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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a good reminder of how fallacious the "appeal to experts" really is. Critical thinking is underrated.
(At the time of editing, the parent comment is flagged. That's too bad, I think the comment is a succinct reminder why, as I say, you should make up your own mind and not assume "expertise" means someone is acting in your interest)
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"
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 ...
daenz|4 years ago
version_five|4 years ago
(Are dairy and grains still food groups... I could easily go on)
edmcnulty101|4 years ago
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...
oivey|4 years ago
steelstraw|4 years ago
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?
crumpled|4 years ago
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|4 years ago
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...
pvg|4 years ago
ren_engineer|4 years ago
>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
inter_netuser|4 years ago
so nearly 3 generations.
sixothree|4 years ago
ars|4 years ago
Maybe lung cancer was 1950s, but health in general? Much, much earlier than that.
davidjytang|4 years ago
refurb|4 years ago
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.
fjert|4 years ago
artursapek|4 years ago
photochemsyn|4 years ago
When Pharmaceutical Companies Used Doctors to Push Opiates
When Pharmaceutical Companies Used Psychiatrists to Push Amphetamines
mise_en_place|4 years ago
seattle_spring|4 years ago
geodel|4 years ago
city41|4 years ago
tmule|4 years ago
tmule|4 years ago
KerrAvon|4 years ago
chihuahua|4 years ago
ratsmack|4 years ago
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
standeven|4 years ago
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?
winternett|4 years ago
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.
MeinBlutIstBlau|4 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
oofabz|4 years ago
8f2ab37a-ed6c|4 years ago
csdvrx|4 years ago
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.
dfghdfhs|4 years ago
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.
xelfer|4 years ago
Really making good use of that global network we got goin' here, history.com.
https://i.imgur.com/3bPAFQA.png
exodust|4 years ago
edit: https://archive.is/aAf3K
paxys|4 years ago
shadowgovt|4 years ago
... 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.
solarkraft|4 years ago
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.
annadane|4 years ago
AlexCoventry|4 years ago
https://www.nature.com/articles/182596a0.pdf
keyle|4 years ago
lucajona|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
soheil|4 years ago
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
Acen|4 years ago
e67f70028a46fba|4 years ago
throwawaylinux|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
foolyvaxxed|4 years ago
[deleted]
mastazi|4 years ago
Edit: here it is https://web.archive.org/web/20220120011739/https://www.histo...
human|4 years ago
nzp7chfjks|4 years ago
solarkraft|4 years ago
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|4 years ago
fsociety999|4 years ago
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.
blindmute|4 years ago
This is literally the only comment chain in the entire thread to reference vaccines
rswskg|4 years ago
xyst|4 years ago
still a shitty habit to pick up though
democracy|4 years ago
Nihilartikel|4 years ago
(Not actually kidding)
MangoCoffee|4 years ago
smoking was cool back then. it was a social thing to do. you can see that in old Hollywood movies.
democracy|4 years ago
adultSwim|4 years ago
stakkur|4 years ago
FTFY.
seventytwo|4 years ago
rgrieselhuber|4 years ago
hypertele-Xii|4 years ago
zeroesandones|4 years ago
elzbardico|4 years ago
sproketboy|4 years ago
[deleted]
forgingahead|4 years ago
[deleted]
version_five|4 years ago
(At the time of editing, the parent comment is flagged. That's too bad, I think the comment is a succinct reminder why, as I say, you should make up your own mind and not assume "expertise" means someone is acting in your interest)
tshaddox|4 years ago
steelstraw|4 years ago
pcdoodle|4 years ago
dewlinedew2|4 years ago
readingnonsense|4 years ago
dang|4 years ago
encryptluks2|4 years ago
[deleted]
VonGuard|4 years ago
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.
kuzuman|4 years ago
[deleted]
webmobdev|4 years ago
> 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