CORPOCRACY & SMOKING -- GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER!

CORPOCRACY & SMOKING – GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007

“Health is the greatest of all possessions; a pale cobble is better than a sick king.”

Isaac Bickerstaff (1735 – 1812), English dramatist


ABSTRACT:

We are packing to move on to Europe for a cruise in the Baltic Sea, visiting old haunts in England, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, Germany and Finland, and some new ones in Estonia and Russia.

You have come to know me as a writer-in-cyberspace with what I read, think and reflect against the tapestry of my life.

Reading has always provoked thinking and reflection against that experience. I do this not so much to put you in touch with me as to put you in touch with yourself.

It is hard for us to give ourselves permission to reflect on our lives other than what that Great Seer in the Sky, the corporation, tells us we should think, feel, believe, as well as what is true and what is not, therefore, how we should behave.

I am a product of that corporation but have never joined it. From an early age, I was suspect of it motives, choosing instead to use it as my laboratory. This is made clear in my writings. Indeed, I’ve taken comfort in being an outsider in a world craving to be insiders, and have known a kind of freedom for the detachment.

This brings me to the subject of this missive, smoking and the cigarette industry. Allan M. Brandt does a valuable public service in his new book, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (Basic Books 2007). Some of his research and insights appear here, along with my continuing weariness of corpocracy, the new dominant force that touches us all. The cigarette industry is but one aspect of this colossus.

WHAT CIGARETTE SMOKING DOES

Repeated exposure to nicotine distorts the brain system responsible for cognitive awareness, and a sense of well-being, so that the smoker comes to crave the chemical.

WHO SMOKES?

Smoking rates are especially high among the poor and the mentally ill, perhaps because they can afford few other consolations and because the mild antidepressant effects of smoking make quitting especially difficult. Yet, across the board, one in five adult Americans today (2007) of all socioeconomic circumstances continues to smoke.

WHEN DID WE KNOW SMOKING WAS OF HIGH RISK?

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, practically everyone knew that smoking was risky. What they didn't know was that smoking was extremely risky.

Smokers who consume a pack of cigarettes a day are fifty times more likely to contract lung cancer than nonsmokers. According to the American Cancer Society, "about half of all Americans who persist in continuing to smoke will die because of the habit."

Diseases related to tobacco account for 20 percent of all deaths in the United States each year.

WHEN DID CORPORATE MALFEASANCE REACH ITS MOST CALLOUS LEVEL?

Beginning in the 1980s, a number of former smokers suffering from cancer sued the tobacco companies for having misled them about just how dangerous smoking was.

For a corporation to withhold accurate health information is not only against the law, it is also a violation of human rights, according to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Facing ruin, tobacco companies launched an army of corporate attorneys on these former smokers and won many of their cases, and even when they lost, the resulting settlements forced them to change their message but not their devious tactics.

The cigarette industry’s main legal defense was based on an illogical set of assumptions: the risks of smoking were “unproven”; that consumers had been sufficiently warned about whatever risks existed, and thus the companies were not responsible for health problems. Some juries were actually convinced by these arguments.

WHEN DID IT ALL START?

The first mass-produced cigarettes appeared on the market in the 1880s in the United States. But cigarette smoking in America really took off after World War I. The nation was changing rapidly from ethnic concentrated communities into local communities with largely local economies driven by a new mass consumer culture.

The corporation was born which increasingly fed, clothed, transported, and entertained the masses under the broad umbrella of corpocracy.

Assembly-line production in everything from hand tools to automobiles to toothpaste enabled companies to produce goods ever more cheaply with brand advertising through newspapers, magazines and the radio vastly expanding their markets into every cranny of society.

At the same time, America’s moral climate was also changing becoming increasingly secular and individualistic. Smoking once considered vulgar and a degenerate habit, limited to people on the fringe such as merchant marine sailors, bourgeoisie artists and the dregs of society, came to symbolize the new liberated optimists of the 1920s. Everybody who was anybody smoked!

