Why was radioactive polonium-laced tobacco used in cigarettes?

The Tobacco Conspiracy

European Commission Public Health
http://ec.europa.eu/health/

Smoking kills indeed: with their lies and schemes, American cigarette manufacturers have created an unprecedented health disaster. For a decade historian Robert Proctor has been combing through their internal documents. Now he’s published the chilling account of his findings.

Stanford (U.S.A.), from our special correspondent

Do you believe you’re a smoker because you’re enjoying it, that’s just the way it is, and you don’t want to change your mind about it? Then turn the page: this article isn’t for you. But maybe you do want to know why people smoke and why stopping seems so difficult? Why so many of us are dying from it? And why all that is deemed to be normal? To that end, we’ll need to enter the engine room of the biggest ever undertaking in engineering consent. It’s a complex place, a tangle of men and organisations, who became cogs in a finely-tuned machine that can infiltrate culture and science, undermine medicine and corrupt anyone. You’ll need a guide to navigate that maze — and Robert Proctor is just that person.

Mr Proctor (57) is neither a conspiracy theorist nor a health-freak. A science historian who teaches at Stanford, California, he’s the author of Golden Holocaust, an essay recently published in the U.S. that has got the American tobacco industry seriously worried — so worried that it’s used every possible legal trick to get its hands on the manuscript before its release — to no avail.

What makes the hefty, 750-page tome so worrisome to giants like RJ Reynolds or Philip Morris? Their own words, to start with. Their secrets, big or small, lifted from memos and internal correspondence, from classified reports, from research findings by their own chemists and doctors. It’s little known in France that those documents, as valuable and sensitive as they are, have been public since the end of the 1990’s — the so-called “tobacco documents”. In 1998, the Master Settlement Agreement, which put an end to the lawsuits brought by 46 U.S. states against cigarette manufacturers, imposed financial penalties — USD 250 billion (€ 188 billion) to be paid over two decades; it also ordered that industry secrets be made public.

Millions of documents from the major manufacturers, spanning over five decades, were put in the care of the University of California, in San Francisco, along with the task of building the “Legacy Tobacco Documents Library” and bringing the whole archive online. To this day 13 million documents have been scanned, which amounts to a whopping 79 million pages, and new ones are added every day. Based on that corpus, Golden Holocaust is an attempt to tell  the unabridged tale of the cigarette. Robert Proctor has been poring over the tobacco documents for over ten years now — enough to make a man paranoid. Among other findings, he learned that the professor who many years ago hired him at Stanford had secretly been on the industry’s payroll. He also understood why one of his grant applications was rejected by the National Science Foundation, America’s main funding body for research: the desk officer was being paid by the tobacco industry…

Everyone who spent some time looking at the tobacco documents reached broadly the same conclusions. In July 2000 experts from the World Health Organisation (WHO) published a damning 260-page report showing how manufacturers had infiltrated their organisation through front organisations or scientists they were secretly paying. The idea, of course, was to prevent the tobacco-control policies from being implemented. When in 1999 the Clinton administration decided to sue, based in part on the documents, the federal prosecutors argued that for half a century the American tobacco industry had “engaged in and executed – and continue to engage in and execute – a massive 50-year scheme to defraud the public”.

Tobacco is first and foremost about numbers — mind-boggling numbers. Every year smoking kills more than malaria, more than AIDS, more than war and more than terrorism – combined. Every year over 5.5 million of lives are lost prematurely. Tobacco killed 100 million people in the 20th century, and will probably claim one billion lives over the course of this century.

Thinking about tobacco is enough to make your head swim. Enough cigarettes are made in a year to fill 24 Egyptian pyramids. Lit cigarettes will deposit some 60,000 tonnes of tar in human lungs. It makes you wonder if humanity has ever invented anything more uselessly harmful to itself. The answer’s no. “The cigarette”, Robert Proctor says, “is the deadliest artefact in the history of human civilization.”

And there are more numbers, more calculations. “For every million cigarettes smoked over a year there will one premature death within 25 years. That law works more or less everywhere”*, Robert Proctor notes. That macabre rule has unexpected applications, such as estimating the number of deaths caused by the lies of Big Tobacco’s management.

On 14 December 1953, tobacco moguls met discreetly at the New York Plaza Hotel. A few months earlier experiments using mice had shown the carcinogenic effects of the product they were selling — something German doctors had known since the 1920’s — and newspapers were picking up the story. After meeting with the director of PR consultancy Hill & Knowlton, the big cigarette manufacturers launched a propaganda campaign highlighting scientific uncertainty, ensuring the public remained unaware of just harmful smoking was. It’s important to “keep the controversy alive”, a Brown & Williamson executive wrote in a famous memo found in the tobacco documents: “Doubt is our product”. A successful product: only in 1964 did the American health authorities start giving clear warnings of the link between tobacco and lung cancer.