Smoked: Why Joe Camel is Still Smiling (Read & Resist Series) [Hardcover]

Mike A Males (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The more you think you know about the war against juvenile smoking the more you need to read this book. Has the anti youth smoking effort been effective -- or counterproductive? Could the self-styled experts be remarkably wrong? This politically incorrect, enjoyable read could spark the debate that leads to a better understanding and possibly to success." -- Dr. C. Everett Koop, US Surgeon General from 1981-1989

Product Details

• Hardcover: 150 pages
• Publisher: Common Courage Press (September 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1567511732
• ISBN-13: 978-1567511734
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 4.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,790,910 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Where's Dr. Koop when we need him?, May 24, 2000

By 

Phelps Gates (Chapel Hill, NC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Smoked: Why Joe Camel is Still Smiling (The Read & Resist Series) (Paperback)

Whatever happened to the smoke-free society we were supposed to have by 2000? The author's thesis (which he convincingly backs up with facts and figures) is that we've been bamboozled by the tobacco industry. Instead of the sensible campaigns (led by Everett Koop, for example) to make smoking (by anybody!) socially inappropriate, which actually did bring smoking down, the tobacco folks are now concentrating on a campaign to criminalize teenage smoking..... this gets adult smokers off the hook and has actually increased teenage smoking by making it an "adult" thing to do! No wonder Philip Morris sponsors all those anti-teen-smoking ads: they've actually increased smoking more than the old cigarette ads did! Should be required reading for members of Congress (though I'm not optimistic that it will have much impact, alas).

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Short and sweet..., February 26, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Smoked: Why Joe Camel is Still Smiling (The Read & Resist Series) (Paperback)

What I found most interesting about this paper (calling it a book is an exaggeration) is that it focuses its lucid and rabid attacks where they belong: on the hopelessly flaccid anti-smoking lobby and not the tobacco industry itself. If anything, Males's charts, graphs, and refreshing commentary gave me a grudging respect for the industry's ability to use bribery, politics, and moral outrage to make everyone fall into step.

In the end, though, Smoked didn't change my ambivalent feelings toward tobacco. Partly this was because Males's uncharacteristically general discussion of the financial `cost' of smoking contributed to my suspicion that it's a myth. I was left wondering if increased healthcare costs are more than offset by the early deaths of users, the fact that tobacco is the most heavily taxed consumer product in the world, and the hundreds of thousands of jobs the industry creates. Of course there are the incalculable human costs, but hey, lots of things are bad for you.

The anger you take away from these pages will more likely be aimed at the anti-smoking lobby, which has missed every opportunity to actually reduce tobacco use and in many ways have allowed themselves to be manipulated into promoting it. Tobacco is not a public health issue in the U.S., it's a political issue. And as such, it will always be with us.

4.0 out of 5 stars Well worth reading, but remember 1999 is the year this came out., January 2, 2012

By 

Sailor Barsoom - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Smoked: Why Joe Camel is Still Smiling (The Read & Resist Series) (Paperback)

We've had everything from 9-11 to the Iraq War to the first black president to electronic cigarettes since then. Teen smoking, adult smoking, and middle-aged vaping are all likely quite different now than in the late Nineties.

I'll be reading more of Males' stuff, though, because he's willing to look into the real numbers and tell us the cold, hard truth: young people aren't as f-ed up as we like to think they are.