Smoked: Why Joe Camel is Still Smiling

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.