We specialize in hard to find items
All Categories
A Question Of Intent: A Great American Battle With A Deadly Industry (Great American Battle with with a Deadly Industry)
Share Tweet
*Price and Stocks may change without prior notice
*Packaging of actual item may differ from photo shown
- Electrical items MAY be 110 volts.
- 7 Day Return Policy
- All products are genuine and original
About A Question Of Intent: A Great American Battle With
Product Description Tobacco companies had been protecting their turf for decades. They had congressmen in their pocket. They had corrupt scientists who made excuses about nicotine, cancer and addiction. They had hordes of lawyers to threaten anyone -- inside the industry or out -- who posed a problem. They had a whole lot of money to spend. And they were good at getting people to do what they wanted them to do. After all, they had already convinced millions of Americans to take up an addictive, unhealthy, and potentially deadly habit. David Kessler didn't care about all that. In this book he tells for the first time the thrilling detective story of how the underdog FDA -- while safeguarding the nation's food, drugs, and blood supply -- finally decided to take on one of the world's most powerful opponents, and how it won. Like A Civil Action or And the Band Played On, A Question of Intent weaves together science, law, and fascinating characters to tell an important and often unexpectedly moving story. We follow Kessler's team of investigators as they race to find the clues that will allow the FDA to assert jurisdiction over cigarettes, while the tobacco companies and their lawyers fight back -- hard. Full of insider information and drama, told with wit, and animated by its author's moral passion, A Question of Intent reads like a Grisham thriller, with one exception -- everything in it is true. From The New England Journal of Medicine Since the mid-1960s, Congress has passed a plethora of bills intended to protect Americans against addictive drugs, toxic substances, and defective consumer products. An alphabet soup of agencies with regulatory authority for health and safety has banned substances from cosmetics and food, required the repair of defective baby cribs and sport utility vehicles, restricted the exposure of workers to acrolein and carbon monoxide, and set maximal limits on arsenic in the water and nitrogen dioxide in outdoor air. Tobacco smoke contains acrolein, carbon monoxide, arsenic, nitrogen dioxide, and well over 4000 other chemicals, more than 40 of which are known carcinogens. Tobacco kills far more Americans than all the substances and products regulated by government combined. Yet, curiously, for nearly half a century after cigarettes were scientifically indicted as causing cancer, no agency responsible for health and safety ever attempted to regulate cigarettes (Figure). When a court told the Consumer Product Safety Commission to consider such regulation in the mid-1970s, Congress amended the relevant legislation to exclude tobacco and tobacco products. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has consistently avoided regulating exposure to tobacco smoke in the workplace, while limiting exposure to at least two dozen hazardous airborne materials that are emitted in tobacco smoke. When Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act in 1970 to prevent the abuse of drugs, narcotics, and other addictive substances, the lawmakers specifically excluded the most deadly addictive substance, tobacco, from the purview of the act. Similarly, in 1976, Congress exempted tobacco and tobacco products from the definition of "chemical substance" in the Toxic Substances Control Act, which was intended to "regulate chemical substances and mixtures which present an unreasonable risk of injury to health." On several occasions, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declined to consider regulating tobacco products, despite the apparent relevance of its mandate and the absence of any congressional prohibition against doing so. Enter David Kessler, the new FDA director, and his colleagues in the early 1990s. Well aware of the effects of tobacco, a handful of FDA staff members wondered collectively why the agency did not regulate a product with a death toll far greater than that of all the products it did regulate. A small group began investigating the question and concluded that the agency might well possess the le
