Forty Years of Advocacy
1977-2017
Timeline
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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.”