Thursday, July 19, 2012
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Golden Holocaust
Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, a book the tobacco industry tried to stop with subpoenas and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.
Proctor, the first historian to testify in court against the tobacco industry (in 1998), warns that the worst of the health catastrophe is still ahead of us: Thanks to the long-term effects of cigarettes, "If everyone stopped smoking today, there would still be millions of deaths a year for decades to come."
"Low-tar" cigarettes? "Light" cigarettes? Better filters? Forget it, he said. They don't work. Today's cigarettes are deadlier even than those made 60 years ago, gram for gram.
Half the people who smoke will die from their habit. A surprising number will die from stroke and heart attacks, not cancer.
Moreover, he asks, "How many people know that tobacco is a major cause of blindness, baldness and bladder cancer, not to mention cataracts, ankle fractures, early onset menopause, ectopic pregnancy, spontaneous abortion and erectile dysfunction?"
Six trillion cigarettes are smoked every year – that's 6,000,000,000,000. Proctor said that's "enough to make a continuous chain from Earth to the sun and back, with enough left over for a couple of round trips to Mars."
Cigarettes are "the deadliest artifact in the history of civilization" – more than bullets, more than atom bombs, more than traffic accidents or wars or heroin addiction combined. They are also among "the most carefully and most craftily devised small objects on the planet."
"The industry has spent tens of billions designing cigarettes since the 1940s – that's from the industry's own documents," he said.
For Proctor, this engagement with Big Tobacco is more than just research: "It's part of my sense of what it means to be an ethical human being, using my expertise to do what's right for humanity on the planet."
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Merchants of Doubt - Misrepresenting Science
BOOK REVIEW
Manufactured Ignorance
MERCHANTS OF DOUBT: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. x + 355 pp. Bloomsbury Press, 2010. $27.
Historians a thousand years from now may wonder what went wrong: How, after scholars had so thoroughly nailed down the reality of anthropogenic climate change, did so many Americans get fooled into thinking it was all a left-wing hoax?
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway give us some very good—if disturbing—answers in their fascinating, detailed and artfully written new book, Merchants of Doubt. In it they show how a small band of right-wing scholars steeped in Cold War myopia, with substantial financing from powerful corporate polluters, managed to mislead large sections of the American public into thinking that the evidence for human-caused warming was uncertain, unsound, politically tainted and unfit to serve as the basis for any kind of political action.
Their story begins with what they call the “Tobacco Strategy,” the campaign launched in the mid-1950s by cigarette makers to refute and ridicule the evidence linking smoking to mass suffering and death. One might suppose the strategy is connected to global-warming denial purely by analogy—a case of yet another powerful industry trying to stave off regulation by obfuscating—but Oreskes and Conway show that key climate-change denialists actually became masters at doubt-mongering while working for the tobacco industry.
Frederick Seitz, for example, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences and ex officio member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, in 1979 was hired by the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, makers of Camel cigarettes, to head their Medical Research Committee. A solid-state physicist with Manhattan Project credentials, Seitz was assigned the task of handing out $45 million in research grants to buttress the prestige of tobacco—grants that, as he would later admit, steered clear of anything that might impugn tobacco. “They didn’t want us looking at the health effects of cigarette smoking,” he said in a 2006 interview. Seitz was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars over the six years during which he served in this capacity. It was not long thereafter that he and a crew of Cold Warrior colleagues also began denying the reality of human-caused climate change.