Taming Tobacco

In 1950, Hill and Doll published a landmark paper in the British Medical Journal. They had interviewed hundreds of lung cancer patients and healthy controls in London hospitals and found that people with lung cancer smoked cigarettes at dramatically higher rates than people without it. The conclusion was not ambiguous; the tobacco industry’s response was a masterclass in how to make clear things seem murky. Within four years, American cigarette manufacturers had formed the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, later renamed the Council for Tobacco Research. They hired scientists, funded studies, placed ad in newspapers, and issued press releases arguing that the evidence was inconclusive and that more research was needed. Iinternal documents that became public proved that they knew these were lies, and that tobacco company executives understood the health risks long before the public did. Their goal wasn’t to disprove the science: it was to create enough uncertainty that politicians…