Were Cigarettes the Greatest Crime of the Twentieth Century?
WHEN I FIRST picked up Robert Proctor’s history of cigarettes and the industrial giants that relentlessly purvey them, two things struck me. The first was the stunning cover jacket, which features a wonderful Van Gogh painting of a skeleton with a flaming cigarette in his mouth. The second was the book’s title. Surely another designation could have been chosen. Such a choice of words was all the more puzzling given that Proctor is an accomplished historian of Nazi medical practices and the author of two excellent books on the subject.
Moral outrage over the tobacco industry’s century-long (and counting) merchandising of death colors every word of this book, from the title page to the final entry in the index. When you finish reading this superbly contextualized and harrowing work, I predict you will not only share Proctor’s ire, you will even agree with his titular word choice. (Well, almost; and I hope not.)
Much of this story will be familiar to those who have read Richard Kluger’s Ashes to Ashes, Stanton Glantz’s The Cigarette Papers, and Allan Brandt’s The Cigarette Century. But what makes Golden Holocaust so valuable is that in the years since those fine books appeared, advances in computing and optical scanning have made the tobacco industry’s once-secret archives of memoranda, scientific studies, and outright chicanery freely available. One can now type in any search term into this massive database, and so Proctor has been able to drill this quarry deeper and wider. The result, in Proctor’s hands, is a forcefully written and genuinely alarming tour de force of history, public health, and muckraking.
It is best to begin by reviewing a few statistics, so as to better understand the global reach of such companies as Philip Morris/Altria, R.J. Reynolds, Lorillard, American Tobacco Company/Fortune Brands, and several others. Six trillion—6,000,000,000,000—cigarettes are smoked every year. That means if you placed one year’s cigarette sales end to end, you would create a chain long enough to travel from the earth to the sun and back with a couple of extra round-trips to Mars when the red planet is in near-earth orbit. But that is only a measure of volume. Without question, tobacco consumption comprises the single largest preventable cause of death. And because there is such a long tail between the point at which a smoker first picks up a pack to the point at which he develops a fatal case of emphysema, heart disease, or cancer, many of the deaths predicted today will not occur for decades.
As Proctor cogently explains, while tobacco killed “only about a hundred million people in the twentieth century,” we can anticipate a billion more deaths in the twenty-first century if trends continue as they have in the past. At present, tobacco kills some 6 million people a year, more than AIDS, malaria, and traffic accidents combined. Half of all life-long smokers will die from their habit. Every cigarette deletes seven minutes from a smoker’s life.
Cigarettes did not become a staple of daily life until the early decades of the twentieth century. Before that could happen, the industry had to make a number of “improvements” to their product. The first step was a process called “flue curing,” in which tobacco leaves were cured in low brick chimneys with closed iron pipes or flues. There were two valued results of this process when compared to the older method of simply exposing the leaves to a wood-burning fire: the risk of burning down the barn in which they were cured was reduced to a minimum, and the resultant tobacco not only turned a bright golden color but was also much milder to smoke and, hence, could be deeply inhaled. The last factor enhanced the smoker’s enjoyment of nicotine; it also made each cigarette far more deadly than pipes, cigars, or chewing tobacco.
There were other technological and merchandising advances required to create this juggernaut of disease. For a start, there was the invention of matches, which allowed for a portable, convenient, and ubiquitous source of fire; the mechanization of machines to roll and mass-produce cigarettes in a fast and inexpensive fashion; government taxation, which produced a second form of addiction in that states and the federal government grew reliant upon the taxable revenues the tobacco companies produced; the wide distribution of cigarettes to soldiers during World Wars I and II, causing millions of soldiers on both sides of these conflicts to become addicted to the product; and cutting edge mass-marketing techniques that spread sales around the world.