A visit to the Scientific Assembly's exhibit floor will no longer yield free cigarettes. In fact, the Academy's position on tobacco use has evolved from passive acceptance to active opposition, and the organization now plays a leading role in promoting a tobacco-free lifestyle. The early years. Browse through the Academy's archives, and you'll find stacks of photos from the fledgling years when it seemed everybody smoked. CME presenters had cigarettes hanging out of their mouths.
Candid shots show physicians chatting, cigarettes pinched between their fingers.
Wide-angle pictures feature doctors and their spouses eating dinner with smoke rising from ashtrays. From 1949 to 1969, tobacco companies exhibited at the Academy's Scientific Assembly. In 1964, the AAGP Board voted to adopt the AMA's policy on tobacco, essentially refusing to endorse the Surgeon General's Report on Smoking, which had been released earlier that year. In 1965, the U.S. Congress passed the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act, which required the surgeon general's health warnings on cigarette packages. Three years later, a resolution introduced at the AAGP Congress of Delegates aimed to ban the exhibition and free distribution of tobacco products at Assembly.