Page 13 - IAV Digital Magazine #610

When The U.S. Surgeon General Shocked Americans By Announcing That Smoking Kills
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hkuX-RIXh0
By Sonja Anderson
Sixty years ago, about 70
million Americans smoked tobacco. An estimated 42 percent of adults identified them- selves as smokers in 1965, and advertisements for cigarettes were impossible to avoid. Tobacco products were stylish and healthy, manufac- turers insisted, with Camel claim- ing its cigarettes “don’t get your wind” and Old Gold saying its were “fresh as mountain air.”
So it came as a shock to the American public when, on January 11, 1964, their surgeon general appeared on tele- vision saying that smoking tobacco leads to disease and death.
Luther Terry, appointed surgeon general by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, had just reviewed the results of a 14-month study by a committee of top-notch medical scientists. Their conclusions, pre- sented in a 387- page report, were that cigarette smoking is a
major cause of lung cancer, throat cancer and chron- ic bronchitis.
“In short, the com- mittee says if you smoke cigarettes, you increase your chances of dying early,” CBS
News reported at the time. “The sooner you start, the more you smoke, the more you inhale, the worse your chances are.”
The ten-man com- mittee, made up of five smokers and five non-smokers, took questions from reporters at a taped press con- ference announc-
ing their findings. They pointed out that 41,000 Americans died annually from lung cancer—more than the annual number of auto- mobile accident fatalities, which was about 38,000. Overall, about 752,000 Americans died of cigarette-associat- ed causes in 1962 alone, they said. Terry stated clear- ly that he’d advise anybody smoking cigarettes to quit.
This connection between ciga- rettes and cancer wasn’t exactly new: Doctors in America had been paying attention to smoking’s pul- monary effects for decades. As lung surgeon Alton Ochsner wrote in 1939, “Inhaled smoke, constantly repeated over a long period of time, undoubtedly is a source of chronic irritation to the bronchial mucosa.” Researchers also noted an increase in lung cancer cases, but the incline was com- monly attributed to other types of inhaled toxins, like automobile
exhaust, tar fumes and factory smog.
As far back as the 1920s, researchers had recorded the smoking habits of people who devel- oped lung cancer and compared them to cancer- free people. They found strong asso- ciations between smoking and can- cer, so researchers fol- lowed up, begin- ning more studies in the early 1950s—the research that eventually led to the surgeon gen- eral’s report.
1964 marked the government’s arrival to the non- smoking move- ment. A year after the top doctor’s announcement, A merican smok-
ers arrived in stores to find their cigarette boxes stamped with a mandatory warn- ing label: “Caution: Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health.”
That weakly word- ed caution strengthened over the years as pub- lic health officials grew firmer on
their stance that tobacco causes cancer and many other health prob- lems. Now,
the Food and Drug Administration pre scribes 11 differ- ent warning labels for tobacco prod- ucts, complement- ed by deliberately frightening images. “Smoking reduces blood flow to the limbs, which can require amputation,” the labels declare. “Smoking causes head and neck cancer.”
Though it took decades for the number of American smokers to significantly decrease—a trend challenged by
a 1980s
uptick in youth smoking—smok- ing rates have fall- en each year since the surgeon general’s first warning. Between 1941 and 1974, surveyor Gallup a nnually asked Americans if they’d smoked a cigarette in the past week. At least four in ten responded yes in each survey. As of 2024, that number is down to one.
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