, Research Paper
The Deception of the Tobacco Industry
The individual act of cigarette smoking offers no benefits
to a person in any way. Its effects on health have been
proven to cause any one of a variety of fatal diseases
including lung cancer and heart diseases. Despite this
reality, about 46 million adult men and women in the United
States smoke cigarettes regularly. Through subliminal
advertisements and propaganda, irrational desires are
cleverly instilled in the minds of millions by callous
cigarette companies; the targeted minds are mostly those of
children. These selfish companies are clearly unconcerned
about the well-being of humanity, and are more concerned
about their profits than their clients health. Despite
overwhelming scientific evidence that their products kill
420,000 American smokers and 53,000 non-smokers each year,
the tobacco industry continues to sell its life-threatening
products, unhindered by any significant government
regulation (Glantz xvii). This is achieved (by the
industry) through strategically planned legal, political,
and public relations tactics which are contrived in order
to mislead the public and take the responsibility for
causing death and disease away from the companies. Along
with help from the government, the tobacco industry relies
on the following in order to preserve its success: (1) the
feigned controversy created by the industry on the
effects of smoking, (2) the addictive properties of
tobacco, and (3) marketing their product by associating it
with misleading images.
Responses to the Health Effects of Cigarettes
Americans have been smoking tobacco since before
Columbus set sail in 1492. The habit has been practiced in
areas of civilization for 500 years (Kluger xviii). Tobacco
is a part of American history; it was grown by George
Washington and engraved on the pillars inside the Capitol
building by Thomas Jefferson (Taylor 7).
Cigarettes became better popularized during the
First World War and were even more successful during the
Second. Tobacco smoking had always been suspected to be an
unhealthy habit, but it was not until the twentieth century
that connections between smoking and disease became more
evident. In 1930 in the United States, 3,000 people died
from lung cancer. By 1962, that number had increased to
41,000, just as the number of cigarette smokers had
increased between those years (Taylor 3). Over the first
half of the century, the number of cancers in the smoking
population went up in direct proportion to the number of
cigarettes smoked per day (Hilts 3).
In 1962, the concern about smoking and health grew
large enough for something official to be done. At
President John F. Kennedy s request, the Surgeon General,
Luther Terry, had assembled a collection of the most
distinguished scientists and doctors who had no public
opinion on the issue (Hilts 30). After two years of
research and experimentation, the Surgeon General released
his report on smoking and health. It concluded: Cigarette
smoking is causally related to lung cancer in men; the
magnitude of the effect of cigarette smoking far outweighs
all other factors (qtd. in Glantz et al. 18). Furthermore,
the report linked smoking to chronic bronchitis, coronary
artery disease, cancer of the larynx, and cancer of the
urinary bladder in men (Glantz et al. 18).
The public knowledge about nicotine at that time,
however, was not as extensive as that on disease. The
report stated that The tobacco habit should be
characterized as an habituation rather than an addiction.
It was not until 24 years later (1988) that the Surgeon
General (C. Everett Koop) concluded that Cigarettes and
other forms of tobacco are addicting, that Nicotine is
the drug in tobacco that causes the addiction, and that
The pharmacologic and behavioral processes that determine
tobacco addiction are similar to those that determine
addiction to drugs such as heroin and cocaine (qtd. in
Glantz et al. 15).
The first time the health dangers of smoking were
formally brought to the American public s attention was in
December, 1953. Experiments done by Drs. Ernst Wynder and
Evarts Graham and their colleagues at the Sloan Kettering
Institute in New York demonstrated that a large percent (by
experimental standards) of mice developed cancerous tumors
when their skins were painted with condensed tobacco smoke,
or tar (Hilts 4). This was considered by many as adequate
verification that smoke would do the same to human lungs
since they, too, are made of skin.
The response in the U.S. was immediate: in less
than two years, consumption dropped to 384 billion
cigarettes per year – down from 416 billion in 1952 (Hilts
2). However, these mouse skin-painting experiments had
their most tremendous effect on the tobacco companies
themselves. On December 15, 1953, for the first time in
history, the head executives of the leading tobacco
companies in the industry met in order to devise an
emergency plan. The leaders of the market were the same
then as they are today: Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Brown
and Williamson, American Tobacco, U.S. Tobacco, and Benson
and Hedges (Hilts 4). The industry s main concern in
response to the medical evidence was to make sure that
consumers carried on smoking (Taylor 11).
