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- Doctors Ought to Care (DOC) is founded in Miami by family physician Alan Blum to educate the public, especially teenagers, in the clinic, classroom, and community at large about the major preventable causes of poor health and high medical costs, beginning with the number one killer habit: cigarette smoking. To counteract the promotion of lethal lifestyles by the makers of unhealthy products, DOC aims to tap the highest level of commitment of every physician and medical student to “laugh the pushers out of town.” DOC’s strategy is to tap the creativity of teenagers in the creation of counteradvertising messages based on humor, brand-name parodies, and paid space in the mass media;
- DOC pays its first “House Call” to the Benson & Hedges 101s Film Series at Miami’s Riviera Cinema, renaming it the Benson & Stenches Film Series;
- Its messages rejected by billboard advertising companies, DOC creates the first paid anti-smoking advertisements in the U.S.: 30 bus benches bus benches throughout Miami with anti-cigarette slogans such as “Country Fresh Arsenic,” “Full-Bodied Cyanide,” “10 Year Supply only $7000,” “Benson & Heart Attacks,” and “Emphysema Slims: You’ve Coughed Up Long Enough, Baby.”
- Rick Richards, MD establishes DOC’s first local chapter with the South Carolina Family Practice Association and becomes a co-founder of National DOC ;
- DOC continues to create bus bench counteradvertisements in Miami and pays House Calls on the Virginia Slims Tennis Tournament of South Florida and The Miami Herald;
- American Medical News, weekly newspaper of the American Medical Association, publishes a laudatory article about DOC: “Miami physicians take lead in drive to curb cigaret smoking”;
- Dr. Blum is invited to contribute a monthly column on health activism, “What’s Up, DOC?” in the U.S. Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence, which he writes until 1981.
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- South Carolina DOC chapter leads the pack;
- Tom Houston, MD founds Mississippi DOC and becomes a co-founder of National DOC;
- DOC’s SuperHealth ’79 campaign takes off;
- The American Academy of Family Physicians publishes an article lauding DOC’s personal approaches to patient education.
- Dr. Alton Ochsner becomes DOC’s honorary chair;
- Mississippi DOC creates pioneering humorous TV anti-smoking ads;
- Australia’s BUGA-Up (Billboard Utilizing Graffitists Against Unhealth Promotions) takes counter-ads a step further.
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- DOC helps embarrass the American Medical Association (AMA) into selling its tobacco stocks;
- DOC’s new MAD Magazine-inspired parodies (eg, “Yellow Lights: They’ll really know you’re smoking”).
- DOC’s chair becomes editor of the Medical Journal of Australia, publishes controversial cover story on BUGA-Up and send-ups of pharmaceutical advertising, fast food marketers, and the tobacco industry.
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- DOC’s House Call to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its Philip Morris-sponsored exhibition, “Treasures of the Vatican”;
- The MJA publishes the first theme issue at any medical journal on the world tobacco pandemic (March 5, 1983);
- Presentation on DOC at the Fifth World Conference on Smoking and Health, Winnipeg;
- As editor of the New York State Journal of Medicine, DOC’s chair publishes the first theme issue at a U.S. journal on the world cigarette pandemic (December 1983).
- DOC’s national advisors meet in Atlanta.
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- The New York Times censors a paid advertisement by DOC in The Times calling attention to the newspaper’s hypocrisy of soliciting cigarette advertising while editorially condemning cigarette smoking;
- The New York State Journal of Medicine publishes the second theme issue on the world cigarette pandemic.
- Medical College of Georgia DOC launches campaign urging physicians to send postcards to elected officials documenting the deaths of constituents from smoking-caused diseases;
- DOC and Northeastern University School of Law take out a full-page advertisement in The Nation to promote their national essay contest for law students that posed the question, “Should tobacco industry executives be held criminally liable for the deaths, diseases, and fires that their products cause?”
