Prof Makes Daily Show Appearance

Kass Professor of the History of Medicine Allan M. Brandt appeared on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show Wednesday night, attempting to shed light on the growing dishonesty within the cigarette industry in a spirited—and very lighthearted—conversation with host Jon Stewart.

Brandt said that the influence of cigarette companies was deeply rooted in a number of spheres of society, including “agriculture, business, popular culture, gender and sexuality.” He discusses the topics in greater detail in his recent book, “The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America.”

Brandt attempted to highlight one of his biggest problems with the behavior of cigarette companies—the industry’s targeting of children in its advertisements.

“So much of their advertising targets kids,” Brandt said. “The industry has found out how to lock into the heads of young people.”

He said that children are “the only place where they’re going to get new smokers—they call them replacement smokers.”

In typical “Daily Show” fashion, Stewart responded with his trademark sarcasm and crowd-pleasing mockery.

“That’s what they call them?” Stewart said. “That’s so awesome.”

He jokingly commended the tactics used by cigarette companies to lure more people to smoke.

“True confession: I was a heavy, heavy smoker for many, many years,” he said. “I was physically driven to do it, it was that fun.”

According to Brandt, however, the effectiveness of certain approaches has many real, detrimental effects. Flavored cigarettes, in particular—with names like “Tahitian Tangerine”—are just one way that advertisers entice people to buy their products.

“Sometimes they give out free cigarettes,” Brandt said.

Stewart repeatedly shifted attention back to Brandt’s book, saying that it documents industry insiders’ “knowledge of the dangers of their own product in incredible detail.”

“They have no sense of shame or acknowledgement of its detriments,” Stewart said.

Brandt emphatically agreed. He said that some unnamed makers openly acknowledged that their industry contained what he refereed to as “tumor promoters.”

The usually comedic-minded audience turned serious ever so briefly when Brandt told Stewart that the so-called replacement smokers were needed because the previous generation was “quitting, like you, or dying.”

“[The industry] will leave no rock unturned,” said Brandt, generating the crowd’s applause.

Introduced by Stewart as “a professor at Harvard Medical School—safety medical school,” Brandt is also a Professor of the History of Science at the College. He was mentioned as a possible candidate for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Deanship, a position that will ultimately be filled by Associate Dean for Computer Science and Engineering Michael D. Smith in July.

Brandt is not the first Harvard faculty member to recently speak out against the dangers of smoking. In February, Harvard School of Public Health Dean Barry R. Bloom gave a presentation to the Motion Picture Association of America indicating that exposing children to smoking in movies increases their odds of eventually becoming smokers.

Near the end of their conversation, Stewart—very much in jest—said that part of the draw of cigarettes might be their complementary nature with other goods.

“Coffee is an incomplete product,” he said. “You need something with it. You need either a donut or a cigarette.”

Brandt, however, did his best to end the discussion on a more staid tone.

“They think this is their great time,” Brandt said of cigarette makers. “More people are smoking now…than ever before in human history.”

—Staff writer Malcom A. Glenn can be reached at mglenn@fas.harvard.edu.