In Smoked: Why Joe Camel is Still Smiling, sociologist Mike A. Males analyzes the history of the anti-smoking movement. The campaigns of the 1960s to the late 1980s were designed and run by health activists and resulted in major declines in smoking by all age groups. But in the 1990s, political interests took up anti-smoking as a vote-winning crusade, replacing sound health, tax, and regulation strategies with a politically-driven agenda stressing popular sloganeering and calculatedly ineffective programming against “teenage smoking.” According to former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop:
“The more you think you know about the war against juvenile smoking the more you need to read this book. Has the anti youth smoking effort been effective — or counterproductive? Could the self-styled experts be remarkably wrong? This politically incorrect, enjoyable read could spark the debate that leads to a better understanding and possibly to success.”