Big Tobacco knew radioactive Po210 in cigarettes posed cancer risk, kept quiet

https://www.uclahealth.org/news/big-tobacco-knew-radioactive-particles-in-cigarettes

by hammock • 3 years ago

296 277 3 years ago

sneak• 3 years ago

Reminder: cigarettes kill 7x as many people in the US every hour, day, week, and month as the "opiate epidemic" in the USA.

One is an "epidemic" and "public health crisis" and access is locked behind a prescription. One is available to anyone 18 or older on each streetcorner.

hammock4• 3 years ago

21*

mcmoor• 3 years ago

I knew that my country really won't be prepared with anymore relaxation on narcotics because we smoke cigarettes much more than almost every other country in the world despite long long campaign on health issues. Heck, Big Tobacco manages to capture religious sector! That's how powerful legalized capitalized drugs are.

yadaeno• 3 years ago

Why do people on this forum always say “my country”. Why not just say the name of the country?

This information is not useful to anyone without that context.

simmerup• 3 years ago

So we should give all the cigarette smokers opiates right? Reduce the mortality rate drastically that way.

angelgonzales• 3 years ago

That may be true but the people who broke into my car twice didn’t do it because they were addicted to nicotine - they did it because they were addicted to opiates.

krisoft• 3 years ago

Hmm. But is that the difference between opiate and nicotine addiction? Or the difference between the restrictions we placed on them?

In other words if we would treat tobaco the way we treat the hard drugs, would people addicted to it perform crimes to get their fix on the surely much more expensive black market?

I truly don’t know the answer.

pessimizer7• 3 years ago

No, they did it because the government supports the prices of opiates, which could easily be made for a nickel a dose. There's nothing intrinsic about opiates that gives you an unquenchable appetite for money. That's cocaine.

rcme• 3 years ago

What’s the average age of death though?

serf• 3 years ago

i'm not interested in defending tobacco/cigarettes, but comparisons like this beg the question : do you see a difference between an addiction that leads to eventual chronic health issues/injury/death sometimes many many decades after first-onset versus an addiction that will many times kill even first-time users, and rarely allows for habits that last many decades?

if you want to compare the health crises, then divide the results by time to create an 'impact' score.

That's why we're focusing on opiates collectively.

version_five3• 3 years ago

This is a pretty poor equivalence, I don't think I need to detail all the reasons, suffice to say a life shortened by smoking is not the same as one destroyed by opiates, either in years lost or in quality of life. Smoking is a poor long term health choice and should be discouraged, it's nothing like what's happening with opiates.

nvllsvm• 3 years ago

What are the age ranges of people dying from cigarettes vs. opiate abuse?

patmcc3• 3 years ago

Smoking cuts your life expectancy by something like ~10 years. Most of those smoking deaths are people who've already smoked 30+ years; there's not a lot we can do to prevent those deaths now, even if they all stopped smoking tomorrow. They'd still get cancer and everything else at higher rates. We've also done a pretty good job at lower smoking rates, especially among young people. Sure, we can ban or restrict tobacco more (maybe we should) but the "public health crisis" is mostly done.

Opiate addiction cuts life expectancy by ~35 years. And getting them onto safer drugs would save lives very immediately. There's stuff that could be done, and everyone knows it, and it's not happening. That's the public health crisis.

edit: and, yes, also, opiates are also more socially destructive, due largely to the criminality.

martinald2• 3 years ago

This isn't really true. Most of the death from smoking comes from other lung & heart problems, not cancer.

As such even if you smoke for many decades and quit your risk decreases dramatically pretty quickly, even within days.

martinald2• 3 years ago

While I'm not suggesting tobacco is fine or anything; they really aren't comparable. Opiate addiction is going to completely take any quality of life away from you (tbh regardless of legality, people that were on prescription opiates still had horrendous disability and mental illness caused by the constant abuse of them, though obviously having to spend hundreds of dollars a day on an illegal supply adds a whole new dimension of horror).

Most people who smoke tobacco don't experience any significant quality of life issues until many decades in when the COPD and serious illness starts. Obviously horrible - but I would say you'd lose more than 7x more quality of life (disability adjusted years?) being an opiate addict over being a smoker.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 3 years ago

Smokers are functional. Junkies... well, they're junkies. One is a useful member of society, the other is a liability at the best of times.

And smokers die old. Quickly too... don't linger on with chronic disease like other old people. Helps keep Medicare solvent.

gerdesj• 3 years ago

Ex-tabber here, 5.5 years clean, with some remaining ... issues.

