Smoking and Health
Surgeon General releases the landmark Smoking and Health report
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗About 200 reporters were held in a locked session long enough to read it. The Saturday release was chosen to blunt the stock market and catch the Sunday papers.
A press lockup at the State Department
On Saturday 11 January 1964, U.S. Surgeon General Luther L. Terry publicly released Smoking and Health, the report of his ten-member advisory committee.
At a State Department press conference, roughly 200 reporters received the report, studied it during a controlled lockup, and then questioned Terry and administration officials.
The committee had spent fourteen months on it, considering more than 7,000 biomedical articles with the help of 155 consultants, after President Kennedy requested an authoritative review.
What the committee concluded
It found that cigarette smoking caused lung and laryngeal cancer in men, was probably a cause of lung cancer in women, and was the most important cause of chronic bronchitis. Cigarette smoking was associated with 70 percent higher all-cause mortality among men.
It judged smoking a sufficiently important U.S. health hazard to warrant remedial action.
It also drew lines: the evidence was not held sufficient to establish causation for coronary heart disease or emphysema, and the mechanism behind lower infant birth weight was described as unknown.
Not "may be hazardous," and not the first word
The listing's phrasing understates the document. This was the language of causation, not of possibility.
It was also not the U.S. government's first acknowledgment of the smoking–lung-cancer relationship: Surgeon General Leroy Burney had stated the Public Health Service position in 1957 and published another statement in 1959.
And no law took effect that Saturday. The report led the news; the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act came in 1965.
Sources
Researched 24 Aug 2026 5 sources not yet audited
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