If we just keep kids from starting to smoke, we'll have this tobacco problem licked, right? Wrong. In Smoked, journalist Mike Males takes you on a tour of the co-optation of a political movement. From the 1960s to the late 1980s, anti-smoking campaigns were designed and run by health activists -- creating major declines in smoking by all age groups. But in the 1990s, political interests took up anti-smoking as a vote-winning crusade, replacing sound health, tax, and regulation strategies with a politically-driven agenda ...
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If we just keep kids from starting to smoke, we'll have this tobacco problem licked, right? Wrong. In Smoked, journalist Mike Males takes you on a tour of the co-optation of a political movement. From the 1960s to the late 1980s, anti-smoking campaigns were designed and run by health activists -- creating major declines in smoking by all age groups. But in the 1990s, political interests took up anti-smoking as a vote-winning crusade, replacing sound health, tax, and regulation strategies with a politically-driven agenda stressing popular sloganeering and calculatedly ineffective programming against "teenage smoking." The failures of this approach (which neatly meshes with industry efforts to promote smoking as "adult, " thereby enticing teens to smoke) have prompted recent calls for a return to effective tax-and-regulate measures. Without them, argues Males, the vote-winning crusade is nothing more than smoke and mirrors.
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