't crave the high you get from it.

What the company wanted was for DeNoble to create a drug that would still hook people and keep them addicted, without harming the heart.

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KULP: Smoking kills  

There have been some complaints to The Telegraph about the statewide ban on smoking in public places. I find that its both fair and unfair, fair because non-smokers can now go into restaurants and bars and not be choked with smoke, and unfair because I can understand the smokers' feeling that it's an intrusion on their freedom. ...

But smokers might be surprised to learn that as early as 1775 doctors were already publishing medical reports, warning that smoking causes cancer. In an era when life spans were short, when it was rare to find people who lived into the sixties, lung cancer would relentlessly kill them. .. .

For hundreds of years, most people knew or suspected that long-term tobacco use was bad. Yet its use is still a protected right...The fact that its toxic effects are not generally felt until the person is old and relatively less useful in society, makes it a perfect drug and a fabulous moneymaker. The cigarettes you smoke for 40 or so years support governments, farmers, retailers, distributors and on and on. They're good for business. Later, as you finally sicken, the medical and pharmaceutical establishments will make money caring for your last days. And nobody forced you do it! Smoking is good for you.

Where did I get all the above? From a book titled "You Said What? Lies and propaganda throughout history." It was compiled by Bill Fawcett and contains 313 sketches. Among them was the one about smoking that got my attention as a longtime former puffer. It was written by E.J. Neiburger whose title "Smoking is Good for You" is a lie that can kill you.

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Big brains payrolled by Big Tobacco  

IT IS well known that when the dangers of smoking became increasingly obvious in the 1950s, tobacco companies funded scientific research aimed at downplaying the risks. Now, a little-known strand of that campaign, aimed at giving an intellectual gloss to pro-smoking arguments, has been detailed for the first time.

In an attempt to win hearts and minds, the tobacco companies bankrolled a network of economists, philosophers and sociologists. Documents newly scrutinised by academics reveal that members of the network generated extensive media coverage and numerous academic articles - with almost no mention that the work had been paid for by cigarette manufacturers.

"The industry realised it had to affect public opinion," says Anne Landman, an independent tobacco policy expert based in Colorado, who carried out the research with colleagues at the University of California at San Francisco.

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In a One-Man Show, the Essence of Dr. King 

Transforming the black box theater of Luna Stage into an evocative replica of Memphis's Lorraine Motel, circa 1968, was challenge enough for Charlie Corcoran, who designed the sets for "The Man in Room 306. . . .

A strikingly human Dr. King emerges. Exhausted from lack of sleep, hounded by J. Edgar Hoover and the F.B.I. and under siege by white supremacists and the burgeoning Black Power movement, Mr. Edwards's Dr. King wolfs down any morsels of food still left on the room service tray and tries, unsuccessfully, to light a tiny cigarette butt.

"Don't tell Coretta," he begs, admitting that he promised her he would quit.

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A look at smoking in Atlantic City casinos  

Here's a quick look at the history of smoking in Atlantic City casinos:

1978-2007: No restrictions on smoking. Several casinos experiment with non-smoking areas, but most of the floor is fair game for smokers.

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Casino smoking ban timeline 

n Nov. 13, 2006: City Council unanimously introduces an ordinance to ban casino smoking.

n Dec. 30, 2006: City Council reintroduces the smoking ban, adding a deadline of April 15 for the ban to take effect.

n Jan. 24, 2007: After two special hearings on the ban, City Council amends the ban again

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