When cigarette companies used doctors to push smoking (2018)

https://www.history.com/news/cigarette-ads-doctors-smoking-endorsement

by benpiper • 5 years ago

153 149 5 years ago

history.com

seventytwo• 5 years ago

Intentional, malicious disinformation campaigns should be viewed as fraud against the American public.

rgrieselhuber• 5 years ago

Especially when they are in collusion with the healthcare system.

hypertele-Xii2• 5 years ago

So, the entire advertizing industry, then?

keyle• 5 years ago

Site not accessible from outside the US? lovely.

lucajona• 5 years ago

Mirror: https://archive.is/aAf3K

e67f70028a46fba• 5 years ago

Thank goodness no companies are using doctors to push their products today.

throwawaylinux• 5 years ago

Yes after cigarettes, opiates, and amphetamines I feel that the medical and pharmaceutical industry has now finally learnt their lesson and padded their bank accounts enough that they would never stoop so low again.

inter_netuser7• 5 years ago

The absolute worst part is that all of the above are actually extremely valuable and useful tools, that now have unnecessary hysteria and stigma around them.

shadowgovt• 5 years ago

I'm reminded of the Ethyl corporation funding the studies that said lead wasn't very harmful.

... Of course, that's the thing about science. The people doing research are separate from the ones providing the money. And people will put money behind the research that they believe is correct. This does, of course, incentivize some unethical folks to fudge numbers, but in general, the right way to approach this is to separate the funding from the science. See what the science says. Then, if you see an outlier paper and you need to understand why it's so different from the consensus... It might be helpful to see who is funding it to understand.

Going the other way (discounting the science based on who is funding it) is forming theories without data.

solarkraft4• 5 years ago

people will put money behind the research that they believe is correct

s/they believe is correct/the narrative of which benefits them.

Unfortunately it's hard to separate funding from the science. What can one do? Ban privately funded research? Force funders of a study to fund another attempting to find contrary results/pick it apart?

While I agree that some source of funding doesn't automatically invalidate a study, but anecdotally (and probably empirically), studies surprisingly often agree with the people who fund them.

hypertele-Xii2• 5 years ago

Force funders of a study to fund another attempting to find contrary results/pick it apart?

That's not a bad idea. The national counter-research unit. Any privately funded research is taxed at some percentage and all proceedings go to debunking that very research!

Acen• 5 years ago

Mirror: https://outline.com/Gzv9W6

VonGuard• 5 years ago

"When asked 'What cigarette do you smoke, doctor?' More doctors said 'Camel' than any other brand."

Abbott and Costello were sponsored by Camel. C-AM-EL-s

C for Comedy

A for Abbott

M for Maxwell

E for Ennis

and L for Lou Costello, put them together and they spell, CAMEL!

https://otrr.org/hotrod/hotrod7.html for episodes.

MangoCoffee• 5 years ago

In the 1930s and 40s

smoking was cool back then. it was a social thing to do. you can see that in old Hollywood movies.

democracy2• 5 years ago

Why not 1850s? )) I am sure even in the 80s and 90s there were plenty of smokers in the movies

asdff2• 5 years ago

Smoking especially in excess wasn't actually all too common until cigarettes started being mass produced in the early 1900s, and WWI and WWI got two generations addicted to rationed cigarettes (especially fig 1 from this):

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4843a2.htm

xyst• 5 years ago

fun fact: cigarette usage does appear to at least decrease the chance of you getting ulcerative colitis

still a shitty habit to pick up though

Nihilartikel2• 5 years ago

There are better means to that end.. such as immuno-modulating parasites. The good old hookworm is a fine example.

