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SMOKE SCREEN: Tobacco and the Public Welfare by Maurine Neuberger

SMOKE SCREEN: Tobacco and the Public Welfare

By

Pub Date: Nov. 8th, 1963
Publisher: Prentice-Hall

The tobacco industry will welcome this with the kind of wince they reserve for the sound of a rasping cigarette cough. However, the Senator from Oregon has documented in layman's language the case against smoking in a way that should prove more than welcome to the growing number of people concerned with the increasing flow of statistical evidence that relates tobacco addiction to lung cancer and heart disease. ""The cigarette industry is the house that advertising built."" The chapters here list the economic pressures that the hucksters can bring to bear on various media when the houses they build are threatened. If the controllers of communications have been slow or soft pedaling in their discussion of the research damaging to the tobacco trade, Mrs. Neuberger finds that the A.M.A. has been a sleeping giant on the issue. She summarizes the concern that other governments have displayed (most notably anti-tobacco are Denmark and Russia) and suggests the ways in which ours could act. Her recommendations are realistic, centering on the FTC, which controls the loopholes that the cigarette industry has been slowing smoke through for years. Here is a protective concern as this description of the cigarette addict shows -- ""He is not a willful suicide."" This is reasoned, persuasive argument as well as informative.