Tobacco War: Inside the California Battles Review

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(More customer reviews)I could hardly put this book down. The battle being fought is truly a life and death matter, alliances and strategies evolve on both sides, and the Tobacco Industry uses their multi-million war chests to mislead the public over and over and over again. Even when you think you can relax after a victory by the anti-tobacco forces, in the next chapter the Tobacco Industry is lurking behind yet another door with a butcher's cleaver, which ends up being wielded by tobacco funded politicians and the California Medical Association to cut tobacco education funds and to weaken the anti-tobacco media campaign. Really this book is about much more than California and its battle with the tobacco industry. It is the best book I've ever read about why we need campaign finance reform and effective sunshine laws. You are shown all the nitty-gritty details, the back room deals, the closed-door bargaining. You'll emerge from this book well-prepared to detect lies in future wars, and to read between-the-lines in daily newspaper coverage.

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Tobacco War charts the dramatic and complex history of tobacco politics in California over the past quarter century. Beginning with the activities of a small band of activists who, in the 1970s, put forward the radical notion that people should not have to breathe second-hand tobacco smoke, Stanton Glantz and Edith Balbach follow the movement through the 1980s, when activists created hundreds of city and county ordinances by working through their local officials, to the present--when tobacco is a highly visible issue in American politics and smoke-free restaurants and bars are a reality throughout the state. The authors show how these accomplishments rest on the groundwork laid over the past two decades by tobacco control activists who have worked across the U.S. to change how people view the tobacco industry and its behavior. Tobacco War is accessibly written, balanced, and meticulously researched. The California experience provides a graphic demonstration of the successes and failures of both the tobacco industry and public health forces. It shows how public health advocates slowly learned to control the terms of the debate and how they discovered that simply establishing tobacco control programs was not enough, that constant vigilance was necessary to protect programs from a hostile legislature and governor. In the end, the California experience proves that it is possible to dramatically change how people think about tobacco and the tobacco industry and to rapidly reduce tobacco consumption. But California's experience also demonstrates that it is possible to run such programs successfully only as long as the public health community exerts power effectively. With legal settlements bringing big dollars to tobacco control programs in every state, this book is must reading for anyone interested in battling and beating the tobacco industry.

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