At the opening of an exhibit that examines the use of images of physicians and ersatz medical information to sell cigarettes, Dean Jeffrey Flier announced that the medical school is changing its policy regarding smoking by extending the ban on smoking to the entire campus.
The new policy will be fully implemented at HMS and the Dental School by the spring of 2009. As a result, the contiguous campuses of HMS, HSDM and the School of Public Health will be completely smoke-free. The current HMS policy bans smoking from the interior and the outdoor areas near entrances and near air intakes.
“We will not immediately impose the campus-wide ban because we recognize that smoking is an intractable addiction,” Flier said. “We want our colleagues who do smoke to have time to quit the habit.”
To support that effort, HMS and the two other schools are offering free, voluntary smoking-cessation programs to help as many people as possible wean themselves off tobacco.
“It’s a formidable challenge, we know, which is why we want to help in any way that we can,” Flier said. “We look forward to the spring of 2009, when the campuses of Harvard Medical School, Dental School, and School of Public Health will be entirely smoke-free for the first time.
“Establishing this policy is another way for us to advance our shared mission of promoting human health,” he said.
The smoking ban announcement coincides with the opening of a new exhibit in the lower level of Gordon Hall. “Not a Cough in a Carload: Images from the Campaign by the Tobacco Industry to Hide the Hazards of Smoking” features images from tobacco advertisements in the 20th century.
Prior to the opening of his exhibit, speaker Robert Jackler of Stanford University School of Medicine examined the power of those images. He was joined by Allan Brandt, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Amalie Moses Kass professor of the history of medicine in the Department of Social Medicine (in the Faculty of Medicine). Brandt is the author of The Cigarette Century.