It is bloody hard to give up, really hard but not impossible. If you want to give up then I do recommend that you prepare yourself mentally. I ended up coming up with a couple of "downside mantras" that I would repeat to myself, whenever thoughts of smoking happened.

I initially thought I would use a vape but realized very quickly that would not work for me. If nicotine is the (only) addictive substance then patches, gum, vapes etc would just work. The habit thing is relatively easy to crack but there must be other addictive components to smoking, including sensation (you need to be a smoker to understand that one). Also I didn't want to substitute one thing for another, so abstention was the way to go for me. Some may find help with gum and patches - gum is probably the best substitute, being "active" (and might even improve mouth hygiene).

I stopped mid afternoon on a Friday and had a lie in on Saturday. That got me to around 18 hours. I made it to 24 hours. Then I managed two days, then four, then a week (a landmark one day less than the next double - every little helps). Then two weeks. Visited the kids and bummed a drag on a fag and hated it.

At around a week my sense of taste and smell re-arrived with a major jolt! I can remember smelling people entering the room and other mad things. It calmed down to normal about week three and I now have a sense of smell that accords with other non smokers.

In the end, if you want to give up, then get cracking sooner rather than later and develop strategies but do not try to rely on things like vapes and gum to do it for you. You have to quite literally give yourself a massive mental kicking too.

For me I focused on two aspects I hated about smoking and I would mentally repeat this to myself whenever I thought of it:

"I don't want to smell and I don't want to die"

Even with my denuded sense of smell I could tell I reeked and the second one is pretty obvious. When I did that the craving or thought would be quashed for a while. I did have dreams where I smoked and sometimes woke up convinced I had been smoking. You do have to wrestle with yourself somewhat and decide to win!

I continued: ... then a month. Now I have saved £10.50 x 30 = £309 (I thought I smoked 20 a day but I smoked more - self delusion, probably more like 25-30). Cool.

... two months, four months (quarter of a year). Six months. Now I have realistically saved around £2000, have a functional sense of taste and smell and I no longer cough all the time.

... one year. Fuck me, how the hell did I manage that?

... pandemic etc

... 29 July 2023 - rarely think about smoking until an article on HD hoves into view.

csours• 3 years ago

If you're wondering why this isn't a big deal in food - tobacco leaves have a huge surface area and generally are NOT washed before being dried. Nearly all food IS washed; but this is a good reminder that we live on a real planet, not a model ecosystem, you're eating trace amounts of all kinds of stuff.

hammock4• 3 years ago

The sticky stuff on the tobacco leaves (where most of the Po210 is) is important to the product.

Also worth clarifying that the tobacco plant is radiophilic, meaning it proactively takes up radioactive elements into the body of the plant and tends to grow better in the presence of radioactivity.

It’s for this reason that Big Tobacco also quietly seeks out radioactive fertilizers

mandmandam3• 3 years ago

It’s for this reason that Big Tobacco also quietly seeks out radioactive fertilizers

Wooow. All these years and I'm still learning new things about how criminally insane those greedy fucks are. Two in a day today.

Sure would be cool if any of our well funded institutions did something about it.

progman32• 3 years ago

tends to grow better in the presence of radioactivity.

Can you post a source for this? Curious.

yaakov342• 3 years ago

A quick search doesn't bring up any examples of radiophile organisms, in the sense of taking up radionuclides that are used for something. "Radiophile" bacteria exist, but that just means they are highly resistant to ionizing radiation. What are radioactive fertilizers? Potassium is radioactive to a small extent, but it doesn't seem like it's ever used for that property.

EA-3167• 3 years ago

They're also grown with high phosphate fertilizers which produce a lot of decay products ending up in Po-210. THEN they aren't washed, and THEN they're dried under gas heaters which promote the formation of Tobacco-Specific Nitrosamines, which are incredibly carcinogenic.

One of the many reasons why, even though smoking anything is not great for your health, smoking tobacco is particularly harmful.

sarchertech• 3 years ago

I don’t know if many other leaves that will give you mouth cancer from chewing them either.

h2odragon2• 3 years ago

depends on what you mean by "washed". rinsed by rain sometime before harvest; at the very least.

I rinsed my tobacco leaves after cutting / before drying, but I dunno how common that is in industrial farming. I've just grown a few plants as a hobbyist interest, advised by someone who helped grow tobacco 50yr ago, specifically for "plug" chewing tobacco. That's a bit different than the bulk of production even then.