The themes of cigarette advertising were carefree, slick and therapeutic. Chesterfield cigarettes associated its product with sex, depicting couples languishing in the moonlight. “Blow my way,” the woman says, to her man who is smoking a cigarette. Philip Morris aimed at the sophisticated smoker; Lucky Strikes appealed to women on the rise with playfully rebellious slogans: “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!”

Already in the 1930s, with suspicion about the damaging health effects of smoking and cancer, there began to grow more of a reassuring and “scientific” tone to the marketing of cigarettes.

Doctors were featured heavily in advertisements. In one ad for Camels, a handsome young physician wearing a head-mirror advises, “Give your throat a vacation. Smoke a Camel.” In another ad, an older doctor with a warm smile and a pince-nez holds a pack of Lucky Strikes and states, “20,679 Physicians say, ‘Luckies are less irritating.”

In the 1950s, when I was in college, practically every professor smoked in class as well as 90 percent of the women. Curiously, far less men appeared to smoke in class for some reason. Everything was seen through the smoke of this classroom haze. You would think a nonsmoker, such as myself, would complain, but we took it as part of the ambience to a college education.

Even so, by the 1950s, a link was revealed between smoking and lung cancer by epidemiological studies in England (Richard Doll and Austen Bradford Hill) and the United States (Ernst Wynder and Evarts Graham). Moreover, they discovered lung cancer had tripled in just thirty years (1920 – 1950).

People were dying, but strangely enough, it failed to create much excitement, although an article in “The Reader’s Digest” had the caption “Cancer by the Carton.” Not to worry,
Americans demonstrated their insouciance by increasing their smoking rate in the 1950s by 20 percent.

WHY DON’T PEOPLE LISTEN TO HEALTH WARNINGS?

There is still no clear answer today. Some claim Americans are fatalistic, “You’ve got to die from something, why not enjoy it with cancer sticks?”

The clearest evidence -- despite the attempts of health promoters to direct volumes of research to the mind of the smoker, and to show the clear habitual nature of smoking -- is that the tobacco companies have cut them off at the pass.

Cigarette manufacturers have been highly successful in launching campaigns of half-truths and outright falsehoods to cast doubt on lung cancer studies. This has given people the impression that the habit cannot be all that dangerous if there is so much controversy around these studies.

Yet, smokers and nonsmokers, alike, know of someone within their intimate circle that has died of emphysema or some other smoking related illness. The danger is huge and there is little justification for controversy.

My own mother died of emphysema. Otherwise, she was the picture of health. It was not pretty to watch her die, as I have written (In the Shadow of the Courthouse AuthorHouse 2003). Yet, when I talked to my mother’s nurse, and said, “Seeing this would convince any smoker to quit.” She looked at me, and said simply, “I smoke,” and walked away.

Tobacco companies in 1953 issued a frank statement to cigarette smoking, which was published across the country in newspapers. The statement claimed emphatically that cigarette smoking was not injurious to heath, and that more research was needed into the question.

In typical corpocracy fashion, the industry created the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC). This was meant to create the impression the industry was taking the health issue seriously. Its main function proved however to be public relations.

Having once been in research & development, I can imagine some underpaid scientists willing to receive tobacco company grants “to find possible evidence of a link between smoking and cancer,” and then to publish their “findings” with the full support of their grantors.

Part of my work in R& D was to find ways to circumvent patents held by competitors, whereas these scientists working for tobacco companies were often subtly encouraged to use these grants to search for causes of cancer other than cigarettes, for example, possible genetic or environmental linkages. They were even encouraged to find beneficial effects of smoking.

When these tobacco company-funded researchers found evidence that cigarette smoke was loaded with carcinogens, their results were suppressed. Incredibly, none of these scientists complained.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that a small number of tobacco-industry “whistle-blowers” came forward. Still, nothing changed. TIRC continued to issue the mantra: “There is no conclusive proof of a link between smoking and cancer,” although the tobacco industry had such proof locked safely away.

