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Everready Glass Sales Reps Administrative & Professional Jorgensen Brooks Group Counselor Mechanical Komatsu Equipment Co Resident Field Mechanic Administrative & Professional Tucson Urban League CEO/President Finance and Accounting Charles E. Gillman Company Accounting Specialist Trades/Construction RANCHO RESORT MAINTANANCE POSITION OpinionA view from the pastTucson, Arizona | Published: 11.20.2008
Reading microfilm or browsing the yellowed pages of the Star, which has served Southern Arizona since 1877, is a romp through Southern Arizona's history. Occasionally an old editorial makes it seem as if it could have been written yesterday. Or sometimes, as with this editorial from June 26, 1964, it shows how science, ideas and critical thinking have evolved.
Today is the American Cancer Society's annual Great American Smokeout, which is designed to encourage cigarette smokers to quit smoking for at least one day. This editorial, originally with the headline "An unwarranted bureaucratic order," draws attention to the progress of 28 years of science, which proves many of these statements false.
The announcement by the Federal Trade Commission in Washington that it had issued an order requiring that all packages of cigarettes and cigarette advertising must carry the following notice, "all cigarette smoking is dangerous to the health, and may cause death from cancer and other diseases," is such a shocking exercise of bureaucratic arbitrary power that it should be defied.
If it can be done to cigarettes, in time it could be done to pipes, cigars, liquor of all kinds and, at some more distant date, to coffee. Smoking too many cigarettes a day, like taking too many drinks a day, certainly can be injurious to health. That is true, to some extent, of coffee.
On the other hand, moderate smoking of a half-dozen cigarettes a day will not hurt any adult's health. Of course, fools that smoke more than 20 a day will find that it hurts their health and can bring on cancer.
The same is largely true of intoxicating liquor. An ounce or two of liquor a day will not hurt any adult's health, but eight or 10 ounces a day can be most injurious mentally as well as physically.
But these facts pale into insignificance as compared with this exercise of purely arbitrary power by a few bureaucrats, who seem to delight in laying down rules how the people of the country must conduct their private lives and how they must be protected.
It is to be hoped that the tobacco companies will demand that the FTC show where its authority to issue such a far-reaching order comes from, and that they fight it by all legal means. The precedent it sets, if unchallenged, will encourage the FTC to regulate other matters.
1964 editorial wrong; shows progress of ideas, science
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