Search Results

This chapter examines the experiences of three US industries — chemical manufacturing, tobacco, and nuclear power — that came under political, legal, and rhetorical attack following World War II, and identifies cross-cutting patterns in the public and private interests who besieged the industries, and in how they responded. At varying times and with few notable exceptions, the conflicts progressed through five stages: industry success and optimism following the war; sustained challenges by social movements; increasing regulatory control by a ‘new social’ regulatory regime in the early 1970s; new, specialized accommodationist public relations strategies and tactics; and involvement in large-scale tort regulation. Unlike most studies of alleged and real corporate malfeasance, this chapter considers both corporate and anti-corporate interests and actions, and suggests a framework for understanding post-World-War-II political economy more broadly.

The international public health community, led by the World Health Organization (WHO), as well as other governmental and non-governmental institutions, remain committed to the containment of the tobacco epidemic. This commitment was evinced by the entry into force in 2005 of the landmark global public health Treaty, the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC). With the establishment of this legally binding instrument addressing a wide range of tobacco supply and demand measures, the fight against the global spread of tobacco use driven by the tobacco industry's exploitation of globalization is now rooted in a set of baseline international norms. This chapter outlines the manner by which the tobacco industry manipulates globalization in its attempt to derail public health programmes combating tobacco consumption; and describes the WHO's efforts in formulating counteractive measures to protect public health interests from that of the tobacco industry. Specifically, the chapter focuses on measures taken in relation to the WHO FCTC's provisions concerning the mitigation of tobacco industry interference and the strengthening of a global regulatory framework for tobacco products.

This chapter traces the history of what Sir Peter Froggatt, Chair of the Independent Scientific Committee on Smoking and Health, writing in the 1980s, called the strategy of ‘systematic gradualism’.. This became the major public health and industry area of interest from the 1950s through to the 1970s. By this term, Sir Peter was referring to scientifically informed strategies aimed at reducing the risk and harm drawing on relationships with industry. Topics discussed in this chapter include the Medical Research Council's tobacco benefaction-funded research programme, the Tobacco Manufacturers Standing Committee and research, the work of the Harrogate laboratories, and research carried forwards within the Imperial Group.

This chapter reviews the evolving economic and social system sustaining the growing tobacco epidemic in order to identify how globalization is affecting the industry, governments, and tobacco control advocates. It is divided into four main sections. The first section recalls key historical events that led to the worldwide prominence of tobacco use and the global rise of tobacco-related death and disease. The second section examines scientific evidence regarding the health effects of active and passive smoking and reviews the globalization of the public health response to the tobacco epidemic. The third section describes the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) negotiating process and final treaty text. The fourth section analyzes some of the remaining major challenges resulting from working within a global system, in particular, those challenges associated with developing coherent domestic and international policies and the permanent need to anticipate the unintended consequences of national and global regulations. The chapter concludes by identifying new directions and resources for global tobacco control and predicting some of the main challenges that lie ahead.

This chapter illustrates the tobacco industry's efforts over the last fifty years to deceive the public against the adverse health effects of smoking and the fact that nicotine was a drug or that it was addictive. It presents in chronological order, the industry commentary, some public, but most secret.

This chapter discusses the legal and policy interventions for preventing and controlling tobacco use. It reviews legal authorities that affect tobacco use at the federal, state, and local levels, and considers key developments in tobacco litigation. The chapter discusses legal issues and controversies such as reducing youth access to tobacco, reducing exposure to second hand smoke, and the regulation of tobacco advertising and promotion.

Litigation plays at least six different roles in tobacco control. First, the most common and least dramatic role is ordinary enforcement of tobacco-control laws. Second, too frequently governments enforce tobacco-control laws sporadically or not at all, creating the opportunity for NGOs either to bring law enforcement actions directly or to sue their governments to force them to do their job, depending on whether courts will permit NGOs to take such actions. Third, tobacco companies increasingly use litigation to thwart effective tobacco control legislation and programmes, typically arguing that constitutional provisions or other controlling law pre-empts such measures. Fourth, lawsuits and administrative proceedings have been brought by smoke-sensitive individuals against employers and places of public accommodation, seeking protection from second-hand smoke or compensation for illnesses caused or exacerbated by exposure to second-hand smoke. Fifth, many lawsuits have been brought by individuals, groups or classes of individuals, and third-party health care payers against the tobacco companies, seeking compensation for tobacco-caused illness, death, and/or out-of-pocket economic costs. Sixth, governments occasionally attempt to enforce general laws (e.g., against racketeering) against tobacco companies, alleging that deceptive and illegal practices by the industry have harmed the general public. Unlike ordinary law enforcement, these cases seek court orders requiring fundamental changes in the way these companies do business. Each of these roles has implications for social change. This chapter discusses each of these in turn, with the most attention devoted to the cases against the tobacco industry. It also looks at the role that legislation can play in encouraging or discouraging tobacco litigation. It concludes with a brief discussion of how tobacco control would have been different in the past in the absence of litigation, and how litigation may affect the course and success of tobacco control in the future.