- Media guru Tony Schwartz and DOC team up to create a paid advertising campaign on radio station WMCA asking the New York City Council to pass the city’s first clean indoor air act and to ban cigarette ads on city-owned billboards and subway signage;
- The Washington Post publishes Dr. Blum’s expose of the targeting of African Americans by the tobacco industry, the first such artic le to appear in an American daily newspaper;
- DOC joins with Baton Rouge chest physician and philatelist James Lutschg to petition the U.S. Citizen’s Stamp Advisory Committee (CSAC) to issue a stamp commemorating the 25th anniversary of the publication of the landmark 1964 Surgeon General’s Report on smoking and health–the CSAC declines to issue such a stamp as it would do again in the 2010s for the Report’s 50th anniversary
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- Anderson (South Carolina) Family Practice Center DOC honors 8 independent local pharmacies for choosing not to sell tobacco products;
- DOC criticizes the American Academy of Family Physicians for permitting Fleischmann’s, a subsidiary of RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company to provide free breakfasts to attendees at the AAFP annual Scientific Assembly in Dallas.
- DOC outmaneuvers Philip Morris to sponsor the United States Boomerang Team, which wins the World Boomerang Championship in Australia wearing a no-smoking logo;
- Oakland artist Doug Minkler creates the poster “Artists as Ashtrays” (with text by Alan Blum, MD) to satirize tobacco industry sponsorship of the arts and the pressures brought by Philip Morris on arts organizations to lobby against the passage of anti-smoking laws;
- DOC is awarded the Surgeon General’s Medallion from Dr. C. Everett Koop.
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- DOC’s first historical exhibition, “‘When More Doctors Smoked Camels’: A century of health claims in cigarette advertising,” curated by Dr. Blum, goes on view at the Texas Medical Center Library;
- Dr. Blum gives the keynote address, “Tobacco and Sports: A Growing Dependence,” at the First National Conference on Tobacco Use in America, held at MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston;
- DOC is sued by Philip Morris, maker of Miller Lite Beer, in federal and Texas state courts for its Killer Lite T-shirt and poster counteradvertising parodies–DOC prevails in both courts;
- New Mexico DOC’s Chris Fletcher, MD produces the Santa Fe Emphysema Slims Celebrity Tennis Tournament and Balloon Rally with the theme, “Throw tobacco out of sports”:
- DOC parodies the targeting of the cigarette brand Uptown to African-Americans in Philadelphia by introducing its own brand, “Upchuck”;
- The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) publishes a study by MCG DOC’s Drs. Paul Fischer, Rick Richards, and colleagues, “Recall and Eye Tracking Study of Adolescents Viewing Tobacco Advertisements,” which found that few adolescents see the warnings in cigarette advertisements. The study is reported in the national news media.
- Dr. Rick Richards documents and exposes the embedding of cigarette brand logos in auto racing video arcade games and pressures SEGA, Nintendo, and other game manufacturers to end this practice;
- Drs. Edward Anselm and Alan Hershenfeld of New York City DOC create a rap video, “McSmoke the Tobacco King and Nikki Teen,” as well as a study guide for use by teachers in schools;
- DOC directs unfavorable attention to RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company’s test marketing in Houston of its new Dakota cigarette (aimed at young women who smoke Marlboro) with a paid counteradvertising campaign, “Dakota DaCough DaCancer DaCoffin,” in the weekly Houston Public News–after Houston’s two daily newspapers refuse to run the ad;
- Dr. Alan Blum testifies before the U.S. Senate HELP (Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions) Subcommittee hearing in favor of Senator Edward Kennedy’s bill to create an agency to oversee cigarettes and other tobacco products;
- DOC receives the American Medical Association’s first National Award for Service on Behalf of America’s Youth.
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- Washington DOC launches national tour of its Statue of Nicotina to spoof Philip Morris’s tour of a copy of the Bill of Rights;
- MCG DOC’s Drs. Paul Fischer, Rick Richards and colleagues publish a national newsworthy study in JAMA showing that children recognize RJ Reynolds’ Joe Camel character as readily as Mickey Mouse–RJ Reynolds sues Dr. Fischer for the data in 1992;
- Artist Doug Minkler disseminates DOC’s counteradvertising strategy in schools.
