Parting Shot: A Historian of the War on Tobacco Reveals How and Why the AMA Deserted

Eric Solberg, vice president of academic and research affairs at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at Houston, and formerly executive assistant to the president of MD Anderson Cancer Center, shares his thoughts about the history of the American Medical Association and tobacco with Alan Blum, MD.  In 1990, Solberg became the executive director of the physicians’ health advocacy and anti-smoking activist organization DOC (Doctors Ought to Care), after having served as director of health promotion for the North Dakota Department of Health. Between 1990 and 2002, he assisted DOC chapters at more than 80 medical schools, organized the first set of confidential internal tobacco industry documents for the Food and Drug Administration, and oversaw the vast ethnographic collection on the tobacco industry and the anti-smoking movement that was to become the Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society.