Anyways my leaves were covered with a fuzz of (dead) gnats that needed washing off. My advisor says thats normal in moisture like mine.

"Washed" = soaped and waxed and repainted like commercial vegetables; then no. It all goes in a big grinder anyway.

User232• 3 years ago

Gotta any resources for garden tobacco you’d be willing to share please? It’s something I’m thinking about trying next spring.

mentos• 3 years ago

Kind of like how social media companies know their products are detrimental to the youth that consume them?

veec_cas_tant• 3 years ago

Maybe I'm way off, but in my mind social media is more like ice cream or fast food companies knowing their product is unhealthy.

gtvwill3• 3 years ago

Your way off. Haven't seen ice cream and fast food be responsible for anywhere near as much suicide and detrimental mental health as social media. Folks generally use ice cream to bring you out of that mood not drive it home.

version_five3• 3 years ago

I think social media is worse for society than tobacco. Tobacco shortens peoples lives, social media is destroying society. We'd ultimately be better living harmoniously but only until seventy than in civil war and mass upheaval.

tap-snap-or-nap• 3 years ago

Should have landmark consequences but cashed up lobbies run the show.

User232• 3 years ago

For what it’s worth this information was publicly available on the Internet in the mid ‘90s if not earlier.

mandmandam3• 3 years ago

... Can you prove that? I'd be interested in a link.

gtvwill3• 3 years ago

What's that you say? We need retrospective criminal charges for this. Hell yes we do! Drag those company boards out of retirement and slap em in jail and size their assets.

Unlikely to happen but I can dream.

iTradeWarez• 3 years ago

Unsurprising and there will be no significant consequences.

stormcode3• 3 years ago

It's a little surprising to me that no company has come out with a 'healthier cigarette'. They could claim to do the acid washing and all the things mentioned in the article in their advertising. Probably without actually saying their cigarettes are healthier but instead focusing on what other companies don't do (the acid wash) and the cancer causing carcinogens their competition's cigarettes contain that their own do not.

That would hook people who enjoy smoking but also enjoy not dying. Even if they are just deluding themselves. It would at least get me (former smoker) curious.

I've also always wondered if Big Tobbaco was working to cure cancer. It would make business sense. If we cured the types of cancer that smoking causes... A lot more people would probably smoke. (Obviously there are other issues like emphasima).

version_five3• 3 years ago

I think there's lots of regulatory and liability reasons why it's not feasible. Like they're grandfathered in to selling what they do, and nobody wants to entertain ideas of a safer thing, only prohibition.

Look at what happened with Juul. Maybe it's changed now, but they had a safer alternative and got shut down.

Also as a bit of trivia, iirc from the book "Barbarians at the gate", RJ Reynolds in the 80s was working on a safer cigarette under Ross Johnson that heated the tobacco instead of burning it. Once they got LBO'd and saddled up with debt, that got canned.

maxbond3• 3 years ago

Look at what happened with Juul. Maybe it's changed now, but they had a safer alternative and got shut down.

1. They got in trouble for marketing to teenagers, not for making health claims.

2. They are a going concern, they haven't been shut down. At least not yet.

On June 23, 2022, the FDA denied authorization for Juul to continue selling its products in the United States, and issued Marketing Denial Orders banning any further marketing or sale of the products effective immediately. That order was blocked by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. the next day.

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

Regardless, they are only one brand, there are many companies with nearly identical products.

3. I'm not an expert but from what I've read, it seems like the there's evidence they may be safer than smoking, but it seems like there isn't enough data to declare that conclusively. Additionally, if it makes tobacco consumption not accessible to a younger audience, it seems like that is going to cancel out the benefit (on a societal scale).

So, I think it's premature to declare them safer.

amelius• 3 years ago

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10123402/

In recent years, tobacco companies have been investing in or acquiring pharmaceutical companies, which produce medications for a myriad of diseases, including tobacco-induced conditions and diseases, and emergency medicine.

stormcode3• 3 years ago

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing this.

sn413• 3 years ago

Well, that's one way to hedge.

