COMMENTARY

"Nicotine Nazis strike again": a brief analysis of the use of Nazi rhetoric in attacking tobacco control advocacy

Nick K Schneider¹, Stanton A Glantz²

¹ Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, University of California, San Francisco, California, USA
² Department of Medicine and Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, University of California, San Francisco, California, USA

Correspondence to:
Professor Stanton A Glantz, University of California, San Francisco, Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, 530 Parnassus Avenue, Suite 366, San Francisco, CA 94143-1390, USA; glantz@medicine.ucsf.edu

Received 27 December 2007

Accepted 6 April 2008

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Germany has a long record of pro-tobacco industry activities and weak tobacco control policies.^1–3 In contrast, during the Nazi era in the 1930s and 1940s, Germany promoted smoke-free public places, advertising restrictions and epidemiology linking smoking to lung cancer, infertility and heart disease.^4–7 Although the Nazi approach to tobacco control was ambivalent and complex, often building on pre-existing policies and with poor enforcement,^{8 9} the association with the Nazis has been widely suggested as one reason for Germany’s modern weakness on tobacco control.^10–12 Although Proctor cautioned against the oversimplistic interpretation of his work in The Nazi War on Cancer⁵ and emphasised that the introduction of tobacco control measures by the Nazis did not make tobacco control inherently fascist,⁴ the tobacco industry and its front groups abused and distorted history to condemn tobacco control measures as Nazi policies and its advocates as "health fascists."⁸

Plans to introduce smoke-free environments in several German . . . [Full text of this article]

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