Science, Academia, and Tobacco

A review of The Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition

Part III

Academic collaborations come in many flavors. Just because the money is corporate doesn’t mean the studies that are funded are flawed by definition. But the cigarette industry’s academic philanthropy set new records for hubris, writes Robert Proctor, professor of history at Stanford University, in his new book, The Golden Holocaust. Duke University and Bowman Gray School of Medicine, both in North Carolina, are named for tobacco magnates.

Harvard has a long and dubious history of tobacco largesse.  Harvard’s Tobacco and Health Research Program kicked off in 1972 with a generous tobacco grant from the Tobacco Institute, who dreamed up the program in the first place. “The Harvard project made the industry look good and so was handsomely endowed, absorbing $7 million over an eight-year period.” Also in 1972, Harvard anthropologist Carl Seltzer testified for the industry in numerous public hearings, stating: “We do not know whether or not there is a causal relationship between smoking and heart disease.” In 2002, Harvard’s School of Public Health declared it would no longer undertake research sponsored by the cigarette industry. Many universities had already gone cold turkey, and after Harvard, bans were put in place by the Karolinska Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Emory University, and many others.

Proctor informs us that “Washington University in St. Louis has been another big sponge for tobacco money." In 1971, the university set a new world record for an industry grant to a single institution, and “millions more were eventually funneled into the School of Medicine, turning it into a hotbed of cigarette-friendly activism.” The irony of taking money from Big Tobacco to fund research on lung cancer is not lost on Proctor. A good deal of the research was aimed away from tobacco and toward possible causes like viruses. “The goal was clearly more than cancer cures,” he writes. “The industry also hoped to generate good PR and academic allies.” The industry was able to garner  sympathetic headlines, like “Helping in Fight against Cancer,” in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.

The other academic hotbed thoroughly penetrated by Big Tobacco was UCLA, according to Proctor. “Tobacco collaborators at UCLA have attracted their fair share of criticism from public health advocates, and for understandable reasons.” The university picked up its own multimillion-dollar grant from cigarette makers for the Program on Tobacco and Health in 1974, and that wasn’t the first tobacco money the university had taken. “As with all such projects,” Proctor writes, “industry lawyers… played a key role in the decision to fund—with the companies also conceding that the decision ‘should be based more on public relations than on purely scientific grounds.’” The end came in 2007, when “UCLA’s dance with the devil” garnered a ton of unwanted press. Reports showed that UCLA had taken more than $6 million from Philip Morris for research “to compare how children’s brains and monkey brains react to nicotine.”

Proctor admits that singling out Harvard, Washington University and UCLA is somewhat misleading, “given that scholars throughout the world have gorged themselves on tobacco money. Indeed it may well be the rare institution that has NOT at one time or another dipped into this pot.”

Including Stanford, where Proctor teaches. Plenty of Stanford researchers have undertaken contract work and served as expert witnesses for the industry right in Proctor’s own backyard, where “at least eighteen faculty members have received monies (in the form of sponsored research) from the Council for Tobacco Research, with at least two of these—Judith Swain and Hugh McDevitt from the medical school—serving on its Scientific Advisory Board. Stanford pharmacologists were assisting the industry with its diethylene glycol studies as early as the 1930s…”

In the conclusion to his densely researched but surprisingly readable work, Proctor returns to the controlling irony of the book: “Our bizarre starting point is the well-stocked shelf of cigarettes, to which we respond by begging people not to purchase them.” He presents the dream of a world in which cigarettes have been abolished. To do so, he admits, would require a leap. “If phasing out tobacco seems out of reach, this is only because our imaginations are impoverished.” And he has scant patience for the “Prohibition failed” argument. It failed, he says, because people like to drink. “Tobacco presents us with a very different situation. Nicotine is not a recreational drug. Most people who smoke wish they didn’t, and most smokers (90 percent) regret ever having started.”

Graphics Credit: http://www.prwatch.org/node/7004

The Tobacco Industry as Disease Vector

A review of The Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition

Part II

The famous Surgeon General’s Report of 1964, officially warning Americans about the dangers of smoking, and publicizing the cancer connection, is typically seen as a triumphal moment in American medical history. But according to Stanford history professor Robert Proctor in his book, The Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, the report was “flawed in a number of interesting respects.” [The author, above, with paraphernalia] For one thing, members of the advisory committee consulting on the report, many of them congressman friendly to the tobacco cause, succeeded in their attempts to have smoking referred to as a “habit” rather than as addiction—a shameful Orwellian turn that went uncorrected for 25 years.