The minutes of the meeting show that salesmen in
the industry [were] frantically alarmed and that the
decline in tobacco stocks on the market ha[d] caused
grave concern . . . (qtd. in Hilts 5). John Hill of
the public relations firm of Hill and Knowlton suggested
that the industry initiate a public counter-attack against
the scientists and that the companies make a public
statement saying that they are sincerely concerned with the
public welfare. They established a joint organization
funded by all the companies to influence the issues of
smoking and health: the Tobacco Industry Research Committee
(TIRC) (Hilts 5-6).
The objective of TIRC was to convince the public
that there was a controversy as to whether smoking is
dangerous (Glantz et al.26). They were to spend large
amounts of money to prevent scientists and public health
officials from warning people of the hazards of cigarette
smoking. TIRC did not begin with any doctors or scientists,
but with 38 public relations experts along with associated
advertising executives and other contractors – all hired by
the tobacco companies (Hilts 6-8). Although there are many
documents to prove this, the industry claimed that TIRC was
an independant organization that would determine the truth
about the health effects of smoking (Glantz et al.26).
The industry needed to reassure smokers (Taylor
12). Refusing to accept the medical evidence linking
cigarettes to lung cancer and addiction created doubt in
the public mind and allowed smokers to choose sides on
the issue. Even today, the tobacco industry s controversy
causes the confusion in the public mind. Philip J. Hilts, a
Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, wrote that
the confusion intentionally produced by the industry can
be measured in units of misperception.
In the last analysis, for the public. . . When asked how
many people smoke, we guess about twice as many as actually
do. When asked to rate the top ten health priorities for
the countries, we guess that quitting smoking should take
tenth place, behind an array of real and imagined hazards,
including the installation of smoke detectors, even though
while fires in the home cause about 6,000 deaths annually,
smoking causes something over 400,000. (19-20)
One of the primary arguments of the tobacco industry
against medical evidence proving that smoking causes cancer
has been that the evidence is merely statistical. This
ignorant statement ignores the fact that the ground of all
reason in science has always been based on statistics.
Cigarette company executives have been trained by public
relations experts and lawyers to say that the causation of
lung cancer through cigarettes has not been proven in the
sense that scientists cannot demonstrate the exact
mechanism that smoke from a given cigarette on a given day
produced the tumor in the smoker s lung. This form of
proof, however, is not requisite in the scientific world,
and it is hypocritical of tobacco companies to demand this
level of proof. The companies themselves use statistics for
the most important company decisions. For example, how and
where to market brands and what amount of flavoring to put
in certain brands. The whole industry uses statistics in
all areas with their business; none of it meets their
created standard of proof. Thus the tobacco companies
attack is on science itself, or rather, on the idea that we
can use science to make decisions (Hilts 18-19).
The industry s stated disagreement with the
evidence also attributed to their argument against
government regulation of their products, and helped prevent
lawsuits against tobacco companies. In addition to their
public disagreement, companies argue that smoking is a
matter of individual choice, blaming their customers for
the diseases they acquire through using addictive tobacco
products. Finally, the industry s claims are made to appear
sincere by their pronounced willingness to support health-
related research (Glantz et al. 3).
TIRC promised to publicize industry-funded work,
even if it revealed that there were cancer-causing agents
in cigarettes. However, memos show that public relations
executives and lawyers would screen the scientist s report
before authorizing their release, even to the Surgeon
General. When reports would turn up with conclusions that
may have been damaging to the tobacco industry, TIRC would
not make them public (Hilts 10-11). Much of the work funded
by TIRC did not even have anything to do with tobacco and
health. In a survey of those who received grants, 80
percent of the scientists said that none of their research
had ever examined smoking s health effects. Of the 20
percent whose work was in that area, over 90 percent agreed
that smoking causes lung cancer and is addictive (Hilts 15).
As the TIRC did all of this to stall for time, the
companies themselves were doing their own research behind
closed curtains – without each company knowing what the
others were doing. Documents show not only that the
experiments done were good work, but that they were
advanced far beyond the work of the top university
scientists of the time (Hilts 11). Within the company labs,
researchers found not one, but 15 compounds which caused
cancer and another 24 which encouraged cancer growth (21).
Characteristically of the tobacco industry, this important
information which could have saved millions of lives was
suppressed from the Surgeon General and, more importantly,
from the public.
