Author: David A. Kessler
This is the David-and-Goliath story of how an American bureaucrat took on the
tobacco industry-and helped topple it. David Kessler, head of the Food and Drug Administration for seven years under
Presidents Bush and Clinton, earned the nickname "Eliot Knessler" from The Washington Post-a pun meant to evoke the memory of the Prohibition-era gangbuster-because he rejuvenated a moribund agency. The FDA regulated, in Kessler's words, "one quarter of every dollar Americans spent-from the food they eat to the drugs they take to the cosmetics they wear." Yet it lacked the courage to take on the country's most lethal product: cigarettes. So did Kessler, at least initially. He agreed with aides and…
America, for all its faults, is the battlefield on which many of the world's most important
health questions are being fought. None of those is more important than the questions this excellent book… Wow. Who would have thought a book on the history of the FDA's handling of tobacco regulation would read like a spy novel? I grabbed this book off the new books shelf at the library, and picked it up…
