Smoking Gun

It is now fifty years since Richard Doll and Bradford Hill first published their preliminary findings linking tobacco smoking with lung cancer. Their cautious conclusion, that ‘smoking is a factor, and an important factor, in the production of carcinoma of the lung’, has been subsequently confirmed by thousands of other studies which have also established connections with heart disease, bronchitis, indigestion and even impotence. The widespread availability of this potentially lethal drug has consequently raised difficult questions about the duties of manufacturers and governments to protect consumers from harmful legal products. The present Labour government’s attempt to ban cigarette advertising is just the latest example in a long history of restrictions on the industry which stretch back at least to the 1965 ban on television advertising.