LeoPanthera• 3 years ago

It's a little surprising to me that no company has come out with a 'healthier cigarette'

Isn't that a vape?

stormcode3• 3 years ago

In a way, yes. I vape instead of smoking. But it isn't the same. It's a different way to get nicotine, like dipping. And vaping was, AFAIK, more of a grass roots thing than a Big Tobbaco thing, at least at first. It felt like Big Tobbaco was caught kinda unawares when vaping became very popular and ended up buying a bunch of vape companies.

basisword• 3 years ago

The experience of smoking and vaping are dramatically different. Tastes different, feels different, there’s no easy way of measuring intake and you can do it in your house so it becomes something you do more regularly as opposed to something you take a 5min break outside for every hour. its so different that after a few weeks vaping I just quit smoking cold turkey instead. Nicotine’s addictive but the other aspects of smoking and the habit itself are much more addictive (ant least for me) and vaping doesn’t replace those.

hammock4• 3 years ago

no company has come out with a 'healthier cigarette'

It’s a tough sell, especially since smoke is now banned pretty much everywhere indoors and outdoors.

There is no shortage of “healthier nicotine devices” though: gum, vapes, Zyn, etc.

jiggawatts• 3 years ago

That’s essentially vaping: a safer form of consuming nicotine without the smoke or other coincidental pollutants.

FollowingTheDao5• 3 years ago

Vaping is in no way quantitively safer than smoking tobacco. The amount of heavy metals you get in a cigarettes is just incredible. Plus you get more nicotine, which makes you more addicted.

sally_glance• 3 years ago

Correct, but the definition of "safer" is where we start to wobble - clinical long-term studies are expensive.

joker_minmax4• 3 years ago

American Spirit advertises themselves as tobacco without extra nicotine or other additives added. Not the same thing, but they're...trying.

And no, they're probably not trying to cure cancer in the slightest. My grandpa was studying in the 1960s and 1970s, and big tobacco tried to fight the laboratory he worked for. The important thing he taught me before he died, from his research, was that nicotine itself interferes with your blood platelets. It's unhealthy beyond the particulates and fumes that we think of as cancerous, because nicotine is fundamentally bad for the blood. That means vaping, dip, everything affects your cardiovascular system.

pessimizer7• 3 years ago

Natural deadly nightshade is no better than deadly nightshade with additives.

rablackburn• 3 years ago

They have, check out IQOS. Its been huge in Japan (and other parts of asia?) for years now. It heats the cigarette but doesnt actually burn. Same as the “dry herb vapes” that get used for cannabis.

Theyve started making moves to roll out it further internationally - big tobacco has been pushing “smoke free” nicotine products for a few years now.

pessimizer7• 3 years ago

It's a little surprising to me that no company has come out with a 'healthier cigarette'.

David Nutt was and is a big proponent of this. Instead of the moralistic hysteria about cigarettes and alcohol, there should be a big effort to create cigarettes that don't give you cancer, and alcohol that doesn't ruin your coordination, decisionmaking skills, and your liver.

That being said, we already have healthier alternatives to cigarettes in Swedish Snus and vaping. The nonprofits that won against the cigarette companies, now desperately looking for another thing to justify their salaries, attacked the alternatives, often in tacit cooperation with the cigarette companies that were also trying to suppress cigarette alternatives (until they were better positioned in those markets.)

Any healthier alternative would be attacked in proportion to how much healthier it was. The healthier nature of it would be characterized as making it too easy, or encouraging addiction. It's like when right-wingers were campaigning against the HPV vaccine because it made sex less risky.

krustyburger• 3 years ago

*emphysema

kingstoned• 3 years ago

"I’ll tell you why I like the cigarette business. It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It’s addictive. And there’s fantastic brand loyalty."

- Warren Buffett

sebmellen• 3 years ago

The deification of Buffet is strange to see. A lot of the businesses he invests in are just not net positives for society - cigarettes, Dairy Queen, Coca-Cola, etc.

SeanAnderson• 3 years ago

ice cream isn't a net positive for society? :(

npteljes8• 3 years ago

People worship all kinds of characters, not just the morally good ones. Morality itself is debatable, and then many just like powerful people who seem to be winning at life, no matter the cost.

sccfsfrfggfw• 3 years ago

He doesn’t invest in cigarettes.

He did say something stupid about them years ago, particularly when taken out of context. If you think DQ and Coca Cola are bad for society I can see that, but you should also be able to see that plenty of people disagree with your view.

CelticBard4• 3 years ago

Since people worship money, they deify Buffet. Does that make sense to you?

