SMOKING : SLOWLY TAKING YOUR BREATH AWAY
LOUISVILLE SMOKING BAN - A RETROSPECTIVE AUTHOR Robert Powell , MD
This is not a scientific paper . It is not a chronology . This is a story about an improbable social shift and how it occurred . Let me set the stage .
I grew up in the 1940s and 50s in a small town in Western Kentucky . Women didn ’ t smoke in public . Men smoked almost everywhere . They did not smoke in the church building or in the city school . They smoked on the sidewalk and the church steps just before services and just about any other time or place . Smoking was the norm . In the movies , the bad guys and the good guys smoked . The starlets smoked , remembering that a lady does not walk around with a lit cigarette . Even the chaplains smoked .
But not just smoking : tobacco was ingrained , it was indelibly our culture . Every farm had a tobacco “ base ” allowing a certain amount of tobacco to be grown each year . Most farms had a tobacco barn for the storing and curing of the crop . The smoke and smell of curing dark fired tobacco was as much a part of autumn as leaves changing colors . There was the equipment needed to plant , care for and harvest the crop . There were jobs with pay to do the hard work required . There were government bureaucrats to measure and grant allotment of the plots to each farm . There were tobacco warehouses and auctions , all employing people in jobs from secretaries to accountants . There was always tinkering , keeping the trucks and farm machinery rolling and working .
At the farm level , tobacco money was for Christmas and that year ’ s new pair of shoes . For many others , it was employment with a weekly paycheck and economic security . In the town it was tobacco warehouses . In the cities it was cigarette manufacturing .
At one time , one out of six cigarettes manufactured in the world was made in Louisville , Kentucky . The manufacturing companies were prominent , wealthy and influential corporate citizens . A hospital I know felt obligated to ask the tobacco company donor if it was okay to remove the cigarette machines from the hospital cafeteria . Fortunately , they said yes . That hospital had already stopped selling tobacco products in its pharmacy .
I have long thought that the event “ Light Up Louisville ,” sponsored by a tobacco company , was meant to be “ Light Up , Louisville ” sending the subliminal message to smoke more .
In short , tobacco was and still is a big business , one that rests on the shoulders of smokers while destroying their health - and as we came to find out , that of those around them .
Few accepted the fact that the combustion products , the smoke , associated with the addictive chemical nicotine , was as harmful to health in so many ways as it is . The medical literature was saying it , but it was not in the public mind until 1964 . On January 11 , 1964 , the first surgeon general report on smoking and health ( which many of us thought should have been “ smoking or health ”) was published by Surgeon General Luther L . Terry , MD . The report concluded that tobacco smoking was a cause of lung and laryngeal cancer in men and a probable cause of lung cancer in women and the most important cause of chronic bronchitis .
With this authoritative opinion in view , the push to educate and urge children not to start smoking and for smokers to stop smoking strengthened . But , against the advertising and money of Big Tobacco , the public acceptance of smoking and the attitude that if the individual smoker wished to harm themselves , they were certainly free to do so , progress was limited .
Then in 1986 the surgeon general ’ s report on the health consequences of involuntary smoking published its findings :
- Involuntary smoking is a cause of disease including lung cancer in healthy non-smokers .
- Compared with children of non-smoking parents , children
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