Golden holocaust Proctor, Robert N
2012., 20120129, 2012, c2011., 2012-02-28, 20110101
eBook
The cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization. It is also one of the most beguiling, thanks to more than a century of manipulation at the hands of tobacco industry ...chemists. In Golden Holocaust, Robert N. Proctor draws on reams of formerly-secret industry documents to explore how the cigarette came to be the most widely-used drug on the planet, with six trillion sticks sold per year. He paints a harrowing picture of tobacco manufacturers conspiring to block the recognition of tobacco-cancer hazards, even as they ensnare legions of scientists and politicians in a web of denial. Proctor tells heretofore untold stories of fraud and subterfuge, and he makes the strongest case to date for a simple yet ambitious remedy: a ban on the manufacture and sale of cigarettes.
ObjectiveTo investigate how and why Japan Tobacco, Inc. (JT) in 1986 established the Smoking Research Foundation (SRF), a research-funding institution, and to explore the extent to which SRF has ...influenced science and health policy in Japan.MethodsWe analysed documents in the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents archive, along with recent Japanese litigation documents and published documents.ResultsJT’s effort to combat effective tobacco control was strengthened in the mid-1980s, following privatisation of the company. While remaining under the protection of Japan’s Ministry of Finance, the semiprivatised company lost its ‘access to politicos’, opening up a perceived need for collaboration with global cigarette makers. One solution, arrived at through clandestine planning with American companies, was to establish a third-party organisation, SRF, with the hope of capturing scientific and medical authority for the industry. Guarded by powerful people in government and academia, SRF was launched with the covert goal of influencing tobacco policy both inside and outside Japan. Scholars funded by SRF have participated in international conferences, national advisory committees and tobacco litigation, in most instances helping the industry to maintain a favourable climate for the continued sale of cigarettes.ConclusionsContrary to industry claims, SRF was never meant to be independent or neutral. With active support from foreign cigarette manufacturers, SRF represents the expansion into Asia of the denialist campaign that began in the USA in 1953.
This Arts and Medicine feature reviews a newly published political history of the US tobacco industry, emphasizing the continuing importance of cigarette smoking to illness and death at a time when ...the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is perceived as the country's greatest health threat.
Storm surges are a significant hazard to coastal communities around the world, putting lives at risk and costing billions of dollars in damage. Understanding how storm surges and high tides interact ...is crucial for estimating extreme water levels so that we can protect coastal communities. We demonstrate that in a tidal regime the best measure of a storm surge is the skew surge, the difference between the observed and predicted high water within a tidal cycle. Based on tide gauge records spanning decades from the UK, U.S., Netherlands, and Ireland we show that the magnitude of high water exerts no influence on the size of the most extreme skew surges. This is the first systematic proof that any storm surge can occur on any tide, which is essential for understanding worst‐case scenarios. The lack of surge generation dependency on water depth emphasizes the dominant natural variability of weather systems in an observation‐based analysis. Weak seasonal relationships between skew surges and high waters were identified at a minority of locations where long‐period changes to the tidal cycle interact with the storm season. Our results allow advances to be made in methods for estimating the joint probabilities of storm surges and tides.
Key Points
Skew surge is the best metric of storm surge in a tidal regime
Any skew surge can coincide with any tide
Where seasonal relationships exist, they should be included in risk predictions
Tobacco use behaviors in the U.S. have changed significantly over the past century. After a steep increase in cigarette use rates over the first half of the 20th century, adult smoking prevalence ...rates started declining from their peak reached in 1964. Improved understanding of the health risks of smoking has been aided by the U.S. Surgeon General's Reports, issued on a nearly annual basis starting in 1964. Among the many forces driving down smoking prevalence were the recognition of tobacco use as an addiction and cause of cancer, along with concerns about the ill effects of breathing secondhand smoke. These factors contributed to the declining social acceptance of smoking, especially with the advent of legal restrictions on smoking in public spaces, mass media counter-marketing campaigns, and higher taxes on cigarettes. This article reviews some of the forces that have helped change the public image of smoking, focusing on the 50 years since the 1964 Surgeon General's Report on smoking and health.
