No smoking
Sir: Your readers might like to reflect on two points in the excellent article about smoking in your March 8 issue.
Should the Health Educational Council really have teeth? Our job is to educate, which we regard as giving information and then leaving the people to make up their own minds; as regards smoking, we have found that this is best done by vivid presentation of the facts in ways similar to, but a great deal more responsible than, those used by the tobacco companies. But to force acceptance of these facts would, we believe, be as unproductive as it would be contrary to educative principles. Hence the question: "Do you want a cigarette more than you want your baby?", which we publicise to the limit of our puny resources.
Do the tobacco companies really treat us with scorn? If so, it is the scorn of Goliath or the Hare. David, or the Tortoise — regard us as you will — has already helped us so to alter the pattern of smoking as to give tobacco sales the "classic pattern of a declining market", as a recent survey put it. And we have generated counter-action from the tobacco lobby, some of it of the nastiest kind, redolent more of fear and hatred than of scorn.
A. C. L. Mackie Director General, The Health Education Council, 78 New Oxford Street, London WCI
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