(Not actually kidding)

refurb2• 5 years ago

That trial failed

democracy2• 5 years ago

A highly addictive habit. If 99% of smokers could enjoy one cigarette a day with morning coffee or afternoon drink then smoking would never become a big issue. Most of them end up with 1-2 packs a day damaging theirs and their family health.

javajosh• 5 years ago

I remember hearing somewhere that even one cigarette will paralyze your alveoli for 24 hours. This would, I assume, make you more susceptible to contagions since foreign particles will make contact with your blood for longer period. If this were true, then even one cig a day would be a real problem, especially in Covid-times.

daenz4• 5 years ago

Look at the timeline:

  1930  - first cigarette company uses physicians in their ads
  1950s - evidence starts mounting that smoking causes lung cancer
  1964  - US Surgeon General report on the link between smoking and cancer
  1998  - cigarette companies still maintained that the link is controversial

So it takes 70 years, or nearly an entire generation, before all of the machinery at play (businesses, government, healthcare, scientists) can effectively come to the conclusion that they messed up badly and sold people poison. Grim.

version_five5• 5 years ago

Yeah who knows what unequivocal advice we could be getting from experts right now that will be thoroughly debunked 70 years from now.

(Are dairy and grains still food groups... I could easily go on)

gruez• 5 years ago

(Are dairy and grains still food groups... I could easily go on)

I don't get it. Are you saying that grain shouldn't be a food group? I think for the purposes of categorizing foods, "starchy staples" is a pretty useful categorization, even if the recommendation to eat 8 servings a day or whatever is misguided.

dylan6042• 5 years ago

High Fructose Syrup is the one I'm holding out hope on.

Social Media consumption is another.

kipchak• 5 years ago

Vegetable/seed oils is one I’ve been seeing recently.

idnefju• 5 years ago

some humans have been drinking animal dairy for so many thousands of years that some ethnicities have evolved to have a lactose breaking down mutation into adulthood

frozenport• 5 years ago

That vaping and nicotine is harmless (just like coffee!) despite seeing the negative effects of nicotine intake on developing fetuses.

ya_throw2• 5 years ago

Yet the current zeitgeist is "Trust the experts, fool!"

We never frikkin learn.

edmcnulty1016• 5 years ago

Labomotomies won the Nobel prize.

They were supported by the mainstream medical and science establishments. Rosemary Kennedy, JFKs relative got one.

People were giving labotomies to their kids to calm them down, advised by their doctor.

Great article on Howard Dulley one of the kids whose parents gave him a lobotomy advised by a doctor.

https://www.npr.org/2005/11/16/5014080/my-lobotomy-howard-du...

svnpenn• 5 years ago

Labomotomies

enriquto2• 5 years ago

What a disturbingly scary article!

He objects to going to bed but then sleeps well. He does a good deal of daydreaming and when asked about it he says 'I don't know.'

Doesn't this description fit most kids in the world? It was used to justify the lobotomy of a poor boy.

LocalH• 5 years ago

One in a long history of barbarism-as-medicine. Some would say we're still in that era.

oivey• 5 years ago

A generation is more like 20 years. You’re talking about a lifetime, which is even more insane.

artursapek• 5 years ago

can you imagine if that was happening now? haha no way right

inter_netuser7• 5 years ago

Generally, 25 years is considered a generation.

so nearly 3 generations.

refurb2• 5 years ago

The issue is that with wealth comes an ever increasing focus on risks as you address the most severe first.

Come visit a developing country and you’ll find that wearing a seatbelt or drinking clean water is still not widely accepted. They have bigger problem right now.

ren_engineer• 5 years ago

there was plenty of research available that smoking was bad as early as the 1920s, it just got silenced. Mainly because Germany was one of the countries that led the movement. Plus billions of dollars working to stop anybody trying to end the money printing from the tobacco industry

In 1930s Germany, scientific research for the first time revealed a connection between lung cancer and smoking, so the use of cigarettes and smoking was strongly discouraged by a heavy government sponsored anti-smoking campaign
After the Second World War, the German research was effectively silenced due to perceived associations with Nazism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_control

daenz4• 5 years ago

After the Second World War, the German research was effectively silenced due to perceived associations with Nazism

That's really interesting. I dug a little more into it[0]. Apparently the underlying reasoning was that the Nazis associated smoking with "degenerates" and damage to "bodily purity." So when the research hit the US, people must have associated anti-smoking with those Nazi ideas. I wonder if tobacco companies latched onto this momentum to keep their public image healthy?

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tobacco_movement_in_Nazi_...

dylan6042• 5 years ago

When did Big Tobacco start using all of the additives to up the addictive level of the things? Does that correlate to the timing of when they started using the "physician approved" nonsense?

ars• 5 years ago

It's longer than that, the term "tobacco heart" was around in 1880! I remember reading a short story from around then (I think by Mark Twain), where the character is criticized for the unhealthy habit of smoking.