Through the independent research conducted in the
company labs, many companies had developed a sophisticated
understanding of nicotine and learned that it was addictive
by the early 1960 s – a quarter of a century before the
Surgeon General concluded just that. An essay written in
1963 by scientists at Battelle (a European lab hired to
work for British American Tobacco and sister companies) and
distributed to the senior executives of British American
Tobacco and Brown & Williamson read as follows:
Chronic intake of nicotine tends to restore the normal
physiological functioning of the endocrine system, so that
ever-increasing dose levels of nicotine are necessary to
maintain the desired action . . . This unconscious desire
explains the addiction of the individual to nicotine. (qtd.
in Glantz et al. 15)
This essay was obviously not submitted to the Surgeon
General, whose report published the next year presumed that
The tobacco habit should be characterized as an
habituation rather than an addiction (qtd. in Glantz et
al. 15). Despite all of the work by the company labs that
proved how nicotine is addictive, tobacco executives have
publicly denied that nicotine is addictive even to this day.
What the companies hoped to achieve in their labs
was to identify the cancer-causing agents in tobacco and
then remove them and, as a result, develop a safe
cigarette. This task proved to be much more challenging
than the company scientists had imagined. They later
discovered that the substances themselves were not what
made cigarettes dangerous, but it was when they were
burned; they were transformed into toxic products just
before entering the lungs. They also found that there were
43 carcinogenic substances to be removed in order for the
cigarette to truly be safe. These compounds could not be
removed since burning them was the basis of smoking; it
released both flavor and nicotine, both essential to the
cigarette (Hilts 25).
The search for a safe cigarette not only provided
complications for the company scientists, but posed a
dilemma for the public relations executives and company
lawyers as well. By asserting that cigarettes are not
harmful, the tobacco industry had situated itself in a
conspicuously difficult position. If the company scientists
actually did produce a safe cigarette, they could not
respectably sell them. Companies would be proving
themselves liars if they were to market a safe
alternative to cigarettes which they had previously
insisted were safe.
By 1975, five companies actually had designed and
tested safer cigarettes, but by then it was too late;
they were not about to admit to their deception and open
themselves to legal liability. Since they could not market
these safer cigarettes, they put their designs in the
closet and locked the door. Gradually, it became obvious
that the scientists and their labs could no longer provide
the companies with anything but harmful data. (Since their
information would not be used to design safer cigarettes,
the only place it could ultimately be used would be against
the industry in court.) So the companies decided to abandon
their research programs: R.J. Reynolds closed its
facilities in December 1970; the British tobacco industry s
laboratory was abruptly closed in 1974; and Philip Morris
shut down its biology labs in 1984 (Hilts 39-40).
Reliance On the Addictive Effects of Nicotine
To the tobacco industry, nicotine is by far the
most important of the thousands of chemicals in tobacco
smoke (Glantz et al. 58). It is what makes tobacco as
addictive as heroin or cocaine. If cigarettes were
manufactured without nicotine, the whole industry would
have faded long ago. (This was proven once when Philip
Morris tried marketing a nicotine-free cigarette called
Next [Hilts 50].) 75 percent of adult smokers know that
they are addicted; by some estimates, as many as 90 percent
are addicted (Glantz et al. 59). Of the seventeen million
Americans who try to quit each year, only eight percent
actually succeed ( Very Few Who Try to Quit 16). Tobacco
executives know how addictive nicotine is, and do their
best to make smoking as convenient as possible to the
smoker: a pack of cigarettes costs less that a half hour of
work at federal minimum wage; no equipment (other than a
match) is necessary; cigarettes are quickly available to
anyone over 18; there is no fear of overdose; until
recently, smoking has been acceptable in most public and
private places; tobacco does not impair one s abilities as
does alcohol or other substances; and the damage it brings
to health is slow to arrive (Schelling 430-431).
By the early 1960s, many tobacco companies had a
sophisticated understanding of nicotine pharmacology, and
had recognized the central role nicotine plays in the
smoking experience. In 1963, Addison Yeamen, vice president
and general counsel for Brown & Williamson, stated on a
memo: Moreover, nicotine is addictive. We are then in the
business of selling nicotine [rather than selling tobacco
or cigarettes], an addictive drug effective in the release
of stress mechanisms [emphasis added] (qtd. in Glantz et
al. 15). William Dunn, Jr. Of Philip Morris wrote in 1971:
Think of the cigarette pack as a storage container for a