booming (Matthews, 1994, p. A5; Flanigan, 1996, p. D5). Pre-Clinton Regulatory Threats
The Threat to Health. Within five years after cigarettes had been sold nationally, the University of Minnesota Medical School noted as early as 1921 a sharp increase in the incidence of lung cancer among men in the United States (Sobel, 1978, p. 162). In the mid-1950s, Reader's Digest published accounts of research which established a link between long-term cigarette smoking and cancer, including experiments at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Institute in 1953, which found that tumors developed in mouse skin exposed for long periods to cigarette smoke. On January 11, 1964, Surgeon General Luther Terry published his report on Smoking and Health which concluded that cigarette smoking was "a health hazard of sufficient importance in the United States to warrant appropriate remedial action" (Sobel, 1978, p. 190). By 1960, 58 percent of adult men and 36 percent of adult women in the United States smoked cigarettes regularly (Burroughs and Helyar, 1990, p. 49). Between 1965 and 1993, the number of cigarette smokers in the United States declined by 40 percent (Arno, 1996, p. 1258). By 1993, only 25 percent of the American adult population (24 million men and 22 million women) smoked cigarettes, but the decline among adults was partially offset by an increase in the percentage of high school seniors who smoked: 19 percent in 1993, up from 17.2 percent in 1992 but still less than the comparable figure in 1976 of 29 percent (Rich, 1994, p. A6).
In 1996, Castleman, citing statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, estimated that cigarette smoking caused 420,000 deaths a year in the United States, including 90 percent of 130,000 lung cancer cases, cost the average heavy smoker (two packs a day or more) an estimated eight years of life and accounted for one in five deaths, 17 times more than resulted from homicide and 50 times more than were rel...