The tobacco industry, or the factory of doubt

Knowledge of the dangers of tobacco is old. Indeed, from the beginning of the 1920s, the link between tobacco and cancer was highlighted by German doctors.^[1].

But it was especially in 1953 that Time and the New York Times published the results of a scientific study by Richard Doll^[2], a British epidemiologist, pointing out the carcinogenic potential of cigarettes on mice, and the responsibility of smoking in the increase in lung cancers. Quickly, the tobacco industry will do everything to deny the evidence, with the help of small influential scientific groups, often composed of declining and corrupt eminences. The main tobacco companies met the same year to decide on a common strategy: reassure consumers by telling them that if the products were proven to be dangerous, the tobacco industry would not sell them, and to create doubt among the public, through partial, inaccurate or deliberately misleading studies, on the dangers of tobacco^[3].

According to researcher Naomi Oreskes, this method is very effective.^[4]. It allows to "spread suspicion by wholesale denying the consensus brought by proven scientific evidence " In fact, this strategy aims to turn scientific methodology against itself, by pushing Cartesian doubt to the point of absurdity. The aim being to create a pseudo-controversy, suggesting the existence of several scientific camps, equally legitimate.

This was formalized in 1969 by a tobacco industry executive who led a campaign supporting the idea that the link between cigarettes and cancer was not proven. In his memoir, he summarized: " Our product is doubt.^[5] ".

Creating doubt among the public about the harmfulness of cigarettes helps protect the financial interests of the tobacco industry by preventing the adoption of protective measures and thus gaining time: The controversy significantly delays the ability of public authorities to legislate.

Having proven itself, this method is consubstantial with the strategy of the tobacco industry. Cigarette manufacturers will claim that filters preserve consumers' lungs or that light or menthol cigarettes are safer. Today, new so-called smokeless products are part of this strategy of manipulating consumers and public authorities.

This organization of doubt now concerns other areas, to the point that Robert Proctor, historian of science, made it an academic discipline: agnotology, the study of the production of ignorance.^[6].

©Tobacco Free Generation