Meanwhile, the industry continued to fund new institutes, and continued to give out research grants for “red herring” research. As an example, the highest-ranking officer of the American Heart Association received money from one of the industry’s fraudulent research arms.

As late as the early 80s, most smokers believed they suffered from a bad habit, rather than an addiction—even though a majority of them wished they didn’t smoke. That is an odd kind of consumer “choice.” Cigarette makers have spent millions to perpetuate this myth. Proctor views tobacco industry executives and lawyers as a unique form of disease vector, spreading the pernicious health consequences of smoking across the globe.

The 2008 World Health Organization (WHO) Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic fleshes out this metaphor, suggesting that all epidemics have a means of contagion, “a vector that spreads disease and death. For the tobacco epidemic, the vector is not a virus, bacterium or other microorganisms—it is an industry and its business strategy.”

In an email exchange, I asked Professor Proctor to expand on this notion of a disease vector:

“We tend to divide "communicable" from "non-communicable" diseases,” Proctor told me, “when the reality is that many "non-communicable" diseases are in fact spread by communications.”

Examples? “Through ignorance and propaganda, for example, which can spread like a virus,” Proctor wrote. “We don't count the anthropogenic communications, oddly enough, even though these can be just as dangerous, and just as deadly. And just as preventable--by changing our exposure environments.”

In a recent article for Tobacco Control, Proctor laid out how the calculus of the disease vector plays out. We know, for example, that smoking will cause roughly 6 million deaths in 2015. And about a third of those will be from lung cancer. We know that 25 acres of tobacco plants will result in about 10 lung cancer deaths per year, starting 20 or 30 years down the road. Here’s a sick equivalence: “A 40 ft container of the sort shipped overseas or trucked by highway houses 10 million cigarettes, which means that each container will cause about 10 deaths.” Proctor works out the numbers for the value of a human life:

“Cigarette companies make about a penny in profit for every cigarette sold, or about $10,000 for every million cigarettes purchased. Since there is one death for every million cigarettes sold (or smoked), a tobacco manufacturer will make about $10,000 for every death caused by their products…. The value of a human life to a cigarette manufacturer is therefore about $10,000.” 

Proctor has even produced a “factories of death” chart, illustrating that arguably the world’s most lethal production plant is Philip Morris’s Richmond cigarette facility, which churned out 146 billion cigarettes in 2010, which adds up to about 146,000 deaths per year.

By 1964, researchers at Harvard had already identified the presence of radioactivity in the form of polonium 210 in cigarette smoke, and the cry went up for safety. As for the notion of safer cigarettes, Proctor says all cigarette filters function the same way—“basically like drinking through a somewhat thinner straw.” He goes even further, arguing that “filters have reduced smoke particle size, producing cancers deeper in the lungs, making them harder to identify and harder to treat.” (Scientists determined that the radiation source was the newer “superphosphate” fertilizers being used heavily on tobacco plants.)

 Next came mandated “tar and nicotine numbers,” which turned out to be misleading measures obtained from smoking robots. Then, “an opportunity presented itself to game the system, as we find in the brilliant trick of ventilation.” Manufacturers pricked tiny holes in the paper near the mouthpiece of cigarettes brands like Carlton and True, which consumers got around by covering the holes with fingers or with “lipping” behavior. “Low tars were a fraud, just as “lights” would be,” Proctor writes. Smokers just smoked harder, or differently, or more frequently. In 1983, pharmacologist Neal Benowitz at UCSF broke the official news in the New England Journal of Medicine: Smokers got just as much nicotine, whether they smoked high-, low-, filtered, unfiltered, regular, light, or ultra-light.  The industry itself had known this for more than 20 years. “Nicotine in the actual rod was rarely allowed to drop below about 10 milligrams per cigarette,” Proctor asserts, “and no cigarette was ever commercially successful with much less than this amount.” (A Philip Morris psychologist compared nicotine-free cigarettes to “sex without orgasm.”)

Indeed, almost every design modification put in place by tobacco companies over the past century, from flue-curing to filters, has served to make cigarettes deadlier than before. “Talk of ‘safer cigarettes’ is rather like talking about safer terrorism, or safer smallpox, or safer forms of drowning,” Proctor concludes.

