Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove is not a fan of flavor country. In Cos’ perfect world, not only would everyone eat organic tofu and drink pomegranate smoothies and live to 146; nobody would have heard of smoking either.
So Cosgrove ramped up the tobacco crusade in 2005 by banishing cigs from the Clinic campus. He trumped himself in 2007 by proclaiming that the hospital would no longer hire smokers or anybody whose grandparents couldn’t finish a half marathon in less than three hours.
The war on Joe Camel has continued ever since, though Cosgrove is slowly running out of venues where he has the power to enforce his edict. Which doesn’t mean he’s stopped trying.
Asked recently after a speech to the local Harvard Business School Club what colleges could do to improve the country’s health, Cosgrove served up a ready answer: “The fact that American universities are not smoke-free appalls me,” he said, according to MedCity News. Also appalling: the cult obsession with Big Trouble in Little China, but he’s willing to back-burner that for now.
Cosgrove has been spreading the word across America’s colleges, but nobody’s getting in line behind him. “I haven’t been able to budge university trustees and hospitals on that at all,” he said.
So far, they’ve also been slow to jump on his plans to restrict graduation to those with 8 percent body fat or less and ban pizza from college dorms.
This article appears in Mar 7-13, 2012.
Quite the elitist, I love people that think they know what is best for everyone in the world.
I don’t think I want to live in his world even if I lived to be 150.
PS. How exactly does he find out if grandparents can run half a marathon 🙂
I’m all for it. This is Cleveland, not Kentucky.
Hey man, It cost RJR and Phillip Morris (not the reporter) billions of dollars and decades of advertising to get everyone to smoke. If everyone quit smoking all that hard earned and worked money would have been for nothing. Even now we have decreased the addiction to cigs rate so much that our good ‘backy’ businesses have to go to China to get the workers for the companies that we used to work for smoking like meth-freaks. We used to have those jobs and we used to be able to smoke anytime. In the good old days everyone smoked…even while in a hospital bed talking to the doctor…Hell, the doctor would smoke while visiting you in the hospital bed..and what would the old actors like Humphey Bogart be without chain smoking their way through a movie? And what about the last smoke for a soldier about to be executed?
What about the laundry list of poisonous chemicals in our food, water supply and hygiene that never gets mentioned Toby…
It’s all about profit isn’t it?
But your hair is on fire about smoking…
Yeah yeah…I know…Easy battle…