Ira Sharenow: The Power of a Single Individual to Improve the Indoor Air Environment
Carol Thompson: The Ultimate Anti-Anti-Smoker
Polar Opposites in Madison, Wisconsin
Alan Blum, MD interviews Ira Sharenow, Madison, Wisconsin’s most visible, courageous, and effective anti-smoking activist in the 1990s when he was a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin. (38:37)
“The Most Hated Person in Tobacco Control”
Column by Bill Lueders
The Isthmus (Madison, Wisconsin)
November 17, 1995.
“MoJo’s September Hellraiser” (2 pages)
Article by Jeanne Brokaw
Mother Jones Magazine
September/October 1996.
At the opposite end of the smoking spectrum in Madson was hairdresser Carol Thompson (@smokers’rights1), who sent vituperative handwritten and typed letters to anti-smoking advocates across the country for over 30 years until her death on January 24, 2021 at age 67. Tweeting to the end, one of her last messages to the world was “Tobacco Control falsely blames smoking for diseases really caused by infection. Using scientific fraud to rob smokers’ liberty violates our basic rights.”
“We Don’t Want You. We Hate You. Get Lost.” (3 pages)
Letter from Smoker’s Rights Action Group founder Carol Thompson to Alan Blum, MD January, 15, 1990.
“Anti-Smokers Are Satans”
“‘Madison’s number-one pro-smoking fanatic,’ Carol Thompson, has distributed a manifesto entitled “Generation of Vermin,” which concludes: ‘Anti-smokers are satans. Anybody who kills one is a public hero. Anybody who slaughters them wholesale is a messiah.'”
From a column by Bill Lueders
The isthmus
December 7, 1990
https://isthmus.com/archive/20-years-ago/lueders-goes-on-the-town/.
“The Charles A. LeMaistre Page” (8 pages)
Presumed author Carol Thompson, identified on the internet by Doris Blum, 2007.