And the industry testing continues. The point of tobacco-sponsored research is not simply to discredit an individual researcher’s work, but to create an aggregate bias in the pattern of research—a lot of “noise” in the signal. In other words, “you basically fund lots of research to dispute a hazard, then cite this same research to say that lots of scholars dispute it.” We are told about “mucociliary escalators,” which dredge the tar up and out of smokers’ lungs. We learn that “a rabbit will scream if nicotine is introduced into the eye.” We read excerpts from anguished letters to tobacco companies: “Do you suppose if I continue to smoke Camel Ultra Light Cigarettes and I should develop cancer it will be ‘Ultra Light Cancer?’”

Proctor brings us up to date: Harm reduction, he writes, has become the industry’s new mantra. “The companies now want us to believe that less hazardous products can be and are being made and marketed.” Proctor thinks harm reduction “may end up causing even greater harm” if products touted as “safer” make smokers less likely to quit. As for public health campaigns, “consumers are encouraged to stop consuming,” Proctor writes, “but producers are never discouraged from producing.” Or, as Louis Pasteur once wrote: “When meditating over a disease, I never think of finding a remedy for it, but, instead, a means of preventing it.”

So, what comes next? A glimpse of the future may already be here, in the form of cinnamon- and mint-flavored Camel Orbs, “which look like Tic Tac candy and contain about a milligram of nicotine in a highly freebased form.”

As for the industry’s success in corrupting scientists and academics through various means, the story is just as bad as you think it is: “It would take many thousands of pages to chronicle the full extent of Big Tobacco’s penetration of academia; the scale of such collaborations is simply too vast. From 1995 to 2007 alone, University of California researchers received at least 108 awards totaling $37 million from tobacco manufacturers….”

Part II of III.

Photo Credit: http://theloungeisback.wordpress.com/

More Vanishing Cigarettes

Churchill, Bette Davis, Don Draper, and Pecos Bill.

In my last post, I highlighted some examples of attacks on cultural history represented by cigarette censorship, to wit: a cigarette taken out of the hand of Paul McCartney, and out of the mouths of Jackson Pollock and Burt Reynolds.

But that is only the tip of the iceberg for cigarette revisionism. Other examples:

--Jean-Paul Sartre. A legendary smoking icon, Sartre was no doubt rolling in his grave over the decision by the Bibliotheque Nationale of France to airbrush away his ever-present cigarette in an exhibition poster marking the 100th anniversary of his birth.

--Winston Churchill. Perhaps the most famous cigar smoker in history, the British Prime Minister suffered the indignity of having his cigar air-brushed out of the famous 1948 photograph of him making the “V” sign for victory. As you can see in the photograph above, that moment in history is no longer with us. Instead, Churchill looks like he is beginning to develop lip cancer.

--Tom and Jerry, Fred Flintstone, and Pecos Bill. Famous cartoon characters who occasionally, for purposes of satire or humor, were seen smoking cigarettes, and whose famous smoking scenes have been edited out by nervous broadcasters over the years. 

--Bette Davis. Another iconic cigarette smoker, she also ran afoul of the U.S. Postal Office (see Jackson Pollock in the post below). When the Post Office offered its Bette Davis stamp in 2008, it was inspired by a still photo from the film "All About Eve." As film critic Roger Ebert wrote at the time: “Where's her cigarette? Yes reader, the cigarette in the original photo has been eliminated. We are all familiar, I am sure, with the countless children and teenagers who have been lured into the clutches of tobacco by stamp collecting, which seems so innocent, yet can have such tragic outcomes.”

--And finally, there is the contemporary case of Don Draper of TV’s “Mad Men,” the only current television show truly obsessed with the cultural significance of smoking.  Indeed, the series opened its first season with a show called “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” in which advertising execs devised a pitch for Lucky Strikes. And the arresting title sequence that opens every show ends with a memorable black and white graphic of Don Draper seen from behind, seated on a couch, a cigarette held firmly in hand. “Bizarrely,” write Chris Harrald and Fletcher Watkins in The Cigarette Book: The History and Culture of Smoking, “this pleasure was denied to the man in the Mad Men promotional video for Season 1, when shown on Apple’s iTunes. The original image of a man seen from behind lounging in silhouette, right hand outstretched with a cigarette in it, has had the cigarette digitally removed.” (It has since been restored).

Photo Credit: CORBIS/Stephanie Schaerer