Big Bad Tobacco

The antismokers over on Liberal Vision were very quick to accuse commenters of working for Big Tobacco. Professor Robert West said:

Some of the posts above have all the hallmarks of an orchestrated attack by the tobacco industry which is deeply concerned that the activities of ASH will damage their revenues.

Somehow or other over the past 50 years, Big Tobacco has become the very embodiment of the devious, lying, corrupt merchant of death. I doubt if even armaments manufacturers have quite such a bad name.

In a long piece in Rolling Stone last week, Al Gore was comparing global warming sceptics to Big Tobacco (my added emphases):

But whatever the cause, the referee appears not to notice that the Polluters and Ideologues are trampling all over the “rules” of democratic discourse. They are financing pseudoscientists whose job is to manufacture doubt about what is true and what is false; buying elected officials wholesale with bribes that the politicians themselves have made “legal” and can now be made in secret; spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year on misleading advertisements in the mass media; hiring four anti-climate lobbyists for every member of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. (Question: Would Michael Jordan have been a star if he was covered by four defensive players every step he took on the basketball court?)

This script, of course, is not entirely new: A half-century ago, when Science and Reason established the linkage between cigarettes and lung diseases, the tobacco industry hired actors, dressed them up as doctors, and paid them to look into television cameras and tell people that the linkage revealed in the Surgeon General’s Report was not real at all. The show went on for decades, with more Americans killed each year by cigarettes than all of the U.S. soldiers killed in all of World War II.

This time, the scientific consensus is even stronger. It has been endorsed by every National Academy of science of every major country on the planet, every major professional scientific society related to the study of global warming and 98 percent of climate scientists throughout the world. In the latest and most authoritative study by 3,000 of the very best scientific experts in the world, the evidence was judged “unequivocal.”

Nor is it even as if global warming alarmists are the only ones to compare their opponents to Big Tobacco. The sceptics do it too. Here’s Fox News on NASA’s James Hansen:

 

And here’s SPPI in 2007:

“Newsweek appears a naively willing party to a sophisticated but unsuccessful campaign strikingly similar to the tobacco industry’s callous 40-year campaign challenging the established causative link between smoking and fatal diseases such as lung cancer. This strategy provides a positive “pro-science” public stance that masks the ignominious activity of institutional and professional persecution of numerous scientists whose honest work casts legitimate doubt upon the more alarmist projections of the supposed “consensus.”

Like the tobacco industry, this campaign (to which Newsweek has made itself party) has:

♥ “Manufactured uncertainty and fear by stridently proclaiming certainty and consensus based on dubious and uncertain modeled results…

♥ “Adopted a strategy of information laundering by acting as a seemingly independent and respectable front…

♥ “Ignored or misrepresented peer-reviewed scientific findings or cherry-picked facts…

♥ “Attempted to shift the focus away from research based on observation with misleading charges that journalistic balance … is the enemy of free of speech,…

♥ “Stifled legitimate debate…

♥ “Placed bad politics and deliberate misinformation before good science and rational understanding.”

I must confess that I don’t know that much about Big Tobacco’s dark history, because I’ve spent most of my time over the past few years looking at its antismoking opponents in Tobacco Control, who (for me at least) now embody everything that is devious, lying, and corrupt. So much so, in fact, that I’ve come to wonder whether this image of Big Bad Tobacco has been the painstaking construction of Tobacco Control, slowly built up over several decades, despite every flailing effort by the tobacco companies to neutralise it.

I remember, for example, seeing the CEOs of several tobacco companies stand up before the US Congress and declare, one after the other, that they did not believe that smoking caused lung cancer. And back then, even though I was a smoker, I wondered how they had the nerve to say something so contradictory to what everybody knew was true. It was almost like saying that the world was flat. Everybody knew it wasn’t.

There are quite a few other stories about Big Tobacco that I’ve heard down the years, but as far as I can see (and I’m happy to be corrected) their principal ‘crime’ was  to deny the orthodox medical view of smoking as the cause of lung cancer – much like it’s the crime of global warming sceptics these days to deny the consensus of opinion within the climate science community on global warming. Everybody knows that that’s happening too. And everybody knows that it’s the oil companies who are trying to suppress the truth.

In both cases these are large and profitable corporations which have come under attack from a few grassroot pressure groups (like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, GASP, etc.) It’s a David versus Goliath battle, which plucky little David somehow manages to win, cheered on by everybody in the audience.

These days, however, it seems to me that David has metamorphosed into Goliath. There are huge amounts of tax money funding antismoking organisations, and there are huge amounts of tax money funding environmentalist organisations. And both have the ear of governments around the world, and use their influence to drive legislation (e.g. smoking bans, carbon emission targets, etc.).

But, even though they have become the political establishment, they still masquerade as David fighting Goliath. Here’s Robert West again (my added emphasis):

It is sad to see people writing on behalf of a vastly wealthy industry that manufactures and very heavily promotes a product that ruins the lives of so many millions of people, and attacking an organisation that on a shoestring has done more to save lives of our citizens than any other that I can think of in the past half a century.

Yes, Deborah Arnott, with her £60,000ish a year job as director of ASH, is running on a shoestring. Or, at least, that’s how she’d like to be perceived: as working for a struggling charity with one old typewriter, and supported solely by postal orders sent weekly by a couple of old ladies in Rotherham who lost their husbands to lung cancer 40 years ago. Because it’s very important to continue to look like you’re still David fighting an unequal battle against Goliath, with only a couple of stones to throw against his vast, armoured bulk, even if you actually have a heavy machine gun, and used it to turn Goliath into bloody pulp two or three decades ago. Because if the audience ever gets wind of how it really is these days, they’re quite likely to switch their allegiance to the other side.

I don’t know whether there’s ever been a movie that has explored this theme. Like maybe a version of Robin Hood where he not only defeats the Sheriff of Nottingham, but takes over his job, and becomes even more villainous than he ever was, while Friar Tuck becomes the Archbishop of Canterbury, and is even worse. If there isn’t, there ought to be. Because we’re living in such times.

The main thing is to demonise your opponent. If you can make him seem cruel and heartless and greedy, then you’ll have the audience on your side, and you’ll be winning. It’s important to be seen to be fighting against someone like, say, Osama bin Laden, with a long beard and cruel eyebrows and fleshy lips, who lives in a cave in Afghanistan and commands millions of obedient suicide bombers bent on the destruction of Western Civilisation and the complete subservience of women.

Perception is everything, it seems. And perceptions can change. It’s entirely plausible that one day – when it’s been found that smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer, but something else does – that Tobacco Control will start to look like a bunch of vicious Nazi thugs who dishonestly and unfairly demonised both the blameless tobacco business (upon which America’s fortune was originally built) and its equally blameless and friendly and law-abiding customers – simply to line their own pockets.

But it’ll need a grassroot organisation of smokers, armed with only a few old laptops running Windows 98, drinking cheap Co-op whisky from dirty glasses, tapping away alone at 3:30 in the morning, and driven only by burning anger at what has been done to them and their friends.

And where the hell do you find people like that?