Maybe lung cancer was 1950s, but health in general? Much, much earlier than that.

pvg2• 5 years ago

The time to reach that level of consensus for lots of things is longer than 70 years - it can easily be infinite. It's not really clear why the final date in your timeline is 1998 since it doesn't mark a time when 'all the machinery in play effectively came to the conclusion'. The dangers of smoking tobacco were widely known through much of the period you've picked and this is also reflected in your timeline.

civilized• 5 years ago

The tobacco lawsuits of the 90s brought the episode to a close. Tobacco companies now have to admit the health harms of smoking. Philip Morris does so at the top of marlboro.com and in several other places.

daenz4• 5 years ago

From the article, 1998 was the year that the Tobacco Institute and the Committee for Tobacco Research disbanded, which I am perceiving as symbolic of the last formal resistance to the idea that smoking causes cancer.

fjert• 5 years ago

This kind of worries me wrt to my vaping nicotine habit long term

chihuahua3• 5 years ago

It's just now coming to your attention that nicotine might be unhealthy?

sixothree• 5 years ago

You forgot: 1994 - seven top tobacco CEOs testified to Congress that they didn't believe nicotine was addictive.

steelstraw• 5 years ago

That's a great reminder to not get too dogmatic about anything, even when business, government, healthcare and scientists are all aligned.

I'm curious if there were doctors and scientists who dissented from the cigarette consensus prior to the 60s? And how were they treated in such an environment?

jhpaul• 5 years ago

There certainly were doctors and scientists who saw the harm of smoking prior to the general consensus. It seems as though this consensus is a result of both mounting medical evidence and a fundemental shift in the way medicine approaches disease, with the field of epidimiology expanding from the study of infectious disease to include a variety of chronic disease and cancers. IIRC, I've read references and anecdotes of smoking and tobacco having obvious negative health impacts as far back as the US Civil War (1860s).

There's a good record in "Research on Smoking and Lung Cancer: A Landmark in the History of Chronic Disease" (The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 1989) [0]:

By the 1930s, some evidence had been obtained that the incidence of lung cancer among males was increasing. The evidence came from three sources: official mortality statistics, pathologists' reports of autopsy findings, and the observations of physicians who specialized in the treatment of lung disease.
Speculation about these factors continued, but there was also much criticism of the view that the reported increase in lung cancer was credible. . . . Factors which were listed as likely to be responsible for an artificial increase were better diagnosis of the disease and increased longevity of the population.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2589239/pdf/yjb...

nzp7chfjks3• 5 years ago

Those would be the "conspiracy theorists".

davidjytang• 5 years ago

In my culture, one generation is often defined as 30 years. Probably the years between own births to giving births.

crumpled• 5 years ago

Big money is playing a long game.

The tech industry is way ahead of any hint of regulations with regards to things like privacy, security or safety. New generations of people are brought unwillingly onto social media by parents. Some problems are hard to reel in by design.

lonecom• 5 years ago

And this is for something that the scientific community did not have vested interest in protecting. That is, the scientific community did not come up with smoking as some boon to humanity.

Now imagine if that was the case here; That the big business and the scientific community had a natural alignment in promoting and protecting a practice with huge commercial interests...

geodel• 5 years ago

Yeah, but that is past. Now we can absolutely, truly believe on doctors, as it is all based on science.

city41• 5 years ago

Since you used "absolutely" and "truly" I'm assuming you're being sarcastic? If not, you just need to look at OxyContin to know this isn't true.

honkdaddy• 5 years ago

I think he is being sarcastic, and you're right, OxyContin is a great example as to why blind trust in medical institutions which are in the pocket of big pharma can be very dangerous.

8f2ab37a-ed6c• 5 years ago

What is the current state of research into the safety of e-cigs? The things have been around for over a decade now, but I haven't seen studies to show how much of a carcinogen they are for regular users. Has the product not been on the market lot enough for studies to be able to prove much of anything in either direction?

csdvrx3• 5 years ago

I read a bit about that, and now that tocopherol is no longer used as an additive, the only questions seem to be 1) if flavorings are not turned into bad things by the vaporization process 2) if nicotine has enough negative side effects when inhaled to warrant restricting what's an efficient and self-directed smoking cessation method.

