"The Cigarette in Global Lung History: How Flue Curing, Matches, Mechanization, and Mass Marketing led to Mass Death and Deception"

Robert N. Proctor, Stanford University

Professor of the History of Science

Abstract

There are presently about 6 trillion cigarettes smoked every year. With 6 billion people on earth, this means a global consumption rate of about 1000 per person per year, man, woman and child. Cigarettes are about 3.5 inches long, which means that 350 million miles are smoked per annum--enough to make a continuous chain stretching from the earth to the sun and back--with enough left over for a couple of side trips to Mars. Or to circle the globe 15,000 times. More than 60 million kg of soot, tar, ash, nicotine, phenols, benzopyrene, hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde and radioactive polonium-210 are inhaled by smokers every year, with well-known consequences: 5 million people die every year from smoking, a number expected to grow to 10 million/year over the next few decades. Tobacco killed an estimated 100 million in the twentieth century, a number that could rise to a billion in the present century--more than one percent of all who have lived since the evolution of Homo sapiens.

How did we come into such a world, which London's Royal College of Physicians has characterized as the "present holocaust"? The modern cigarette must be seen as the outcome of mass marketing and mass deception, combined with creative feats of pharmacologic engineering. No small object has been more carefully designed. The tobacco industry has also fought research with research, with one goal being the construction of both popular and expert ignorance (agnotology). Litigation against the industry has become one way to curb tobacco use in the U.S, but thousands of scholars have also defended the industry in court (as expert witnesses), raising novel issues of moral and social responsibility. Historians have also worked extensively for the industry, earning millions of dollars. The talk will compare the historiography of plaintiffs v. industry defendants in court, as part of a larger epidemiology of expertise, looking also at changing rhetorics of gigantism, archival eavescasting, and some of the intricacies of decoy, distraction and filibuster research.