Smoke filled airplanes and offices 40 years ago when the first surgeon general’s report on the hazards of tobacco was released–on Jan. 11, a Saturday, to minimize the impact on Wall Street.
Today, smoking rates have dropped by half, cigarette ads are banned from radio and television, and many, if not most, smokers have tried to quit.
But health authorities say the decline in smoking rates has reached a plateau.
Women now smoke nearly as much as men. Tobacco marketing exceeds $11 billion a year. States have spent much of their $40 billion windfall in tobacco lawsuit settlement money to balance budgets, not to curb smoking.
Have anti-smoking victories outweighed challenges in the four decades since the landmark report linked smoking to lung cancer, bronchitis and heart disease? Most experts seem to call it a draw.
“The world is certainly a different place,” said Tom Glynn, director of cancer science and trends at the Atlanta-based American Cancer Society, one of the organizations that pushed for the 1964 report. “We’ve moved from total acceptance of tobacco to a situation where virtually everyone, including smokers, is aligned against it.”
Dr. David Satcher, a former surgeon general and current director of the National Center for Primary Care at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, said smoking remains the nation’s leading cause of preventable death.
“Despite all that we know about smoking and health, over 50 million people [in the United States] are still smoking,” he said. “There’s no way to feel comfortable with that.”
About seven weeks after President John Kennedy was assassinated, his surgeon general, Luther Terry, released his landmark 387-page report.
Congress required warning labels on cigarette packages the next year and banned radio and TV ads in 1969. The government required non-smoking sections in airplanes in 1973 and now bans smoking on all U.S. flights.
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The rate of smoking among U.S. adults began a steep decline from about 40 percent in the mid-1960s to about 23 percent today. But smoking rates in the U.S. went down only minimally in the 1990s.
“We have picked the low-hanging fruit,” Glynn said. “We’re working today with a harder core of smokers who have heard the word and are not willing or able to do something about it.”