MattGaiser• 3 years ago

I mostly see claims that he is a smart investor, rarely that he is any kind of moral paragon.

sershe6• 3 years ago

Long time ago there was a moment when the best performing stocks in my individual-stock portfolio were PM or maybe MO (cigarettes), DPS (Dr Pepper, it was later acquired), MCD, and AAPL. I joked that it makes sense, the best business is selling good-feeling, harmful crap to the gullible ;)

However, there is another side to this... Who are you (not you personally, but anyone) to decide how others should live their lives? If someone wants to drink soda, smoke and eat fast food, why wouldn't they? If selling what people want is somehow bad, then I guess restricting it should be good, so we should just take all these people we have decided are too stupid to know what's good for them, and regiment their life until we are satisfied? As much as I dislike and disagree with their choices, this line of thinking seems abhorrent to me, at most I'd argue we have some say on what they are doing if they use taxpayer-funded healthcare and such, but for me that is an argument against the latter, not the former. And in any case it has no bearing on the morality of the seller - he didn't ask or force anyone other than the buyer to deal with the 2nd order effects.

Viewed from that perspective, there's nothing wrong with selling cigarettes.

pessimizer7• 3 years ago

Dairy Queen has been amazing for society, brought a lot of happiness to a lot of people. Was a place in small towns where people could sit outside eating ice cream and socializing.

The only thing bad about Dairy Queen is the quality of the food has dropped over the decades, and there aren't enough of them.

ajkjk3• 3 years ago

Yeah as a business anyone can see it's good. Yet a net negative for society. The perfect argument for regulation.

sn413• 3 years ago

Historically, that about sums up the opium trade run by the British as well. Work Indians to death by indentured slavery, forcing them to give up food crops to grow opium. Sell in China. Costs nothing to make. Sell it for vast sums. It was addictive. (I don't know about brand loyalty, though.)

hristov• 3 years ago

This quote is a bit out of context. Warren Buffet said this right after saying that he would not purchase rjr nabisco because it made him morally uncomfortable.

Generally berkshire hathaway has not made large equity investments in tobacco companies although they are in warrens sweet spot of famous consumer brand names.

On the other hand berkshire hathaway has invested in a lot of companies selling sugar to consumers.

jeron• 3 years ago

now that aspartame is considered carcinogenic, is it still moral to invest in companies that sell products that contain it?

consumer4513• 3 years ago

Crazy and awesome that this is on top of HN right now.[0] I did a double take.

This is a sensitive issue. If you were in charge of public health, would you focus on making cigarettes “safer” or on smoking cessation?

I would argue both, but I can see the conflict from a health standpoint.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895991

hammock4• 3 years ago

If you were in charge of public health, would you focus on making cigarettes “safer” or on smoking cessation?

That question was answered years ago when smoke was banned in pretty much every indoor and outdoor space across America.

Would take a pretty big effort to reverse that now. Not saying it couldn’t be done, though

consumer4513• 3 years ago

We humans are such binary thinkers, myself included.

If we could somehow silently reduce Polonium-210 in tobacco while also lowering smoking in general, that would be ideal.

Japan did it. [0] Why can’t the rest of the world?

Smoking is huge in Central and Eastern Europe still. Sadly, I smoke sometimes out here. Wish I could find a brand with lower radioactivity for those times.

People have the gear to test for this. A brand comparison would make for a great citizen science Patreon funded video.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36905717

ddingus• 3 years ago

Go for safer, put vaping at the top of the harm reduction list. I smoked for a long time. A good vape got me off the real tobacco. Nothing else even came close.

The difference is dramatic! Healing happened and I am in great shape today. Hard to tell anything now.

Regulate it so people can find safe vapes.

And no blame and shame. Everyone knows we sell death sticks to people for profit. Vapes are tame by comparison and offer many possibilities beyond nicotine too.

SavageBeast• 3 years ago

Here in Austin TX, Im told a pack of smokes at the local downtown corner mart (Royal Blue - well known for higher than necessary pricing) is nearing $20! Thats $1 per cigarette. Seems to me simple economics is coming around to address this problem. "Go ahead and keep smoking - smoke as much as you can afford!"

For the non-familiar its not uncommon to go through a pack per day between the ones you personally smoke and the ubiquitous people around too cheap to buy their own pack but happy to bum one or more of yours. So lets just say $20 x 6 days a week for $120/week. Thats about $480/month to continue being an active smoker. Take a years worth of that spending and you got yourself a pretty nice vacation.

npteljes8• 3 years ago

If you were in charge of public health

We need to define what to optimize for. Cost-wise, a society with smokes makes sense to some.

“Well cigarettes aren’t that bad really when you think about it,” Devine said. “It might shorten a couple of years off the end of your life, but that’s a good thing. That actually saves money in the long run for the health system.”

