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from the smoking-gun-found-next-to-skeleton-in-closet dept.
PandoDaily's Mark Ames has published a paywalled article [archive] entitled "Shillers for killers: Revealed: How the tobacco industry paid journalists, scientists, activists and lawyers to cover up the most deadly crime in human history." The article draws upon a new round of documents that was recently added to the University of California San Francisco's Legacy Tobacco Documents Library. The library contains 14 million documents and is growing, as noted on the Library's blog. Some bits are more relevant to our community.
In 1994, marketing director at the RJ Reynolds tobacco company wrote to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to discuss topics related to protecting tobacco advertising on the Internet. Later that year, EFF's executive director sent a proposal to RJ Reynolds's direct marketing manager, Peter Michaelson, soliciting money to fund an EFF project that would oppose government regulations on commercial tobacco advertising on the Web. An alternative plan is suggested:
"We are also prepared to pursue a legal test of this alternative approach to regulation. For example, if MARC [RJR's direct marketers] or RJR decided to put one or another sponsored on-line service up on the Internet or via America-on-Line or other on-line service, the white paper could become the basis of a legal brief challenging the constitutionality of any governmental effort to block the programming on the basis of current advertising bans in electronic media... We have not budgeted for this alternative at this point."
Years before Glenn Greenwald teamed up with Laura Poitras and whistleblower Edward Snowden to expose the NSA, he worked as a lawyer for Wachtell Lipton, a law firm that sued ABC-TV for $10 billion and helped to gag smoking industry whistleblowers. This had a chilling effect on CBS, which prevented the airing of a 60 Minutes program covering Merrell Williams and Jeffrey Wigand until the next year. These events were covered by the 1996 Frontline documentary "Smoke In The Eye" [Internet Archive] and Wigand's story inspired the 1999 film, The Insider.
It's reasonable to assume Greenwald—ever the diligent researcher—must have joined Wachtell fully aware that they were helping gag whistleblowers and threatening journalists: Greenwald says that he chose to work for Wachtell in 1994 after being recruited by over a dozen top law firms. But of course that doesn't necessarily mean he worked on the specific Philip Morris case. Except that a billing ledger discovered in the tobacco library shows Greenwald's name in a Wachtell Lipton bill to Philip Morris... Other Wachtell Lipton memos show Greenwald's name prominently displayed on the letterhead in aggressive, threatening letters against ABC-TV, against whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, and against whistleblower Merrell Williams...
[...] Again, in the two decades since, whistleblower champion Glenn Greenwald has never said a single word about this case or about the role his law firm played in crushing TV investigative journalism. As far as our research can tell, Greenwald has never taken a position on tobacco laws or spoken about the horrific death toll smoking is taking.
Original Submission
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @12:17PM
Amazingly, if you look into the evidence that smoking causes cancer, it is extremely weak. There is some association there, but it could just as well be that smoking speeds up the growth of preexisting tumors. Or that it increases the proportion of tumor cells that survive (eg by suppressing immune surveillance).
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Monday July 13 2015, @12:26PM
No, smoking does cause cancer. Seen it firsthand in at least three people.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @12:35PM
Oh really? What methods did you use to 'see it happen'? How did you distinguish from amongst the possibilities I mentioned?
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Monday July 13 2015, @12:43PM
Well, a friend, grampa on my dad's side, and some friend of my mother's died from lung cancer from smoking all their lives.
Granted, they were all old. I think there's a paper that says it's far less risky to smoke if you're under 40.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Monday July 13 2015, @12:43PM
Oh and a neighbor died from COPD caused by smoking. She was like 55.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @01:03PM
Caused by smoking means a specific thing, it means a tumor cell formed due to smoking. Your observations are not detailed enough to rule out the explanations I mentioned that do not involve smoking causing cancer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @02:27PM
Your theory is not backed up by statistics.
Look no further than the insurance companies. They knew well before anyone else. They have the actuarial tables to back it up. If I remember correctly the correlation was 98%. Which means a 2% error rate. But if 9 out of 10 smokers and 1 out of 10 non smokers get tumors, you can say it probably causes cancer. Is it the *only* cause? No. But it is a major one.
