60 years ago, on January 11, 1964, the U.S. Surgeon General’s office released a report entitled “Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General.” It reported that smoking was a direct cause of lung cancer, emphysema, and heart disease. It stated that people who smoked had a 70% increase in mortality rate over those who did not smoke. This report led directly to public policy put in place to reduce smoking. It also had an enormous impact on Americans’ perspective on smoking.
For 30 years before the report on smoking and health was issued, physicians, scientists, and researchers were gathering evidence of the ill effects smoking had on health. In 1961, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the National Tuberculosis Association, and the American Public Health Association banded together and wrote a letter to President Kennedy asking him to form a national commission to research the effects of smoking on Americans. In 1962, the government responded, and Surgeon General Luther Terry put together a committee to research and put together a report on their findings. The committee chosen included members of the four organization who had sent the letter as well as members of the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the American Medical Association, and the Tobacco Institute. The final committee of ten members reviewed over 7,000 scientific articles before writing the report that was released in 1964.
As a direct result of these findings, the U.S. Congress passed the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965 and the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act of 1969. The Labeling and Advertising Act required cigarette manufacturers to include a health warning on packages of cigarettes and banned cigarette companies from advertising on television and radio. The Smoking Act required an annual report to be written on the negative consequences of smoking cigarettes. California was the first state to ban smoking indoors, and many have followed suit.
In addition to prompting public policy, the report changed the way Americans viewed smoking. At the time of the report, it was estimated that approximately 52% of men and 35% of women in the U.S. were regular smokers. Surveys taken in 1958 showed that only 44% of Americans believed that smoking could cause cancer. In 1968, that number rose to 78%. Thanks to this shift, adult smoking rates have decreased from 43% in 1965 to 18% in 2014. Unfortunately, thanks to the advent of e-cigarettes and the branding around them, youth smoking rates have increased 900% from 2011 to 2015. This is, perhaps, the next hurdle in this long campaign begun over 60 years ago.
Learn more here:
- https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/spotlight/nn/feature/smoking
- https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/sgr/history/index.htm
- https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/caac.21210
- https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/consequences-smoking-exec-summary.pdf
- https://e-cigarettes.surgeongeneral.gov/documents/2016_SGR_Exec_Summ_508.pdf