| "We believe that we have
established with reasonable certainty the existence of a
number of possible health risks associated with cigarette
smoking that the public should be made aware of . . .
Further action, if any, is the individual responsibility
of the ordinary citizens of this country." This is what Don Oakley imagines the Advisory Committee to the U.S. Surgeon General might have recommended in its landmark 1964 report. Smoking and Health. Instead, on the basis of a handful of questionable studies, it called for "appropriate remedial action" on a national scale. The report immediately assumed the status of Holy Writ and "action" was eventually translated into a full-blown crusade that has had profund, pernicious and seemingly endless consequeces on American socieity: the ostracizing of and discrimination against smokers . . . the secondhand smoke hysteria . . . the prostitution of science for the politically correct end of a "smoke-free" society . . . the legal plundering of the tobacco industry . . . and on and on. |
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