Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13680

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Clarke SH.
Cigarettes, alcohol, and the question of corporate responsibility.
Rev Am Hist 2007 Dec; 35:(4):636-41
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/reviews_in_american_history/v035/35.4clarke.html

Abstract:

Between 1964 and 1976, Congress passed several pieces of legislation designed to impose new responsibilities on American corporations. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act banned discrimination by employers on account of race, national origin, religion, and sex. Congress sought to protect consumers through legislation such as the Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1970 and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, which banned discrimination by creditors on account of sex or marital status. Other bills dealt with the environment, including the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972. They demanded that corporations invest in new technologies in order to stop emitting pollutants. More legislation addressed questions of health and safety, such as the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966, the Flammable Fabrics Act of 1967, and the Consumer Product Safety Act of 1970.1 With the notable exception of the Civil Rights Act, historians have begun only recently to investigate the origins and implications of much of this legislation.2 How effectively have elected officials dealt with questions of corporate responsibility? Pamela Pennock addresses this topic in her study of the regulation of tobacco and alcohol advertising during the period from 1950 to 1990.

Tobacco and alcohol are important case studies. After all, they represent the two most pervasive legal drugs in the late twentieth century. In 1965, at least 40 percent of consumers smoked cigarettes (p. 230). And, for the year 1999, an estimated 65 percent of Americans drank beer, wine, or hard liquor. Pennock quotes a 1971 editorial from the New York Times: “This country’s worst drug problem-in terms of numbers of individuals seriously affected, annual economic loss and similar indices-is neither heroin nor marijuana nor any other of the drugs newly come to fashion. Rather it is that terrible old and reliable destroyer of lives: alcohol” (p. 173).

Rather than ban the substances, Americans tried at various times to restrict their advertisements. Pennock thus focuses on the politics of advertising [End Page 636] regulation and she divides her book into three parts. Part One examines the effort to ban alcohol advertising between 1947 and 1958. Part Two traces efforts to restrict tobacco advertising during the 1960s. Part Three returns to alcohol advertising, examining legislative debates from the 1970s and 1980s. In each part, Pennock traces what she calls the efforts of “marketing control movements” to promote legislation restricting advertisements, on one hand, and efforts by corporations to publish what they wished, on the other…

Keywords:
Publication Types: Historical Article MeSH Terms: Advertising as Topic/history* Advertising as Topic/legislation & jurisprudence Alcohol Drinking/prevention & control* Government Regulation/history History, 20th Century History, 21st Century Legislation as Topic/history* Politics* Social Responsibility Tobacco Industry/history* United States

Notes:

Review of:
Pamela E. Pennock. Advertising Sin and Sickness: The Politics of Alcohol and Tobacco Marketing, 1950–1990. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007. vii + 282 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $36.00.