Exhibits Detail Years of Anti-Smoking Cartoons

May 30, 05:06 PM

Current Headlines: By Tom Buckham, The Buffalo News, N.Y.

May 30--In 1963, Surgeon General Luther Terry released "Smoking and Health," which concluded unambiguously that smoking causes lung cancer and other diseases.

Written by 10 medical researchers selected by Terry and the tobacco industry, the slamdunk report, and the heavy media coverage it received, "was supposed to end the debate about the dangers of tobacco that had raged for decades, if not centuries," recalls Dr. Alan Blum.

It did not, of course. As years turned into decades under a still-persistent haze of cigarette smoke, Blum started snipping anti-tobacco editorial cartoons and headlines from the nation's newspapers.

Part of his collection of some 900 drawings is now on display in "Cartoonists Take Up Smoking," an exhibition divided between two locations -- the upper lobby of Roswell Park Cancer Institute and the Gallery at Buffalo Niagara International Airport.

The show includes clippings of stories detailing how the war against smoking was waged and how the industry resisted, as well as cartoonists' skewering of Big Tobacco's tactics, including its "sabotage of clean air legislation and airline smoking bans, to their circumvention of restrictions on advertising," said Blum, director of the University of Alabama's Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society.

One example, a 2001 cartoon by Pulitzer Prize winner Tom Toles of The Buffalo News, lampoons cigarette maker Philip Morris for cloaking its past behind a new name, Altria.

The exhibit "is a walk through time," said Dr. Michael Cummings, chairman of Roswell Park's department of health behavior. Cummings has known Blum since the early 1980s, when Blum, then editor of the New York State Journal of Medicine, devoted two issues to the health threat tobacco posed.

The success of anti-smoking legislation and public-service campaigns in recent years lend a certain irony to that walk, Cummings observed.

When he arrived at Roswell Park in 1981, cigarettes were handed out to arriving patients and sold from vending ma- chines in the hospital. Now, the smoking rate in the state has dropped below 18 percent, and the institute's quit-smoking hotline received 200,000 calls from state residents last year.

The airport segment of "Cartoonists Take Up Smoking" mainly deals with the campaign to ban smoking on airplanes that was launched years ago by flight attendants. If they hadn't stood up to their employers and the tobacco industry, "We'd probably still have people lighting up on airplanes," Cummings said.

Many people who pass the exhibit in the cancer institute already know about the deadly effects of smoking, but that is beside the point, said Terry Alford, coordinator of the Erie-Niagara Tobacco-Free Coalition, based at Roswell Park.

"Our goal is to deglamorize and denormalize smoking whenever we get the opportunity," Alford said.

The exhibit will remain on display at Roswell Park until the end of June; it closes at the airport Thursday.

tbuckham@buffnews.com

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