Was Science Sidelined in Cigarette Debate?

It was instructive to be reading Golden Holocaust, Robert N. Proctor's new history of the tobacco industry, during the recent debates over Mitt Romney's leadership of Bain Capital.

Bain made some of its money by closing unprofitable companies that it had bought, often firing hundreds of people along the way. During his 15 years at Bain, Romney became a multimillionaire.

To many observers, the Bain story was a yawn. Those who have studied the history of capitalism, dating back to the days of John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, have shown that it is generally a dirty business, in which more ruthless practitioners generally get ahead and deftly use science and statistics to support their causes.

But perhaps due to the current economic downturn and high unemployment rate, others asked whether someone who had made his fortune as Romney did was an appropriate person to lead our country. It was, of course, only a momentary pause, but one that may have actually forced people to rethink something that they have long taken for granted.

This type of dramatically new perspective, "making the familiar seem strange and the strange familiar," is what Proctor is trying to achieve in Golden Holocaust. Is the tobacco industry so inherently duplicitous that it does not deserve to exist, even if it is a great capitalist success? Proctor challenges his readers to conceptualize a much happier and healthier world in which the manufacture and sale of cigarettes is prohibited.

Proctor is hardly the first accomplished author to mine this topic. Books by Richard Kluger, Stanton Glantz and Allan Brandt have savaged the cigarette industry, relying in part on internal tobacco company documents that were released as a result of a series of lawsuits.

Proctor builds not only on this earlier work but on the continued release of documents in an easily searchable online database, now containing 70 million pages. As the author notes, being able to search for specific terms -- like candy cigarettes, cyanide and the famous 1964 surgeon general's Report -- made it easy for him to document the industry's perfidies. Through such searches Proctor learned, for example, that cigarette filters don't filter and that light and low tar cigarettes are especially deadly. He also learned that, remarkably, the tobacco industry was given the power to veto membership on the surgeon general's committee, leading to a report that did not condemn smoking nearly as forcefully as it might have.

Indeed, Golden Holocaust is like a 700-page how-to manual of how to sell a dangerous product that no one needs and make lots of money as a result. Here is the full story of the December 1953 meeting of tobacco company CEOs that engineered several public strategies for obfuscating the growing proof -- privately well-known to these executives -- that smoking was both addictive and almost surely linked to lung cancer. The main plan, engineered by the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton, was to repetitively insist that no definitive proof of harm existed and that "more research was needed." It was a masterful example of what we now call "plausible deniability." Proctor calls it an "oncologic Ponzi scheme."