Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Legal Approaches to Smoking Deterrence

Legal Approaches to Smoking Deterrence Diana Chapman Walsh Health Policy Institute, and School of Public Health, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215 Nancy P. Gordon Division of Health Policy, Research, and Education, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 As a target of opportunity for public health action, smoking stands alone. The scientific indictment has been so compellingly constructed that it exemplifies how painstaking research can weave around an initially observed correlation, strand-by-strand, a web of causation so ineluctable that all it lacks is "a signed confession from the cigarette" (5). The health and human costs are so clear that most of the 55 million cigarette smokers in the United States freely voice the wish that they could stop. The economic trade-offs are so stark that the present lifetime value of quitting for heavily smoking men under age 45 is about $34,000 in reduced risks of lung cancer, coronary heart disease, and emphyse­ ma alone, according to one estimate (47a). And the political situation has evolved to the remarkable point where the Secretary of Health and Human Services in a most ardent free market and antitax administration could float the proposition that the government exact a kind of users' tax on cigarettes, to aid in the http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Annual Review of Public Health Annual Reviews

Legal Approaches to Smoking Deterrence

Walsh, D C; Gordon, N P
Annual Review of Public Health , Volume 7 (1) – May 1, 1986
Download PDF
23 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/annual-reviews/legal-approaches-to-smoking-deterrence-l9l44Dm4qx
Publisher
Annual Reviews
Copyright
Copyright 1986 Annual Reviews. All rights reserved
Subject
Review Articles
ISSN
0163-7525
eISSN
1545-2093
DOI
10.1146/annurev.pu.07.050186.001015
pmid
3521640
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Diana Chapman Walsh Health Policy Institute, and School of Public Health, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215 Nancy P. Gordon Division of Health Policy, Research, and Education, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 As a target of opportunity for public health action, smoking stands alone. The scientific indictment has been so compellingly constructed that it exemplifies how painstaking research can weave around an initially observed correlation, strand-by-strand, a web of causation so ineluctable that all it lacks is "a signed confession from the cigarette" (5). The health and human costs are so clear that most of the 55 million cigarette smokers in the United States freely voice the wish that they could stop. The economic trade-offs are so stark that the present lifetime value of quitting for heavily smoking men under age 45 is about $34,000 in reduced risks of lung cancer, coronary heart disease, and emphyse­ ma alone, according to one estimate (47a). And the political situation has evolved to the remarkable point where the Secretary of Health and Human Services in a most ardent free market and antitax administration could float the proposition that the government exact a kind of users' tax on cigarettes, to aid in the

Journal

Annual Review of Public Health – Annual Reviews

Published: May 1, 1986

There are no references for this article.