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Great american smokeout 25 years mark
Cigarettes have rarely delivered what they promised:
"Making smoking ’safe’ for smokers." (Bonded Tobacco Company)
Cigarettes are safe?
"For Digestion’s Sake - Smoke Camels." (Camel Cigarettes)
Smoking Aids Digestion?
"More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette." (Camel Cigarettes)
They do?
"Women have been feminine since Eve, now cigarettes are feminine." (Eve Cigarettes)
They are?
"Just what the doctor ordered." (L&M Cigarettes)
Right.
And as consumers have wised up over the past 40 years to what they’re really getting in a pack of cigarettes—larynx, mouth, esophagus, and lung cancer; increased risk of lung disease, heart attack, and stroke—society’s attitudes toward smoking have changed.
It has been hard to ignore the evidence as study after study linked tobacco and smoke to a host of deadly diseases.
Beginning with the American Cancer Society’s (ACS) Hammond-Horn study in 1954, demonstrating the effect of cigarette smoking on death rates from cancer and other diseases, the tide was starting to turn against tobacco.
The Hammond-Horn study contributed to the Surgeon General’s 1964 report that led to warning labels on tobacco products—but not in advertisements for them. That came in 1972, two years after tobacco ads were banned from television and radio.
A Single Request Begets a National Event
The town of Randolph, Mass., became a microcosm for this change.
"Kids used to come into my office after school, and one day we were talking about college," says Arthur P. Mullaney, a former guidance counselor at Randolph High School. "I said, ’you know, if I could have a nickel for every cigarette butt I see outside we’d have enough money to send all of you to college.’"
"If we stopped the town from smoking and took the proceeds that would have been spent on cigarettes," Mullaney tells ACS News Today, "we’d have a scholarship fund." And that is what Mullaney and a core group students set out to do.
"I called it ’Smokeout’," says Mullaney. "And we had a saying—’light up a student’s future, not a cigarette.’"
A Town Calls it Quits
Mullaney accepts credit for coining the term, but says it was really the kids who made it happen. This initial brainstorm took place in October or November, he says.
The students planned to have the town’s Smokeout—whose population at that time Mullaney estimates was between 18,000 and 26,000—for a day during a week-long break they had in February of the next year.
"This was the first time a town in the US quit smoking," he says.
"From a group of five or six students that talked about the idea, it turned into a group of 600—over half the school." And it wasn’t just the kids. "The whole town got in on it. It really caught the enthusiasm of people," he says.
A department store owner who had a couple of cigarette machines invited some of the students to come down with a truck and take the machines to the dump, Mullaney says. He also had his art department print signs for the kids’ campaign.
"There must’ve been two hundred, two hundred fifty signs, all over town," he says.
Another store owner who had a long counter display of tobacco products let the kids drape it in black fabric. The students went door to door through neighborhoods with pins that said, ’please don’t smoke,’ and asked people to make a donation instead.
"If the person agreed, they got a pin," he says. Mullaney, a member of the local Rotary club, got them to sponsor a bank account for the money the students raised.
The students raised $4,500 the first year, and about $5,000 the year after. They formed a committee that would select the scholarship recipients and how much they would get.
American Cancer Society Joins the Effort
"By the third year, I got a call from someone at the American Cancer Society," he says. "They helped with the marketing." The Society brought out players from the [Boston] Celtics and [New England] Patriots—"they had connections," he says, but they really stayed in the background and let the kids run the show.
"It was the first program that got the media response it did," he says. "Anti-smoking was just beginning. That was the first loud clamor, the initial shot...That was the Class of 1970. I was a part of that."
Smokeout Outgrows Randolph
A few years later Minnesota newspaper editor Lynn R. Smith of the Monticello Times spearheaded the state’s first D-Day, or Don’t Smoke Day. The idea caught on quickly across the state, and across the country.
The ACS’ California Division renamed the event the Great American Smokeout in 1976. It went national a year later, when nearly a million smokers in the US quit for a day.
"I knew it was important," Mullaney says. "It was too big for one town. It’s where it should be. It’s now a signature program."
On Nov. 15, 2001, Smokeout will be 25 years old. In the past it has been celebrated with rallies and parades, and has been chaired by celebrities like Sammy Davis Jr, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, and Mr. Potato Head.
Schools, workplaces, military installations, and legislative halls feature "cold turkey" menu items to further the "quit" message—if you can quit for a day, you can quit for good.
In a 1997 letter to then-President Bill Clinton, newspaper editor Smith wrote in his newspaper column: "In your State of the Union address in 1996 you said, ’One of the most important things we can do...is to protect our children from what is rapidly becoming the single greatest threat to their health—cigarette smoking and tobacco addiction’...Some will say nothing can be done to curb teen smoking. They are wrong."
Adult Smoking on the Decline
Progress is evident—70 million Americans once smoked. Though an estimated 47 million adults in the US still smoke, and teen smoking seems to be on the rise, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report says adult smoking is on the decline.
The shift in public perception can be seen in landmarks like the 1977 ban on smoking in public places in Berkeley, Calif., the federal ban on smoking on interstate buses and domestic flights in 1990, and the 1999 Master Settlement Agreement requiring tobacco companies to pay $206 billion to 45 states to cover Medicaid costs of treating smokers.
"Those are just a few of the remarkable changes in the age-old acceptance of smoking as our cultural norm," says Dileep G. Bal, MD, MPH, immediate past president of the ACS.
"What we have been doing can be characterized as the demoralization of smoking as an acceptable behavior, and positioning it for what it really is—a killer of nearly half a million Americans every year," he says.
Smoking is the most preventable cause of death in our society. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death for men and women, and this year there will be about 169,500 new cases diagnosed in the US. More than 80% of lung cancers are thought to result from smoking.
About the author:
http://www.cancer.org
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