Commentary
Every now and then I get together with some friends and smoke cigars. Of course, I’m aware of the health effects of tobacco. In 1967, when I was 12, the first political thing I ever wrote was a speech against tobacco use, given before my seventh-grade class at Franklin Junior High School in Wayne, Mich. (Go, Hornets!)
That was just a couple years after the Surgeon General’s famous 1964 Report on Smoking and Health, the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965, and just before the 1969 Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, which banned tobacco ads on TV and radio.
Students attending schools in California and across America take health classes with copious lessons on the deleterious effects of smoking. Over the years, I’ve examined the textbooks, and the presentation is uncontroversial—unlike, say, topics on abortion or “gender.”…