About 1) the solution for the FDA has been to ban flavorings, under the "think about the children" idea. While the risk of childen getting addicted to nicotine could be a concern, given the lack of measured risk, it could be as innocent as enjoying beer. About 2), nicotine seem to have negative effects on arteries and the skin mostly, causing premature aging (increase elastases and metalloproteases).

We may have more data in a generation or two, but it would be advisable to plan on reducing your use of e-cigs.

encryptluks2• 5 years ago

Tocopherol wasn't used as an additive as far as I know, at least any any reputable ejuice vendor, and from I recall the timing on the flavored vape juice ban was oddly around the same time as first COVID cases. It is likely that they jumped to conclusions and then used "some" vendors adding vitamin E as an excuse for such a drastic terrible measure.

dfghdfhs• 5 years ago

Research is great but common sense is a good starting point.

We know lungs are very sensitive and easily accumulate shit in them. Therefore the reasonable position is to assume that anything you point into your lungs is harmful, unless you have extremely strong evidence that it's not (as opposed to assume that something is safe until evidence that it's not.)

So: assume that e-cigs will give you lung cancer.

publicola1990• 5 years ago

But of relative safety viz-a-viz regular cigarettes: is it not possible to assume that e-cigs are safer than regular cigs?

solarkraft4• 5 years ago

It's a bit funny that some commenters relate this to vaccines. I also see a similarity, but maybe in a slightly different way.

The tobacco industry paid doctors to become outliers and promoted them to imply expert consensus and push their product.

People not very fond of vaccines also promote outliers attempting to imply some form of consensus or at least scientific validity. Quite a few of them also have products or a whole world view to sell (which often includes buying specific products).

pstuart• 5 years ago

Mercola and RFK Jr both make a good living from their anti-vax positioning.

fsociety999• 5 years ago

Do you really believe the financial and other incentives are greater for the people pushing _against_ vaccines and Big Pharma as opposed to the politicians, “experts“, and doctors who are pushing the vaccines so aggressively to the point where they are okay if you lose your job if you don’t take them?

That is a bit of an upside down view of the power structure in society. Pharmaceutical companies are literally making hundreds of billions of dollars off of their products. These companies are not exactly innocent. They have very little morals and are generally okay with mass suffering as long as their profits are increasing (look at the opioid epidemic as an example).

If anything, I think it is much more likely that the reverse is happening. The scientists, doctors, etc. are designing studies in a way to paint a more favorable view of the products that they are looking at. They are cherry picking data to show that they are good while ignoring any data to the contrary. It looks a lot more like they are in the pocket of Big Pharma to me.

In addition, there is a social stigma where if you take an unpopular view here, you will likely be seen as a “conspiracy theorist”, or face the possibility of losing your job, friends, family members.

Most of the people against Big Pharma promote living a healthy lifestyle, taking supplements, going outside, getting sunlight, eating well, exercising, etc. It is not like they are trying to sell you some expensive products.

When governments all around the world are providing billions of taxpayer money to pharmaceutical companies who have legal indemnity and can’t be sued if people have adverse reactions to their products, and those same governments are forcing their citizens to take the products (often against their will) in order to be allowed to participate in society, it is probably time to start questioning who the “good guys” really are here.

inter_netuser7• 5 years ago

I would never agree with this comment above, but today we see nurses fired over this whole vaccine issue. Nurses, who worked frontlines during the first wave when vaccines weren't available, contracted and recovered from covid, and have antibodies to prove it.

They were called heroes.

Today, none of that apparently matters, valuable medical staff were fired anyway, in a middle of pandemic. Why???

Only to turn around, and demand that the vaccinated, but COVID-positive workers (who'd normally have to isolate) work the COVID wards instead?

Couldn't they just ask those that declined vaccination, but previously infected with COVID, work in those wards?

They've done that in 2020, and if they are willing to do that again, are they not heroes, risking their own lives to save others? Well, suddenly they are now pariahs instead of heroes, and must be fired and ridiclued.

How does any of this make sense???