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/37343/do-smokin...

consumer4513• 3 years ago

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

Edit: and also another sticky situation that we’ve gotten ourselves into…

Donorcycles: Motorcycle Helmet Laws and the Supply of Organ Donors

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/661256

amluto• 3 years ago

insoluble alpha particles bind with resins in the cigarette smoke and get stuck and accumulate at the bronchial bifurcations of the lungs

Maybe, when pigs fly, journalists will be able to understand the difference between radiation and radioactivity.

eftychis3• 3 years ago

Maybe, say maybe let us get forward some legislation, adding criminal liability to the executives ignoring such things, explicitly.

Because if Purdue taught anything to the U.S. is that their voters do not care. We should prove them wrong I suggest. (Related to the events.)

If you think your vote doesn't count: congratulations, the entities you complain about convinced you wrong, and are doing their job. Demonstrate, create groups and demand things from your representative, pick someone from the group you have to run against your representative. There is no democracy otherwise. Time we start caring.

These might be called rights on each constitution, but that is a misnomer: they are jobs each citizen needs to do. Sorry, but that is the truth in the end.

Disclaimer: Above message is for the residents of every democratic country.

arsome• 3 years ago

Who the hell has time or mental capacity to do any of that when you're just trying to scrape by or make it to the end of the day though?

eftychis3• 3 years ago

The rich: that is why (one of the whys) their votes matter.

FollowingTheDao5• 3 years ago

The answer actually quite simple.

Stop using things made mega corporations. It’s probably include many of the companies you’re currently working for.

Note I said that it was simple, not easy.

tru3_power• 3 years ago

Or where to even start? What are you going to do? Write a letter? Protest? What does that even get you. Seems big $ is all that works.

ajkjk3• 3 years ago

1a. Plenty of people, especially on this website, are not just scraping by.

1b. Some are of course. Many are legitimately scraping by, but many others are scraping by because they're in a lifestyle prison of their own making, and could easily have complete financial security by consuming less. For them it's an excuse, not an explanation.

2. A lifestyle that has you "making it to the end of the day" is an unhealthy lifestyle, and, yes, you've got to do work on yourself --- take charge of your free time, leave the bad job, leave the bad relationship, strike out alone, etc --- before you can work on making the world better. So there are some dependencies before you're gonna do anything important, but that doesn't mean you can't be on the path.

jvanderbot• 3 years ago

Hey it's almost as though we should delegate the responsibility of drafting and passing reasonable protective legislation that benefits the common good to someone else. Someone we choose by voting perhaps.

65103• 3 years ago

Those who do have the time could spend it making life harder for those who try to scrape by, or prevent them from making it to the end of the day.

I don't have to like it but it seems that is what the answer would look like.

In a way people are allowed to just barely sustain themselves because they are so annoying when they cant.

notquitehuman• 3 years ago

Most people don’t. They just go on with their lives until they hit their breaking point or die. Occasionally they lash out at people with actual power, but they usually just kill children and people buying lettuce.

BolexNOLA• 3 years ago

Millions of people do it every day and their efforts often bear fruit, so a lot of people do! This feels like a very cynical, hand wavy response. Despite the fact that HN is full of exactly the kind of people with the time and energy to do this. I would urge you to take a step back and think about how we can help with this stuff as opposed to dissuading folks.

travisporter• 3 years ago

There’s meaning in everything you do.

__MatrixMan__2• 3 years ago

Prison for the execs, fines for the shareholders.

TheOtherHobbes2• 3 years ago

This is the only thing that will work.

Limited (liability) corporations are a moral disaster, with no democratic or moral accountability.

Beyond a certain size they can start to pull the strings of democracy in very unhealthy and distorting ways - including "sponsorship" of lawmakers, policy lobbying, and campaigns of outright disinformation at all levels of media.

If I shoot someone in the face I will go to prison and may well face the death penalty.

If a corporation causes mass misery - death, disability, decades of lost life, economic decay, the corruption and subversion of democracy - it will very likely get off with no sanctions at all. If there are fines, they'll be token. Only the most egregious cases get more severe fines - uncomfortable, but not usually life-changing.

Criminal charges are only likely if there's fraud that directly affects shareholders.

It's almost as if the lives of ordinary people are complete disposable.

Aside from prison and fines, there should be a corporate death penalty.

If corporations are people, they should be held accountable in the same ways people are.

aionaiodfgnio• 3 years ago

Prison for the board, too.

fithisux• 3 years ago

Agree.

slashdev4• 3 years ago

People care to such a small extent that most don’t even bother to vote. Good luck running a healthy democracy like that.