In this chapter Mary Neuburger provides a historical analysis of tobacco consumption in postwar Bulgaria, with a focus on the activities and successes of the state tobacco monopoly, Bulgartabak (BT). BT offers an important example of an island of extraordinary entrepreneurial success within a Bloc economy, by an enterprise that was remarkably responsive to consumer needs. By the late 1950s, BT was a major producer of cigarettes for a domestic and Bloc population with dramatically rising smoking rates. Increased smoking, of course, was a global phenomenon in the postwar period. But while this was driven by corporate marketing in the West, socialist states and official enterprises like BT actively provided the products and venues that translated into a rapid increase in smoking behind the Iron Curtain. By the later decades of the period, however, socialist regimes launched anti-smoking campaigns and restrictions even as they continued to enable a smoking society. In Bulgaria, in particular, state efforts to quell smoking were always overshadowed by the importance of BT, whose continued success in the 1970s and 1980s was in large part a result of exchanges with Western companies and selective appropriation of technologies. At the same time BT achievements were also clearly predicated on the enabling structures of the Bulgarian socialist economy, Bloc trade and, most importantly, their ability to successfully respond to Bloc smokers—through taste tests, research on flavor and blend, and elaborate changes in packaging and branding. Far from “dictating needs” BT was always attune to Bloc tastes.

Chapters 4 and 5 examine the changing political context of tobacco in Kentucky through an analysis of the Kentucky Department of Agriculture (KDA) newsletter in order to understand the rhetorical decisions made by the state in response to the changing political status of the tobacco industry and therefore tobacco production. Chapter 5 begins in the late 1960s with the shift to an overt rhetoric of tobacco heritage and traces the erasure of tobacco—now a stigmatized crop—almost entirely from the pages of the KDA newsletter by the end of the twentieth century, even as it continued to contribute to the Kentucky farm economy and to the livelihoods of thousands of Kentucky farm families. The chapter ends with a discussion of tobacco “heritage” today; examples include public art, tobacco festivals, and media representations.

The Surgeon General's Report of 1964 marks a watershed in the history of public health. Following its publication, both the science and the practice of public health were visibly transformed. This chapter traces the clinical and epidemiological progress in knowledge about smoking and health harm, and the institutional history of the Report. In establishing cigarette smoking as the preeminent public health issue of the second half of the 20th century, the federal government established new responsibilities and authority for science and health in the consumer culture. Surgeons General since have used the authority of their office to shape the policy context of subsequent tobacco regulation.

This chapter explores the social and cultural transformations that coincided with the growth of the tobacco industry in Bulgaria during the period 1878–1914. In 1892, Bulgaria was still an amalgam of elements, not yet untangled from the Ottoman past and still trying to negotiate a future within Europe. This was a process that would unfold, among other ways, through internal and international economic relationships and commodity exchange. By the 1890s tobacco was a central player in such interactions as one of the few highly valuable and marketable Bulgarian commodities with an immediate potential for export growth. This chapter charts the rapid expansion of tobacco cultivation, processing, and commerce in Bulgaria that began in the late nineteenth century and how tobacco came to play a central role in the country's economy and social life. It also examines how tobacco became embroiled in Bulgarian politics as well as social and ethnic conflict and concludes by discussing the impact of World War I on Bulgarian tobacco.

Part I of this chapter describes some of the activities that some food and beverage corporations routinely engage in as part of their ‘health and wellness’ strategies. Specific changes in food industry policies can favourably impact dietary practices and nutritional status, and therefore contribute to reductions in the risk of cardiovascular disease and chronic disease in both the medium and long term. These changes focus on product reformulation and the promotion of physical activity and healthy lifestyles. A case study of PepsiCo's 2010 goals and commitments is presented. Part II evaluates the food industry's tactics and potentially adverse effects on public health. Lessons from the tobacco and other industries are applied to the food industry, using material drawn from PepsiCo's proposals. The analysis suggests that food companies may be replicating several of the tactics used by tobacco companies to promote a positive image and influence research as part of an effort to reduce the prospects for public regulation and taxation.

