Information versus Power Approaches to Understanding the History of Cigarettes

Audience: Tobacco Control professional

Key Points: Tobacco industry has manipulated key power centers

Educational Experience: Learn more about how to reduce the sale of cigarettes

Benefits: Learn how Cigarettes are Kept Socially Acceptable

Most approaches to tobacco control concentrate on the information available to consumers, ignoring the extent to which the tobacco industry has manipulated political institutions.  Here I look at several examples of how the industry has exerted power over social institutions, including the pharmaceutical industry, the U.S. military, the insurance industry, the American Law Institute, the American Medical Association, and the U.S. Congress and the Presidency, all for the purposes of buttressing the social acceptability of selling and smoking cigarettes.  The point is made that to better understand the persistence of smoking, we need to understand the myriad and diverse strategies used by the industry to manipulate cigarette rhetoric, legislation, litigation, and popular and scientific media.  The point is also made that we have to understand how much of the industry’s political muscle has been devoted to framing debates in such a way as to marginalize those kinds of policies that would be most likely to result in lowered smoking rates.  Finally, the point is made that we need to be more creative in the kinds of alternatives we imagine to a world where the selling of cigarettes is regarded as socially unobjectionable.