For
many decades tobacco corporations wanted to suppress the fact that tobacco use
is addictive. Scientists have known about nicotine addiction for a long time.
However, when Congress subpoenaed the executives of the major tobacco companies
to testify in 1994, all of the
executives raised their hands and swore that they did not believe that nicotine
was addictive. About that same time, an employee of one of the tobacco
companies copied some of the internal research documents and released them to
the Journal of the American Medical
Association. These documents proved that the tobacco companies knew, from
their own secret research, that nicotine was addictive. The corporate
researchers even referred to cigarettes as NDDs—nicotine delivery devices. Not
only did they know they were selling an addictive product, but addiction was
their product. (The Russell Crowe movie The
Insider tells this story.)
The
tobacco corporations not only knew that addiction was their product, but they
knew that most smokers start smoking when they are young. They accordingly
focused some very successful advertising campaigns on young consumers. “Joe
Camel” was a particularly successful image that made young people think smoking
was cool.
In
the late 1990s the federal government and state governments sued the tobacco
corporations for the health care expenses due to lung cancer and other
smoking-related diseases. Tobacco corporations had been making the profits
from, and taxpayers footing the bill for, smoking-addiction-induced cancer.
Despite their best efforts and attempted appeals, the tobacco corporations had
to pay these expenses, and in addition had to stop marketing their products to
young people.
A
similar thing is happening with the corporate attempts to discredit global
warming science. One of the early leaders of these attempts was the same man
who fought to discredit the link between smoking and cancer: Frederick Seitz.
One of the groups that fight to discredit global warming, the Heartland
Institute, still denies the health dangers of smoking. They used to have this
on their home page, but now keep it hidden on a web
page that is not easy to find.
The
truth gets even more indirect and mysterious. I describe now a report I heard
on All Things Considered yesterday. Today,
nearly everyone has heard that stress causes numerous health problems,
including heart attacks. The scientific research behind the stress-heart
disease connection is excellent. But the earliest major researcher who studied
the physiology of stress—Hans
Selye—got most of his funding from tobacco corporations. The reason is
actually quite simple. Numerous things cause heart attacks. Stress is one of
them. Smoking is another. Others include poor nutrition and genetic factors.
All of these factors interact with one another. And what the tobacco companies
wanted to claim, although Selye never actually said this himself (as far as I
can tell), was that stress, not smoking,
caused heart attacks. What Selye did not say, the tobacco companies were
eager to say. Their advertisements openly proclaimed that you should smoke to
relieve stress. Tobacco corporations wanted to blame stress and avert criticism
of smoking.
And
Selye went right along with this. Mark Petticrew, Director of Public Health for
the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and his colleagues examined
thousands of documents that were made public as a result of the “tobacco
settlement” of the late 1990s. They found that tobacco corporations vetted the
content and wording of Selye’s papers (see hyperlink above). Says Petticrew,
“tobacco industry lawyers actually influenced the content of his writings, they
suggested to him things that he should comment on.”
Hanse
Selye was certainly a famous scientist, author of thousands of papers and 39
books. But was Selye a liar? It does not appear so. But tobacco companies paid
for his research and used his results to lie to the American public. Blood is
on their hands, and Selye was their, apparently willing, tool.
You
see, some scientists will say whatever you pay them to say. Far fewer
scientists will do this than lawyers and politicians, but there are some.
Corporate interests, such as the coal and oil industries, have found these few
and use them over and over and over.
No comments:
Post a Comment