This chapter examines how the tobacco industry, led by the Bulgarian state tobacco monopoly Bulgartabak, fared under communism. The Bulgartabak leadership propelled the tobacco concern to a place of prestige in the international circles of global tobacco. Ever attuned to Soviet and Bloc tastes, Bulgaria became the biggest exporter of cigarettes in the world between 1966 and 1988 (or in some years second only to the United States). About 90 percent of Bulgartabak's cigarette exports went to its closest trading partner and political ally, the Soviet Union. This chapter considers the role played by the tobacco industry in the integration of Muslims into Bulgarian socialist society as well as in domestic and international political dynamics. It also discusses the growth of tobacco export trade and concludes by assessing the collapse of communism in Bulgaria, which signaled the end of the Bulgartabak empire.

This chapter examines the repercussions of Bulgaria's trade relations with Nazi Germany for tobacco merchants. Bulgarian–German commercial partnership, in which the tobacco trade was central, provided one of the foundations for Bulgaria's entry into World War II on the Axis side. German trade with Bulgaria and other countries in Eastern Europe expanded rapidly in the course of the 1930s as a part of Nazi Gross-raumwirtshaft (greater German economic space). Even before Bulgaria became an Axis state, Jews were gradually shut out of the tobacco trade by Nazi dictate. This chapter considers how the Bulgarian state was compelled to marshal not only its troops but also its tobacco industry as part of its Axis war effort, as well as its impact on the country's Jewish tobacco merchants such as Jacques Asseof. It also discusses the Nazis' attempts to limit smoking in Bulgaria, the rise of anti-Semitism in the country, and the deportation of Bulgarian Jews to the provinces during the war.

Chapters 4 and 5 examine the changing political context of tobacco in Kentucky through an analysis of the Kentucky Department of Agriculture (KDA) newsletter in order to understand the rhetorical decisions made by the state in response to the changing political status of the tobacco industry and therefore tobacco production. Chapter 4 begins in the 1940s and ends with the late 1960s, a period in which the coverage of tobacco in the newsletter moved from the treatment of tobacco as a symbolically self-evident farm commodity that was highly valued despite the tumultuous character of the industry, to a tradition that was valorized and defended as essential to the Kentucky economy.

This chapter focuses on the health consequences to dealers of secondhand smoke. Smoke scared all the dealers interviewed. Tied to the gaming tables, they literally ate smoke, hour after hour, year after year. They could ask customers not to smoke or to hold their cigarettes away from the table, but most were reluctant to do that as it might impact their tips or cost them their jobs. An in-depth look at the hundreds of thousands of internal documents from the tobacco industry housed at the University of California, San Francisco Medical School revealed an entire world—well-funded and religiously kept secret—of legal, research, and public relations strategies carefully designed by the tobacco and gaming industries to keep Nevadans smoking and state regulations at bay. Secondhand smoke was indeed a larger and much more deadly story.

This chapter examines how the World Health Organization (WHO), under the leadership of Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland, was able to overcome the most pressing financial difficulties and regain some of its authority over global health programs by strategically adapting to the principles of neoliberalism. It considers the WHO's efforts to accommodate the interests of the private sector and reinvent the organization as a business-friendly venue, in part by avoiding antagonizing an industry even when important health issues were at stake. It also discusses the WHO's strategic resistance in two instances: a global campaign against the tobacco industry as part of its antismoking mission, and the WHO's opposition to the pharmaceutical sector in the dispute over intellectual property protection and access to antiretroviral drugs.

This chapter focuses on the history of tobacco use in Major League Baseball (MLB). It begins with the story of Bill Tuttle, who chewed tobacco anywhere from ten to twelve hours a day for more than forty years and eventually developed oral cancer. A seemingly endless series of operations left Tuttle badly disfigured. In the spring of 1996, Tuttle, now head of the National Spit Tobacco Education Program (NSTEP), spearheaded a crusade to warn Major Leaguers about the dangers of smokeless tobacco. This chapter examines baseball's historical connection to the tobacco industry, first by tracing the beginnings of marketing tobacco through baseball. It then discusses the debate that arose in the late 1950s and early 1960s over athletic endorsements of tobacco products due to evidence linking smoking with carcinogenic effects. It also considers how the tobacco industry latched onto the notion, supported by dubious medical evidence, that smokeless tobacco was a safe alternative to cigarettes. Finally, it reflects on how the fight over tobacco products in baseball played out at the end of the twentieth century.