Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh.

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For future podcast episodes.

This is Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today, an insider's history of one of the most important scientific documents

of the 20th century, the 1964 Surgeon General's report on smoking. Dr. Josh Sharfstein

interviews Donald Schapland, one of the original staffers of the advisory committee on smoking

and health, about a report that was so damning it had to be released with all sorts of cloak

and dagger preparations and almost didn't happen at all. Let's listen. Donald Chaplin,

thank you so much for joining me today on Public Health on Call. To talk about the 1964 report

of the advisory committee to the U.S. Surgeon General on smoking and health.

And I want to ask you first to take us back to that time, 1960, 1961, 1962.

What was the state of tobacco use in the United States back then?

In the early 1960s, the behavior itself was ubiquitous in U.S. society.

At the time, about half of the adult population were regular cigarette smokers.

And of course, a number or large percentage of teens were smokers as well.

It was pretty much a behavior that

was practiced everywhere in society among old and the young, the educated and the not, the wealthy

and not. And it was pretty much everywhere. You could smoke pretty much everywhere you wanted to.

...