In the midst of this, the tobacco industry benefited from a general skepticism on the part of the public concerning statistics, and from the opposition of doctors toward the science of epidemiology, a relatively new discipline.

At the time, few doctors were trained in either statistics or epidemiology, and some may have sensed that the epidemiologists posed a threat to their position as the premier authorities on health issues.

In fact in the 1960s, the American Medical Association, a corpocracy in its own right, accepted $15 million in research grants from the TIRC, and then maintained from this research that the links between smoking and cancer were “unproven.”

This was despite the US Surgeon General in 1964 issuing a report confirming the linkage. The following year Congress passed the Cigarette Labeling Act, which eventually was watered down to a “warning” by the successful lobbying of tobacco companies.

The charade continued. A growing number of brands now came out with filtered versions. Filters are cosmetic and do not reduce the risks of smoking, but half of smokers believed they did.

“Light” cigarettes were marketed as “milder” when they were more addictive because the increased nicotine. Interestingly enough, the tobacco industry never claimed “low-tar” cigarettes were safer. The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association did it instead, claiming low-tar brands “were below the critical threshold of risk of disease.” There was scant evidence at the time in support of this claim, which we now know to be absolutely false.

In the midst of all this jockeying, tobacco companies put doctors and health on the shelf and returned to their original theme of cigarette smoking being more fun and an expression of freedom, rebellion and a ticket to inclusive company.

WHEN THE FANTASY BUBBLE BURST

By the 1980s, a smoker was dying every eight seconds somewhere in the United States. Cigarettes were killing more than 400,000 Americans every year.

Meanwhile, individuals and states launched suits against the tobacco companies. Not to be deterred, CEOs of these companies appeared imperiously confident before the US Congress, and challenged these figures while claiming cigarette smoking was safe.

Too many people were dying, many of them public figures, for this performance to prevent the fantasy bubble from bursting. In 1985, a New Jersey judge ruled that the public had a “right to know what the tobacco companies knew and know about the risks of cigarette smoking and what it did or did not do with regard to that knowledge.”

It turned out that the industry had for years suppressed its own research linking cigarettes to cancer.

In the 1970s, it had developed a cigarette that was safer but never marketed because it would amount to admitting guilt.

Then there was the problem that “low-tar” cigarettes contained less nicotine, and therefore were less addictive. So what did some companies in the industry do? They added more nicotine to their “Light” brands.

Today, smoking rates are down by 50 percent from the high of the 1960s. Some 40 million Americans have quit smoking; yet million of Americans still smoke.

More importantly, it appears that lung cancer rates have finally peaked. It is now apparent that changes in behavior are possible when people have the right warnings and sufficient supportive information to convince them that they should change. The horror is that until the twenty-first century most Americans had neither; nor do billions of people around the world that continue to smoke at alarming rates.

GENIUS OF CORPOCRACY

The genius of tobacco companies is that the industry continues to be successful in attracting “replacement smokers,” a euphemism for teenagers and young adults. These smokers have a sense of immortality with years ahead of them “to quit,” failing to realize they are being ticketed to replace dead smokers.

One of the many cruelties of smoking-related illnesses today is that smokers have a sense of shame for being so crippled by the disease of smoking, as if they deserve their fate, as if they, alone, are responsible for their cupidity. The disembodied corporation is by implication exonerated, after all, it is just a business confined to legal and not moral statues.

Few realize how heartlessly corpocracy has lied to smokers, how it has confused them with its campaign of reassurance; how it has abandoned them with this cavalier sentiment:

“Nobody forced smokers to smoke. In accordance with the law, we posted warnings on the cigarette cartons for them to read.” Therefore, we are neither complicit in nor responsible for their fate. It belongs wholly to them, the smokers.”

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Dr. Fisher’s latest book is A Look Back To See Ahead (2007). For information regarding this book, contact http://www.authorhouse.com/.