I'm lost at this point.

solarkraft4• 5 years ago

Do you really believe the financial and other incentives are greater for the people pushing _against_ vaccines and Big Pharma as opposed to the politicians, “experts“, and doctors who are pushing the vaccines so aggressively to the point where they are okay if you lose your job if you don’t take them?

Definitely. I must confess that I am much more familiar with the situation in Germany, where the commercial entanglement of doctors and pharma companies may be much weaker. We do have a lot of Anti-Vax propaganda, however, which I follow somewhat, so I do know their ways. From what I know they are similar (if not more radicalized) than their counter parts in the US.

Pharmaceutical companies are literally making hundreds of billions of dollars off of their products. These companies are not exactly innocent. They have very little morals and are generally okay with mass suffering as long as their profits are increasing (look at the opioid epidemic as an example).

I agree! They must be tightly controlled. They're not all evil, though. Like most companies they also have some utility to society: They produce medicine that clearly works, in some cases even remarkably well (sure, arguably at inflated prices). This is the case with vaccines.

In addition, there is a social stigma where if you take an unpopular view here, you will likely be seen as a “conspiracy theorist”, or face the possibility of losing your job, friends, family members.

I try not to do this, but you're right. Sometimes it's a bit hard because the stereotype is often true. I do have an anti-(corona)vaccine friend and while I think her considerations are irrational here, it's not like she's malicious herself. Especially when wanting to convince her of my changing her mind, there's nothing good not treating her respectfully will do.

Most of the people against Big Pharma promote living a healthy lifestyle, taking supplements, going outside, getting sunlight, eating well, exercising, etc.

This is where things get hairy. Going outside, getting sunlight, eating well and exercising are all fabulous things and I am all for promoting them.

The issue begins to appear when you insinuate that these can be better than a proven treatment for a given sickness, like telling people to just take more walks outside and the cancer will solve itself. That is what harms people. And it's something a large portion of people in this bubble definitely do. That is where the issue lies.

It is not like they are trying to sell you some expensive products.

Many influencers out of this bubble absolutely are, especially regarding the supplements you previously mentioned (plus some weird devices, sculptures, things with magnets ...). They can contain nothing of much value and just be ineffective at curing illnesses, leading to people not seeking real treatment and wasting their money, they can also be actively harmful, see "Miracle Mineral Solution", which contains literal bleach [0]. That is doubly harmful and absolutely to be fought. These people are enriching themselves from gullible people by telling them fantasy stories and it is highly despicable.

------

Of course there's a spectrum. Not everyone who as safety concerns about the vaccines automatically believes in wild conspiracy theories. However the seed of "look at what shady things people up there are doing" can often grow into "all the system is evil and we must fight it with fire" and that's what I'm afraid of. That this radicalization frequently happens is at least supported ancedotally (I have been in that loop for a short while myself) and why I'm so passionate about this topic.

Real conspiracies exist! But please use your critical thinking skills to evaluate the evidence and likelihoods of things.

End of rant, I guess.

[0] https://scimoms.com/coronavirus-mms/

blindmute• 5 years ago

It's a bit funny that some commenters relate this to vaccines.

This is literally the only comment chain in the entire thread to reference vaccines

solarkraft4• 5 years ago

It looks like they were rightfully flagged.

readingnonsense• 5 years ago

Bringing these things up during the early days of the pandemic would have gotten you blacklisted/shadowbanned on sites such as this one, as "please don't spread unfounded rumors - dang"

dang• 5 years ago

That doesn't sound like something I'd post, and there's no occurrence of it in HN Search.

photochemsyn2• 5 years ago

Future possible headlines:

When Pharmaceutical Companies Used Doctors to Push Opiates

When Pharmaceutical Companies Used Psychiatrists to Push Amphetamines

seattle_spring• 5 years ago

Are you really convinced that, from a medical perspective, those are on the same playing field as tobacco?

adamrezich• 5 years ago

absolutely. the degree to which amphetamines are pushed on children is insane. I was one such child ~16 years ago.