ObjectiveTo use methods from computational linguistics to identify differences in the rhetorical strategies deployed by defence versus plaintiffs’ lawyers in cigarette litigation.MethodsFrom 318 ...closing arguments in 159 Engle progeny trials (2008–2016) archived in the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents, we calculated frequency scores and Mann-Whitney Rho scores of plaintiffs versus defence corpora to discover ‘tropes’ (terms used disproportionately by one side) and ‘taboos’ (terms scrupulously avoided by one side or the other).ResultsDefence attorneys seek to place the smoker on trial, using his or her friends and family members to demonstrate that he or she must have been fully aware of the harms caused by smoking. We show that ‘free choice,’ ‘common knowledge’ and ‘personal responsibility’ remain key strategies in cigarette litigation, but algorithmic analysis allows us to understand how such strategies can be deployed without actually using these expressions. Industry attorneys rarely mention personal responsibility, for example, but invoke that concept indirectly, by talking about ‘decisions’ made by the individual smoker and ‘risks’ they assumed.ConclusionsQuantitative analysis can reveal heretofore hidden patterns in courtroom rhetoric, including the weaponisation of pronouns and the systematic avoidance of certain terms, such as ‘profits’ or ‘customer.’ While cigarette makers use words that focus on the individual smoker, attorneys for the plaintiffs refocus agency onto the industry. We show how even seemingly trivial parts of speech—like pronouns—along with references to family members or words like ‘truth’ and ‘facts’ have been weaponised for use in litigation.
The cigarette is the deadliest artefact in the history of human civilisation. Most of the richer countries of the globe, however, are making progress in reducing both smoking rates and overall ...consumption. Many different methods have been proposed to steepen this downward slope, including increased taxation, bans on advertising, promotion of cessation, and expansion of smoke-free spaces. One option that deserves more attention is the enactment of local or national bans on the sale of cigarettes. There are precedents: 15 US states enacted bans on the sale of cigarettes from 1890 to 1927, for instance, and such laws are still fully within the power of local communities and state governments. Apart from reducing human suffering, abolishing the sale of cigarettes would result in savings in the realm of healthcare costs, increased labour productivity, lessened harms from fires, reduced consumption of scarce physical resources, and a smaller global carbon footprint. Abolition would also put a halt to one of the principal sources of corruption in modern civilisation, and would effectively eliminate one of the historical forces behind global warming denial and environmental obfuscation. The primary reason for abolition, however, is that smokers themselves dislike the fact they smoke. Smoking is not a recreational drug, and abolishing cigarettes would therefore enlarge rather than restrict human liberties. Abolition would also help cigarette makers fulfil their repeated promises to ‘cease production’ if cigarettes were ever found to be causing harm.
On 28 July 2017, US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Chief Scott Gottlieb, MD, announced a bold new plan to limit the nicotine allowed in manufactured cigarettes. 1 Gottlieb, a Trump appointee ...revealing C Everett Koop-like potential, pointed out that cigarettes remain the leading preventable cause of death in the USA, killing nearly half a million Americans every year. 2 But of course it is the nicotine in cigarettes-kept above some crucial level and potency-that keeps people smoking and ultimately leads to disease, death and the suffering of families. FDA News Release: FDA announces comprehensive regulatory plan to shift trajectory of tobacco-related disease, death. 2017 https://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm568923.htm 2 U.S Food & Drug Administration. In: Credit suisse global investment returns yearbook, 2015: 5-15. http://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/index.cfm?fileid=AE924F44-E396-A4E5-11E63B09CFE37CCB 4 Yeaman A . Implications of Battelle Hippo I & II and the Grifffith filter: UCSF Brown & Williamson, 1963. http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/xrc72d00 5 U.S Food & Drug Administration.
As public health advocates struggle over how best to end the cigarette epidemic, one persistent obstacle to developing appropriate policies has been the lingering spectre of ‘prohibition’. A ...misunderstanding of the USA’s experience with the national ban on sales of alcohol more than a century ago has led even public health advocates to claim that we cannot end the sale of cigarettes because ‘prohibition does not work’: a ban on sales, we hear, would lead to crime and to black markets, among many other negatives. In this Special Communication, we show how the tobacco industry has carefully constructed and reinforced this imagined impossibility, creating a false analogy between cigarettes and alcohol. This improper analogy, with its multiple negative associations, continues to block intelligent thinking about how to end cigarette sales. Instead of prohibition, we propose abolition as a term that better captures what ending sales of the single most deadly consumer product in history will actually do: enhance human health and freedom.
PDF
