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

The Unfiltered Truth About Smoking and Health

Always research, never action: Eric Solberg, MA, vice president for academic and research affairs at the University of Texas Health Center at Houston, shares his thoughts on the American Medical Association’s willful failure to combat the tobacco industry with Dr. Alan Blum, MD. (18:55)

Closed captioned transcription available here

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.

Eric Solberg’s History of Medical Research on Tobacco Timeline

The images in this section relate to subjects discussed by Eric Solberg

‘Stop Cancer’ Drive Suppresses Scientific News Linking Disease to Cigs

In Fact
1947

Smoking & Carcinoma of the Lung (Doll & Hill)

British Medical Journal
September, 30 1950

Cancer by the Carton

Reader’s Digest
December, 1952

Verdict on Cigs-Guilty As Charged

Life
January 24, 1964

World Cig Pandemic; AMA & Cig Smoking

Letter from Roy Ritts to Alan Blum
March 2, 1984

Conspiracy Theory & Tobacco Litigation

March, 1997

Not One Single Case of Throat Irritation

Front Cover; Camel Ad
Journal of the American Medical Association
1950

1953-07-03 - Alton Ochsner to Morris Fishbein

Correspondence between Alton Ochsner to Morris Fishbein

Letters
1953-1955

 Surgeon General Luther Terry Addressing a Press Conference; Advisory Committee Seated Behind Him

Photo Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine
January 11, 1964

Drs. William Cahan, Alan Blum, & Everett Koop

1996

Left:
Charles LeMaistre

Photo Courtesy of Dolph Briscoe Center for American History
1973

C. Everett Koop in Surgeon General Uniform

Photo Courtesy of National Library of Medicine