psychiatry in general is a pretty ridiculous field, at least as practiced here in the US. just yesterday I had my every-three-months checkup where I basically tell my psychiatrist everything is still going good, so can I have three more months' prescriptions of the thing you got me dependent on when I was a teenager, please. I was making some small talk about my life as per usual, talking about how work has been a bit stressful but that I've noticed I've become much better at handling work-related anxiety, compared to in the past, and she asked if I wanted to try any kind of prescription to help with it. it seems like the whole job is basically listening to people with issues and prescribing them pills to attempt to fix the problem. if a prescribed pill doesn't do anything after a certain amount of time, or has negative unintended effects, then oh shit stop taking it, let's try something else instead... another pill, of course, not any kind of counseling or literally any other kind of treatment at all, just more pills.

photochemsyn2• 5 years ago

Curiously enough, there are some legitimate medical uses for nicotine, just as there are some legitimate medical uses for opiates and amphetamines.

Colleen McBride, director of the cancer prevention, detection and control program at Duke University Medical Center... says there is a growing body of evidence that nicotine actually relieves some symptoms of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease, and appears to help those with severe depression focus.

https://today.duke.edu/2001/08/mm_medicaluses.html

The question is, to what extent are current medical uses of such substances actually necessary, i.e. to what extent has it all been about getting those sales numbers up?

mise_en_place• 5 years ago

In the United States, it’s peculiar that relatively useless pharmaceuticals with a low therapeutic index are heavily advertised, whereas actually useful pharmaceuticals are rarely mentioned at all.

human• 5 years ago

If it was that bad in the 40s, imagine now with a mountain of student debt. Money is more tempting than ever.

tmule2• 5 years ago

The Sackler family pushed opioids onto middle America in a rather spectacular fashion. In any functioning society - including with a death penalty - they’d be contending with the harshest possible penalty. Just not in America.

KerrAvon2• 5 years ago

They killed Tom Petty and Prince and still seem to be getting away with it.

chihuahua3• 5 years ago

This makes me think of the Drake meme. Making billions of dollars by selling cannabis (until recently): bad. Making billions of dollars by selling opioids: this is fine.

tmule2• 5 years ago

There used to be an old fashioned concept called noblesse oblige. That’s no longer a thing in society, and the elites - barring performative actions and fashionable statements- are not invested in the well-being of average Americans.

ratsmack2• 5 years ago

It seems that lately, questioning the "doctors" in public places can make you a pariah (and I won't go any further with that).

On another note, I was prescribed a medicine 20 years ago called Propulsid. When I went to fill the prescription, the pharmacist told me that he would not recommend I take it. I contacted the doctor and he was pissed that the pharmacist had given me that recommendation. In the end I didn't take it, which is a good thing because it was removed from the market several years later for causing heart issues.

WARNING
Serious cardiac arrhythmias including ventricular tachycardia, ventricular fibrillation, torsades de pointes, and QT prolongation have been reported in patients taking cisapride.

https://www.rxlist.com/propulsid-drug.htm

winternett• 5 years ago

I finally learned the term "pill mill" last year when I looked up a doctor I had seen for a physical when they prescribed me over 8 medications when I had never taken nor needed any prior. I didn't fill any of the prescriptions and believe it or not all my vitals with my new doc are just fine for my age without any new prescriptions.

Money and fear of losing money has infected almost every profession and business lately, especially due to the pandemic. Even online reviews and advice are hit or miss and even fabricated completely. Getting a second opinions and asking my elders (65+) questions have served me better so far in life than just outright trusting what random professionals on the Internet and TV regularly tell me. I am vaxxed mind you, enough facts were there and I'm pretty reasonable.

Pill interactions are also a big big issue... A doctor sees each patient for maybe an hour, its important to be able to make sure you also feel comfortable with following their advice (live or die) of course.

standeven• 5 years ago

It’s fine to question magazine articles that contain lines like “4 out of 5 doctors recommend…”.

It’s fine to question individual doctors.

It’s fine to question corporate-sponsored think tanks.

Is it fine to question a scientific consensus on effective ways to fight a global pandemic?

ratsmack2• 5 years ago

Is it fine to question a scientific consensus on effective ways to fight a global pandemic?

Yes, it is always fine to question scientific conclusions with legitimate concerns.

Or we could always revert to letting the church decide what valid science is, I guess.

jjoonathan• 5 years ago

In high-context environments that correctly incentivize truth seeking and long form debate? Sure!

