A Question of Intent: A Great American Battle With a Deadly Industry

by David A. Kessler, M.D., dean of the School of Medicine and professor of pediatrics, medicine and public health; PublicAffairs (N.Y.), 2001. The author writes about the chapter in his career that preceded his arrival at Yale as dean in July 1997. As commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Kessler upset the conventional wisdom that the tobacco industry was too big and too powerful to be challenged. A Question of Intent tells the story of his agency’s investigation of the industry, its attempts to regulate it, and the “tobacco wars” still being waged.