The Report That Took on Big Tobacco

On a Saturday in January 1964, more than 200 reporters packed into a State Department press conference in Washington, D.C. What they heard changed American life. Surgeon General Luther L. Terry, the nation's top doctor, released the first Report of the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health — and its message was blunt: cigarette smoking causes lung cancer.

The report was the product of a ten-member committee of scientists who had spent fourteen months reviewing more than 7,000 published studies on tobacco and disease. Their conclusions left little room for doubt. Cigarette smoking, they declared, was a cause of lung cancer and laryngeal cancer in men, a probable cause of lung cancer in women, and the most important cause of chronic bronchitis. In the committee's measured official language, smoking was "a health hazard of sufficient importance in the United States to warrant appropriate remedial action."

That action came, step by step. The report made headlines for days and was later ranked among the top news stories of 1964; the New York Public Library would name it one of the 100 "Books of the Century." Congress responded with the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965, putting health warnings on cigarette packs, and in 1969 banned cigarette advertising from television and radio. Dozens of follow-up Surgeon General's reports have tracked the tobacco science ever since, and anti-smoking campaigns, taxes and public smoking bans followed across the decades.

Consider what America looked like before the report landed. In 1964, about 42 percent of American adults smoked regularly. Cigarette ads had run for years in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and doctors themselves lit up in hospitals and offices. Smoking was simply what adults did.

The report did not end tobacco overnight — the industry fought back hard and still sells cigarettes worldwide. But the numbers tell the story of a turning point. By 2012 the share of American adults who smoked had fallen to 18 percent, and researchers estimated that between 1964 and 2012, at least 8 million premature, smoking-related deaths were prevented — eight million people who lived, on average, twenty extra years. One report, one Saturday, millions of lives.

Photo: Surgeon General Luther Terry at the January 11, 1964 press conference releasing the smoking and health report, with members of the advisory committee seated behind him — National Institutes of Health, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).