The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Raleigh's Weed And the Senator The last time I was in Washington I promised Dick Neuberger, the Junior Senator from Oregon, to write something about his...
...So I promised to think about the problem—and in the course of time it really began to bother me...
...For just about fifty years the pleasures of nicotine were a regular feature of my life...
...Of the 564 Seventh Day Adventists who were among the 8,692 hospital patients surveyed, only one was a victim of lung cancer and he had smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for twenty-five years before becoming a member of the Seventh Day Adventist sect...
...Still more ironic, on the day when the bright earnings-picture for American Tobacco was released, the American Cancer Society issued its bulletin...
...which discloses that lung cancer could be largely prevented by abolishing the use of tobacco...
...Athletes and glamor girls are shown as habitual practitioners of the custom...
...it won't do you any good...
...By contrast the earnings of the American Tobacco Company went up 22 per cent in the first quarter of this year, as compared with the first three months of 1957...
...The other evening an old friend of mine said to me: "These are my lungs and if I want to commit suicide, that's my own business...
...Let me quote a paragraph or two from the argument which he presented to the Senate...
...The researchers found that the male patients who abstained from smoking or drinking, because of their religious precepts, suffered lung cancer only one-tenth as frequently and had heart attacks only three-fifths as often as the general male population...
...In my opinion, these claims can do a vast amount of harm by encouraging young men and women to become addicts of the tobacco habit in general and of cigarettes in particular...
...But there are the boys and girls to think about...
...The conclusions regarding the lower incidence of cancer and heart disease among nonusers of tobacco and alcohol were the result of a study of patients in eight Seventh Day Adventist hospitals...
...if other people want to enjoy them and run the risks involved, that's their business...
...When I finally began to crawl out I asked my doctor: "Well, what about this good old pipe...
...The old farm boy who had always been as strong as a horse suddenly collapsed and had to spend three months in bed...
...I don't want to go about preachifying, but it does look as if something ought to be done...
...Virtually all cigarette advertising—particularly on television and radio—is designed to make the use of cigarettes appealing and acceptable to young people...
...THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Raleigh's Weed And the Senator The last time I was in Washington I promised Dick Neuberger, the Junior Senator from Oregon, to write something about his much-discussed speech on the tobacco habit...
...Does this mean that people have money only for soft goods such as cigarettes, and not for durable goods such as automobiles and other merchandise into which steel is fitted...
...You will see what an awkward position I would be in were I to participate in an anti-tobacco campaign...
...Does it mean that the tensions and anxieties of our time are creating men and women who must spend their limited finances first on a drug like cigarettes and on more stable items only after that...
...The taste and smell of good tobacco were comforting and care-dispelling...
...My conviction that this is injurious to our country has been fortified by the recent announcement from the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research that Seventh Day Adventist men, who as a part of their religious beliefs refrain from cigarettes and alcohol, suffer far less from lung cancer and heart attacks than do American males in general...
...But there are American ways of getting at this American attitude...
...Steel Corporation earnings fell off 46 per cent during the same period...
...With a sympathetic grin he replied: "Tobacco is a depressant...
...So that was that...
...For ten years I have lived without the soothing taste of tobacco...
...All of this is important and exciting...
...But when it comes to the advertising of cigarettes and the promotion of the tobacco business, it seems to me that the Senator has a point...
...In another short address at a later date the persistent Senator added: ". the press reported that General Motors profits for the first quarter of the year dropped 29.4 per cent, and that the U.S...
...But I want to shout as loudly as I can that here in America neither the sale of tobacco nor the publishing of advertising can be controlled by law...
...And then heart disease struck...
...I am more convinced than ever of the urgent need to provide the Federal Trade Commission with additional authority to control the misleading and exaggerated claims presently being spread throughout the land by manufacturers of cigarettes...
...Until ten years ago I was a devotee of tobacco, seldom separated from my pipe...
...I don't use tobacco nor alcoholic liquor, but I don't have any holier-than-thou feeling about it...
...I had said to him: "I know that these facts which you are reporting are important, but I hate like the devil to go round telling other people what they ought to do or ought not to do.' Dick had answered: "I feel the same way...
Vol. 41 • June 1958 • No. 26