The reality is, most people are very focused on their own problems. Complaining is free, but doing something about it is not.

myshpa20• 3 years ago

Let's not pretend that in the end money doesn't dictate rules regardless of who's momentarily in the office.

The laws and regulations already in place are there for a reason. Not something that could be easily changed with a new administration.

The system is made by generations to persist, whatever happens.

nwiswell• 3 years ago

People care to such a small extent that most don’t even bother to vote.

That isn't supported by the facts:

Approximately 240 million people were eligible to vote in the 2020 presidential election and roughly 66.1% of them submitted ballots, totaling about 158 million.

In any case, it's true that the US has lower levels of voter turnout than other Western democracies, but it's unclear how to partition the reasons (less engagement/less caring? less notion of civil duty? less ability to get to the polls, including unfriendly work laws and voter suppression?)

The bottom line is that "most" eligible voters in the US DO care about something... but I'd suggest that the problem is that people care way too much about specific things that don't matter very much. If all the calories go into the hot button issues, then everything else is starved of oxygen. Our problem is perhaps one of too much emotional engagement.

WarOnPrivacy3• 3 years ago

Because if Purdue taught anything to the U.S. is that their voters do not care.

Voters don't care because news orgs don't care (in a meaningful way). Lobbyists writing law isn't as sexy to editors as sportsball, celebs or missing pretty white girls.

myshpa20• 3 years ago

News don't care because news are owned by businessmen. We don't have (almost any) independent news anymore.

anigbrowl3• 3 years ago

Even when media covers it, voters tend not to care, or get mad at being asked to care - consider the meteorologist who resigned from doing TV weather reports due to the death threats from viewers who objected to being told climate change was a factor in weather systems.

simple-thoughts2• 3 years ago

I’m not an expert in political theory nor in practice. I also have no particular interest in politics. My only concern is that my jurisdiction allows me to conduct my private business in peace. Asking people like us to do these things is ridiculous. More likely than not, we would protest for the wrong things in the wrong way and make things worse. Politics is a complex field and should be taken care of by experts.

anigbrowl3• 3 years ago

Read up on 'institutional capture'.

Alex3917• 3 years ago

let us get forward some legislation, adding criminal liability to the executives ignoring such things

IIRC there is government legislation that effectively mandates that tobacco companies add polonium to tobacco. Something to do with the fertilizer sticking to the trichromes on the leaves.

tester7564• 3 years ago

Smoking is sad thing

It generates so many negative things for barely 1 or two positive

and yet people argue for it in the name of some "freedom"

How does destroying your and people's around health, getting an addiction, paying bonus $$ to the govt as a additional tax and stinking sound like a "freedom"

r3trohack3r• 3 years ago

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/freedom

Freedom doesn’t mean making good decisions. It means having the liberty to make a decision, even if it’s not in your own best interest.

Do you have a right to destroy your own health? Do you have a right to get yourself addicted to a substance? Do you have a right to smell bad? Does the government have a right to exact a tax to disincentivize bad decisions? Do you have a right to contaminate the air in personal spaces like your own home? Do you have the right to contaminate the air in public spaces?

Do you have a right to tell someone else they aren’t allowed to make any number of those decisions?

There’s the other side of the transaction as well. Do you have a right to grow something that’s bad for your health? Do you have the right to smoke it? Do you have the right to share it? Do you have the right to sell it?

In this case, do you have the right to lie to the person you’re selling it to about whether it’s good/bad for their health? How does that change if you didn’t know it was a lie? How does it change if you did? How does it change if you didn’t know, but you could have known if you’d sought out the information?

Sightline• 3 years ago

physical addiction = freedom?

joshuahutt• 3 years ago

You have a right to, and a responsibility not to.

tester7564• 3 years ago

I kinda disagree here.

When you're addicted you aren't free as in freedom

You want to stop smoking, but you cant.

Thus smoking which leads to addiction isn't "freedom"

CelticBard4• 3 years ago

Look I agree with everything you said, but freedom means being free to make "bad" decisions.

tester7564• 3 years ago

I kinda disagree here.

When you're addicted you aren't free as in freedom

You want to stop smoking, but you cant.

Thus smoking which leads to addiction isn't "freedom"

npteljes8• 3 years ago

Freedom means enabling the bad things too.

Which I think leads to two things. One is that maybe freedom isn't that good by itself. Second is that every system will have its flaws, and so, its abusers. And sometimes the system shouldn't be designed to be as abuse-free as possible. Sometimes that throws out the baby with the bathwater.

tester7564• 3 years ago

I kinda disagree here.

