The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. These scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers. Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly-some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is "not settled" denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. "Doubt is our product," wrote one tobacco executive. These "experts" supplied it. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science, roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era.

Maurice Duke and Daniel P. Jordan vividly describe the colorful life and times of one of the South's—and America's—most important businesses and provide insight into how luck, management practices, and personalities helped the company rise to international prominence. Universal Leaf Tobacco Company, the world's largest independent leaf tobacco dealer, is one of the major buying arms for tobacco manufacturers worldwide, selecting, purchasing, processing, and storing leaf tobacco. The story opens during the aftermath of the Civil War when Southerners realized once again the worldwide potential of their native crop. The authors follow the company from its incorporation 1918 through one of the first hostile takeover attempts in American business, to its evolution in 1993 into Universal Corporation, a worldwide conglomerate with a number of products including tobacco. Based on scholarly research and over two hundred interviews with past and present Universal employees, this objective saga reveals much about American business and economic history.

Learn to develop and assess comprehensive youth tobacco interventions! Preventing Youth Access to Tobacco examines the components of a preventive public health intervention directed at reducing the rate of youth tobacco use. This valuable book describes this innovative intervention, which involves making tobacco more difficult for young people to acquire and also calls for fines for possession of tobacco. It illustrates the rationale for this intervention and reviews the literature on the topic, pointing to findings that indicate that this kind of comprehensive intervention has been shown to be effective. From the editors: “The amount of human pain and suffering caused by tobacco use is immeasurable. Preventing youth smoking initiation of the most effective way of reducing long-term mortality from heart disease, chronic lung disease, and other tobacco-related disorders. Smoking is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States, killing over 400,000 people each year. This is more people than die of AIDS, homicide, suicide, automobile accidents, illegal drug use, and fires combined. Despite these facts, 22.9 of adult Americans and 13.8 of Americans under 18 smoke cigarettes.” This essential book can provide some much-needed answers, showing you: effective ways of reducing the rate of regular smoking among adolescents how to assess a community’s readiness to change how to gauge the effectiveness of tobacco laws directed toward youth how to judge the comprehensiveness of school-based tobacco interventions what factors influence illegal tobacco sales to minors why merchants sell tobacco to kids illegally and what the legal risks are for minors who try to buy tobacco

The proliferation of lawsuits against the tobacco industry has had profound implications for American health policy, tort law, civil law, and welfare and social policy. Since the publication of Rabin and Sugarman's Smoking Policy, class action suits, FDA regulation, clean air legislation, health insurance reimbursement, and extensive advertising have brought tobacco to the forefront of national and public policy debates. This collection includes essays by eleven leading public health experts, economists, physicians, political scientists, and lawyers, whose activities encompass Congressional testimonies, Surgeon General's reports on youth smoking, and clinical trials for drugs for smoking cessation. They analyze specific strategies that have been used to influence tobacco use--including taxation, regulation of advertising and promotion, regulation of indoor smoking, control of youth access to cigarettes and other tobacco products, litigation, and subsidies of smoking cessation--and set them against the latest scientific findings about tobacco use and the changing cultural and political setting against which policy decisions are being made. In addition to Rabin and Sugarman, contributors include Frank Chaloupka, Peter Jacobson, Robert Kagan, Nancy Rigotti, John Slade, and Ken Warner.