September 4, 2024
A new online exhibition created by Dr. Alan Blum, founder and director of The University of Alabama Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society (CSTS), was featured in the July 26 issue of The Cancer Letter.
The exhibition of nearly 40 items from the Center’s collection, “Smoke Rings: Tobacco and the Olympics,” reveals ways in which the tobacco industry tried to associate cigarette smoking with the Olympic Games throughout the 20th Century.
In 1928, Olympic swimming champion Helen Wainwright appeared in an advertisement for The American Tobacco Company’s Lucky Strike cigarettes, claiming “They’re great. They have never affected my throat, and they taste fine.” A decade later, the headline of an advertisement for R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company’s Camel cigarettes would proclaim,“‘Camels don’t get your wind,’” Olympic Champions say.” In 1960, Kent cigarettes was the sponsor of TV coverage of the Summer and Winter Olympic Games, “the greatest network sports advertising campaign in the history of cigarette advertising,” according to the P. Lorillard Tobacco Company, the maker of Kent and Newport cigarettes.
The Cancer Letter is an independent national weekly news publication widely read by the oncology community. This is the ninth exhibition by the Center featured in The Cancer Letter’s Cancer History Project series. Several of these exhibitions, including “Smoke Rings,” were designed by Bryce Callahan, a UA senior undergraduate student majoring in computer engineering.
Blum was also quoted in a recent investigative news story by The Examination, an independent nonprofit science and health news publication. The article, “Big Tobacco was forced to stop marketing ‘low-tar’ cigarettes. In China, sales are booming,” explores ways that the state-owned China tobacco monopoly has continued to promote low-tar cigarettes as a safer alternative to regular cigarettes to dissuade smokers from quitting. Blum said this strategy, once used in the United States, has since been discontinued, adding that low-tar cigarettes are just as harmful as cigarettes.
In August, CSTS was selected as one of four partnering centers of the C. Everett Koop Institute at Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine. The institute advances health and well-being through research, education and policy efforts and promotes humanism in the practice of medicine. Blum was the closing plenary speaker at the 14th annual Koop Tobacco Conference in September 2023.
CSTS is housed within the College of Community Health Sciences, where Blum holds the Gerald Leon Wallace, MD, Endowed Chair in Family Medicine. CSTS holds the largest collection of original documents, artifacts, photographs and print and broadcast news coverage of the tobacco industry, cigarette marketing and anti-smoking activities from the 19th Century to the present. Through online exhibitions, an oral history project and original presentations and publications, the Center explores historical and contemporary aspects of tobacco from all angles.