When you're addicted you aren't free as in freedom

You want to stop smoking, but you cant.

Thus smoking which leads to addiction isn't "freedom"

jongjong• 3 years ago

Damn. Makes you wonder what kinds of horrible things big companies are doing now which will only be uncovered in the next 20 years or so. What makes tobacco companies less ethical than say big pharma or big tech companies?

It's a systemic issue. At the core of this issue is the concept of a corporation. The real cancer are the legal constructs of limited liability and the concept of corporate person-hood. Companies are simply not meant to become so large; they are physically incapable of handling the kind of liability which they will inevitably be exposed to on a global scale. The scale of such companies gives them inertia which allows them to transcend ethical boundaries; with global exposure, they can always find enough people who are unethical enough to undertake the necessary cover-ups to keep things going in a way which maximizes short-term profits.

Had the tobacco industry been made up of many smaller businesses, the information would have gotten out sooner as many small tobacco businesses would have voluntarily shuttered their doors in response to the research... But with a handful of gigantic companies headed up by some of the most ethically challenged individuals that all of planet earth could provide, it's not surprising that it didn't happen that way.

Capitalism is meant to be composed of small, mostly short-lived businesses that are almost ephemeral in nature. It should be easy to start a new business just as closing an existing business should not be a big deal. Long term inter-generational wealth should be difficult but not impossible to preserve; though it could be preserved using a deflationary currency as a market-neutral store of value; its value would be derived either from trust in the institution or in the automatic mechanism which administers the currency (e.g. the government or public ledger).

Imagine what we could achieve with today's technology if only we had kept the efficient capitalist system which our ancestors had designed; a system which proved itself to be efficient during hard times of technological and resource scarcity.

Our current system evolved in a post-scarcity environment and therefore it is not optimized for resource efficiency. It's optimized for centralization of power.

cbracketdash• 3 years ago

Given the nature of the tobacco business (to get people addicted on a pleasure-inducing drug), it's not surprising to see them ignore health risks !

anon7331• 3 years ago

Honestly, who cares? It's not like people had no idea smoking caused cancer to begin with. They certainly don't care, so why should we?

vondur• 3 years ago

There are big warnings on cigarette packaging that explicitly warns you that they cause cancer, reproductive harm and emphysema. Adding a warning about radioactivity probably won’t make a difference.

joker_minmax4• 3 years ago

Tobacco also loves to collect uranium and thorium in the root. As much as I want to blame the company here, they're already selling poison. What percentage of it is their fault if the poison is even more poisonous?

replwoacause• 3 years ago

100% of it

pfdietz5• 3 years ago

Collecting uranium in plant tissues won't do much to increase Po-210, since the decay chain to Po-210 runs through Ra-226, which has a halflife of 1600 years.

joker_minmax4• 3 years ago

The polonium is not the only thing decaying in the tobacco, is all I meant.

pard68• 3 years ago

Is this radioactive stuff just the result of burning tobacco or is it added from another element specifically in cigarettes? If it's from tobacco, is it normal for burning plant matter to result in radioactive materials?

badrabbit• 3 years ago

Is it possible to make "clean" cigarettes then? I wish it was possible to take out the nicotine and mix it with something you can smoke without harm.

hasmanean• 3 years ago

Where does polonium come from in tobacco fields? If it’s in the topsoil then why wouldn’t it be depleted after 3 or 4 crops?

Was it released into some Appalachian watershed by Oak Ridge and is therefore in the rivers/groundwater?

HPsquared• 3 years ago

Phosphate fertilizer, I think. It contains some polonium IIRC. Minerals have impurities.

pfdietz5• 3 years ago

Polonium comes from uranium. It's on the decay chain, via radium and then radon. Soil contains uranium at about the same concentration as the underlying bedrock (typically a few ppm by mass.)

pimpampum• 3 years ago

Laws that rely on misaligned interests are universally bad.

c8g• 3 years ago

At least in our country everyone knows that cigarettes causes cancer. Even 50% of the packet required to have warning that says cigarettes causes death. Who cares.

hulitu• 3 years ago

Big Tobacco knew radioactive Po210 in cigarettes posed cancer risk, kept quiet

And how did Po210 get into the leaves ?

Some people suggested fertilizers but then every plant culture might be affected.

Big Tobacco knew radioactive Po210 in cigarettes posed cancer risk, kept quiet

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