In low-context, short form meme warfare with the only intention of spreading an opinion that the consensus believes is both incorrect and detrimental? Absolutely not. That's what you're doing right now. Knock it off.

account42• 5 years ago

Is it fine to question a scientific consensus on effective ways to fight a global pandemic?

If it cannot be questioned, is there really a consensus?

somenameforme• 5 years ago

When it becomes impossible to be able to reasonably comfortably speak against a consensus, that consensus loses any sort of meaning because it becomes impossible to determine whether it's being upheld by coercion or not. It also becomes completely impossible to carry out science in such an environment because such pressures invariably leak into e.g. universities, career opportunities, grants, and so on.

So without being able to reasonably comfortably speak against a scientific consensus you end up with neither science nor a consensus.

paxys• 5 years ago

I have long suspected that all the doctors and studies that confirm that vaping is a perfectly safe alternative are to be taken with a similar grain of salt.

adultSwim• 5 years ago

The timing on this story is coincident with the recent outspoken professor.

soheil• 5 years ago

Easy to look back and make fun of those commercials [0]. It's more sad than anything else if someone does that since they'd be applying their current knowledge of harms of tobacco to people who didn't have said knowledge. This is a cognitive bias called the Curse of knowledge [1]. I see so much of this happening not just on Youtube comments, but even here on HN, it's almost disturbing.

The fair thing to wonder about is what things are we doing today that will seem ridiculous and obviously harmful to people in 100 years from now. Staring at a bright flat screen hours a day just to interact with a random stranger who vehemently disagrees with you about petty subjects?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCMzjJjuxQI

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

AlexCoventry• 5 years ago

The statistician R. A. Fisher contributed a great deal to the confusion, as well.

https://www.nature.com/articles/182596a0.pdf

webmobdev• 5 years ago

And now Tobacco companies have latched on to, and are promoting Marijuana - something that is even more addictive, and both mentally and physically more harmful (in the long run).

Marijuana also affects brain development. When people begin using marijuana as teenagers, the drug may impair thinking, memory, and learning functions and affect how the brain builds connections between the areas necessary for these functions. Researchers are still studying how long marijuana's effects last and whether some changes may be permanent. Long-term marijuana use has been linked to mental illness in some people, such as: temporary hallucinations, temporary paranoia, worsening symptoms in patients with schizophrenia ...

Source: https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/marijuana

xelfer• 5 years ago

This content is not available in your area.

Really making good use of that global network we got goin' here, history.com.

https://i.imgur.com/3bPAFQA.png

exodust• 5 years ago

Where should I book a plane ticket to, so I can view this article?

edit: https://archive.is/aAf3K

mastazi• 5 years ago

Archive link please? Content is geoblocked (connecting from Australia)

Edit: here it is https://web.archive.org/web/20220120011739/https://www.histo...

annadane• 5 years ago

I understand this is only tangentially related, but you can understand with the background of some of the medical profession, that some people are anti-vax (with respect to covid-19). To be clear, I'm very pro-vax - but yeah

stakkur• 5 years ago

“When Doctors Recommended Smoking As A Science-Based Health Practice”

FTFY.

oofabz• 5 years ago

My grandmother was prescribed cigarettes for anxiety in the 1950s. She quit in the '80s after developing emphysema, but it was too late. After years on oxygen her lungs were unable to sustain her and she suffocated.

zeroesandones• 5 years ago

they used all kind of tactics, political wars, gender wars, cultural wars; name them all. Thanks to the mastermind Edward Bernays.

elzbardico• 5 years ago

In a pure quantitative basis, considering only the deaths and not even the social and economic cost (which indirectly leads to more deaths, or at least impacts quality of life) there's no much reason not to include tobacco into the list of great genocides. Objectivelly, all those executives, salesman, advertisers are guilty of crimes against humanity.

rswskg• 5 years ago

Japan Tobacco employed scientists to conduct research about the benefits of smoking as recently as 2009. My students when I worked there were said scientists.

nzp7chfjks3• 5 years ago

Drinking fluoride is still good for your teeth right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_relations_campaigns_of_...

When cigarette companies used doctors to push smoking (2018)

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