Having had 4 family members die from lung cancer, three family friends from lung/throat cancer, I find your ideas rather manipulative. The other members of the family who *dont* smoke are still alive. Maybe that is survivor bias. But come on... Even the cig companies have finally admitted it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @02:53PM
I'm not sure why this is so difficult to understand. You have moles don't you? The same things can exist inside your body where you can't see. So one explanation is that the cancer is already there, it is just growing slowly. Smoking, etc may just speed it up so it becomes a problem before you die of something else. This is different from smoking "causing" cancer. It is an important distinction, because understanding what is going on helps us to develop treatments. That is just one possibility, there are others.
(Score: 2) by jcross on Monday July 13 2015, @06:01PM
I think it's correct to say that it causes deaths from cancer. To the smokers who die that way and their loved ones, I imagine your distinction might sound a little beside the point.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @06:18PM
That sounds foolish. There is no reason to take a doctor/scientist seriously who is satisfied with that level of knowledge. It means they aren't really trying to understand cancer at all and you should fire them.
It is one thing to simply be working under conditions of limited information, it is quite another to say "it's beside the point to investigate any further" and purposefully perpetuate that condition.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @12:10PM
The job of a doctor is to make you better, they don't need the level of understanding you are implying they should have. They only need to pay attention to the science and perhas differentiate the good science from the bad, though that could be done by a competent third party.
And while scientists need to keep pursuing a better understanding, how many people in this discussion are cancer scientists?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @02:23PM
Even if either of those were true, those are still awful possibilities.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday July 13 2015, @07:47PM
I'm having a hard time parsing your logic. If without the tobacco your immune system would suppress the cancer, but the tobacco keeps it from the suppression, how is that not causing cancer? You have cancerous cells in your body all the time, and you have since you were an infant, but normally the immune system gets rid of them, or at least suppresses them.
That's like saying depriving a person of food isn't starving them. After all, they weren't starving when you first stopped them from getting food, so it's only that their body has been consuming the food they already had. If they'd just dropped dead immediately they would never have starved.
You have to consider normal processes as being a part of the base state.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @08:09PM
Yes, from the uninformed patient's perspective the two may be similar. I am thinking from a scientific and treatment perspective. Tumors are usually considered to be clonal (descended from a single cell), the "cause" is whatever brought that cell into existence. Without that first step, the other factors cannot lead to cancer. Thus we should try to prevent or address that first step, whatever it is. Imprecise use of the term "cause" is apparently an obstacle to communicating that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @12:18PM
Tumors also mutate. If tobacco smoke causes a tumor to mutate into something more aggressive and harmful, then it is effectively tobacco that caused the cancer.
Although if you wanted to take your logic a step further, you could argue that if a persons parents didn't copulate to bring that person into being that person would never have got cancer, so perhaps your parents are the cause of all your illnesses.
(Score: 2, Informative) by tripstah on Monday July 13 2015, @07:47PM
The industry's former, and occasionally, current stance is that the "link" between smoking and cancer hasn't been proven. This is, in fact, true. No one has determined the exact mechanism for any carcinogen or cancer. To that end, you could also say that being exposed to any known carcinogen doesn't cause cancer. Of course, we do know that certain compounds cause cancer and how to establish statistical models to validate the existence of a "strong" correlation.
--trip
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @08:04PM
Precisely. I don't think we know what the mechanism of carcinogenesis is in any case (well, maybe retinoblastoma). However, I am confident it is either not accumulating somatic mutations, or these are orders of magnitude more common that thought.
I disagree about the use of the word "cause". Show me one paper that distinguishes between the possibilities mentioned in the OP. Note I am not arguing anywhere there is no correlation between smoking and cancer, or that smoking is not bad for your health.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @01:19AM
Then you're in luck. If you can establish that uncertainty with anything approximating the scientific method, tobacco firms like RJR will throw grant money at you faster than you can say, "intellectual whore."
My apologies to any self-respecting sex workers who frequent SN.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @01:23AM
Why would they do that?