- California DOC’s Jim Smith and Susan Yael Smith produce the handbook, Medical Activism: A DOC Approach to Countering the Tobacco Industry;
- DOC produces the documentary, “Medicine vs. Madison Avenue: Fighting Smoke with Fire,” which is awarded first prize in the health promotion category of the 1994 International Medical Film Festival;
- Dr. Alan Blum is expelled from a tobacco industry conference in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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- Erik Vidstrand and Oregon DOC’s Bruce Thomson, MD refit two 1960s Volkswagon vans as Barfboro Barfmobiles to spoof Philip Morris Marlboro Adventure Travel. Vidstrand, the Barfman, drives over 100,000 miles in the Barfmobile to county fairs and schools in Arizona, California, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and Oregon.
- Artist Doug Minkler, Alan Blum, MD, and Eric Solberg create DOC’s Deck-O-Butts trading cards (eg, “The Sound of Mucus”) to distribute in Houston schools with a grant from the Thrasher Research Foundation;
- Dr. Blum receives the American Academy of Family Physicians’ first National Public Health Award.
- The New England Journal of Medicine publishes a letter by 7-year old Sammy Blum urging Marvel Masterpieces trading cards to end depictions of smoking by heroes and villains alike;
- DOC purchases counteradvertisement mocking Philip Morris’ ads in Jewish publications playing down the importance of clean indoor air laws: “Meshugge or Non-Meshugge?
- DOC produces a symposium and exhibition at the Texas Medical Center Library commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Surgeon General’s Report on smoking and health, with a member of the original advisory committee that wrote the report, Dr. Walter Burdette, in attendance.
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- DOC receives grant from Henry and Edith Everett to establish the DOC Tobacco Archive to organize and make publicly available the vast collection of cigarette advertising, tobacco industry publications, promotional ephemera, the correspondence of Alan Blum, MD as editor of the Medical Journal of Australia and the New York State Journal of Medicine (which published the first theme issues on smoking at any medical journal), photographs of tobacco sponsored events, and newspaper, magazine, radio, and TV coverage of the tobacco industry and anti-smoking activism.
- DOC’s “3M2-Faced” campaign pressures Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, a leading manufacturer of medications and health equipment, to divest its National Outdoor Advertising subsidiary, a major recipient of cigarette advertising revenue.
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- DOC creates Millennium Campaign to establish a National Tobacco Museum;
- DOC produces an exhibition at the Texas Medical Center Library, “The Unfiltered Truth about Smoking and Health: How the American Medical Association Rewrote Tobacco History.”
- DOC establishes the University of Alabama Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society as a major resource on the history of the tobacco industry, cigarette marketing, and anti-smoking activism in the latter half of the 20th Century.
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- Dr. Blum becomes the first holder of the Gerald Leon Wallace, MD Endowed Chair in Family Medicine at the University of Alabama School of Medicine in Tuscaloosa.
- Eric Solberg, DOC’s executive director since 1990, closes DOC’s national office in 2002 on DOC’s 25th anniversary, but several of the more than 100 local DOC chapters at medical schools and family medicine residency programs continue to train medical students and residents in school health education about smoking and the other the major preventable causes of poor health and high medical costs;
- The website of the University of Alabama Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society (csts.ua.edu) remains a resource on the history of DOC and medical activism in the latter half of the 20th Century;
- Recognizing that lessons learned from the successes and failures of the decades-long effort to end the tobacco pandemic are applicable to other emerging health concerns, the Center and its website are exploring digital media addiction, cannabis-related problems and the commercialization of marijuana, the alcohol and gambling industries’ growing presence at universities, obesity and the promotion of empty calories, tanning bed use by college students, the rise in infections by viruses once thought to be eradicated, and disinformation on vaccines and masking in public places, among other issues;
- The Center’s trove of original materials collected by Dr. Blum beginning in the 1960s on the tobacco industry, cigarette marketing, and antismoking activism (“a daily biopsy of the tobacco pandemic and efforts to end it”), remains the largest and most comprehensive in the world as it seeks a permanent endowment and partnerships with other universities, museums, libraries, and public health organizations.