Lecture Vol. 1 - Tab A -- (Post Surgeon General Years) cover
Statement
By C. Everett Koop, MD, ScD
Surgeon General, U.S. Public Health Service
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
To the Subcommittee on Transportation, and Hazard Substance, Committee on Energy and Commerce
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC
September 13, 1989
Congressional Committees don't always signify the governmental issues over which they have oversight by title alone. The subject of my statement was tobacco and specifically issues involving the advertising of tobacco because the chairman of the committee had introduced a bill HR 1250, which would have eliminated all image-based tobacco advertising, allowing only so-called "tombstone advertising". Congressional testimony is concise and usually worth reading, because of that characteristic alone, but also because these subjects usually are not frivolous.
In general, in summary fashion, this statement lays out my personal position - not the governments - on tobacco advertising, the response to the issue of both the tobacco industry and the advertising industry and is especially concerned with children's access to tobacco.
Vending machines are also discussed and it is well for the user to remember that during my tenure, the medical director of the Veteran's Administration, believing that government hospitals and clinics should be models of healthy environments, ordered all vending machines selling cigarettes removed from Veteran's Administration properties. The furor that followed was not so much generated by the tobacco industry as it was by the vending machine industry and advertisers.