Behind the Bastards - Part Two: How Cigarettes Invented Everything

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

Robert is joined again by James Stout to continue to discuss the Tobacco Industry.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Should really get that checked out. Cut me blowing my nose. But keep the yell. Keep the yell. It sounds like a wounded elephant. I feel like a wounded elephant. The pollen count in Oregon right now is unbelievable. I just went outside during the break between episode recordings and emptied a magazine from an AR-15 into a tree, but it does not appear to have solved the problem. You've got to get heavier than that, man. You've got to eat that. I should have used the 308. That's why the army's upgraded the caliber. You want to fuck up a tree. You really want to move closer to that 30 caliber range. Yep. This episode's brought to you by 6.8 tree killer.

That end buster. That's 338 Lapua, baby. Yeah, well, that'll fuck up. When I was a young man, times like this, right around near the end of the year, my friends and I would go out into the woods and we would shoot down a tree in order to have a bonfire around it. And that doesn't really relate to the subject of the episode, but we often smoked cigarettes while doing it. Not interesting. It's kind of like shooting down a tree, isn't it? Because if you're actively consuming a base, it's a bit like shooting down a tree. Yeah, you just have to hope that they can grow up faster than you can shoot them.

Let's shoot them. Yep. That's what they say about trees. And it's also what they say about the human race, because one thing you got to give it to us is we bred slightly faster than cigarettes were able to kill us. Once again, a win for humanity. Yeah, the Titanic dub. So cigarettes did not get to have their real moment in the sun until a few years after the dissolution of American tobacco, which again, the Supreme Court knocks it out in 1911, probably somewhere under 10 percent of smokers and a much smaller portion of the U.S. population actually smoked cigarettes. So a pretty small fraction of the U.S. adult population is smoking still, even even as successful as our old buddy Duke was at getting people to

smoke. But the thing that's going to actually start to change this and really turn around cigarettes fortunes is the First World War. Now, James, you've been a trench. Yeah, I've been in a couple of trenches. So yeah, that's no professional reasons. Yeah, their trenches are not the cleanest places in the world, especially if it's raining in their muddy. You wouldn't want to have a pipe in a trench necessarily. You could smoke a pipe in a trench, but stuff's going to get in it. That's kind of gross, right? That's not ideal. Yeah. And when, you know, if you're doing trench stuff, you probably don't have time to sit down and really smoke a cigar. You know, they take a while.

Cigarettes are the depends on what rank you're at, doesn't it? Once you, right, right. If you're sitting, yeah, yeah, yeah, you get up to the, you know, the field grade officers, you find with a cigar. They have plenty of time for cigars and they have clean enough areas for cigarettes or for pipes. But if you're a working man in the trenches, the best way you have to smoke in between getting murdered by German machine guns is a cigarette. And that's that's really what causes a shitload of people to start adopting cigarettes. That's what actually makes it a mainstream thing is World War One. Now, it goes well with death. It does go well with death, James. Cigarette adoption had crept up only gradually prior to this. And it had been met by this really active anti smoking campaign

the whole time. It's kind of just noting that the first 20 years of like the 20th century, basically from like the late 1890s to like 1917, 1918, there's a very active anti smoking campaign in the United States. And it's powered by a lot of the same voices who are also fighting for prohibition. There were even bans on the public consumption of tobacco in some states. In 1910, a doctor named Charles Peace founded the non smokers protective league advocating for a public smoking ban in America's largest city. In 1913, the New York Times published an op ed opposing the establishment of smoking cars in the subway. Now, these people we now know are right, you know, like cigarettes bad public smoking bad. But they're not they're not again, there's not strong

evidence that proves cigarettes cause cancer at this point. There's not really good scientific studies at this point. These people are just busy bodies, right? Yeah, yeah, right. They can be right for the wrong reasons. Well, what are their arguments that they don't like it? Yeah, let me let me tell you, chief among the voices of small of non smokers is our old friend of the pod, John Harvey Kellogg, America's code. Kellogg's complaint was quote, smoking has become so nearly universal among men that non smokers are practically ignored and their rights trampled upon. Now, that means that like by being around cigarette smoke, you're having your rights trampled upon. And yes, we now know secondhand smoke is seriously bad for you at the time we did it. And also,

let's be honest here, 1917, walking around a city that's still filled with horseshit and now leaded gasoline fumes from all of the cars rolling around and industrial smoke from all of the different fucking coal factories and stuff. Cigarettes are not your number one health risk. Yeah, then the thing number one trampling on your right side of 1917. Yeah, it's just not the biggest problem. Look, John Harvey Kellogg. Yeah, do not give him credit for being on the right side of history with this one. So non smokers. Also, it was not again, because there's not greats. There are some of these people do sit ours are ahead of their time and are saying like, hey, this stuff is has to be bad for you. And we're going to figure out like the way in which

it's killing people later. A lot of them are just angry because they think it's gross. And a huge chunk of them are angry because cigarettes are popular with women, right? Because women start smoking. That's a big part of the anti smoking campaign. In 1904, New York State passes a law that makes it a crime for women to quote, endanger the morals of children by smoking in their presence. A woman named Jenny Lasher was charged in sentence to jail for violating it. In 1908, New York City alderman passed an ordinance restricting public smoking by women from the Washington Post, quote, the Sullivan ordinance made it illegal for restaurant and bar owners to permit women to smoke in their establishments. The stated rationale from Bowery moralist and

political chief in Tim Sullivan was that proper ladies were offended by women's smoking. And it certainly wasn't any kind of attempt by a man to control women's behavior. Despite the ordinance's short duration, it lasted only two weeks. The sentiment underlying it was held by others as well. Women's smoking was viewed by many as taboo associated with what Amanda Amos and Margarita Haglund have termed luscious and libidness moral behavior. So it is a good band name. And it's interesting. One of the things that cigarettes do is they make it. They are a big part of why it starts to become okay for men and women to socialize together who are unmarried, right? In a lot of ways. So one of the things that is common prior to cigarettes becoming

mainstream, after you have like a big dinner, if you if you have a fancy potty, then after dinner, the men will go to smoke cigars and the women will, you know, go clean up or something. And increasingly in the early 20s would start or in the early 19th, 1900s, what starts to happen is after dinner, everybody has a cigarette. And women didn't smoke cigars, but cigarettes are new. And so it's not really that weird to a lot of modern people that women would smoke them. And also there's not women's cigarettes. So everyone's smoking the same cigarettes. And increasingly, they start doing it in the same places together, unmarried men and women just hanging out and having a smoke and talking. This is a big part of this is kind of in the background

of the of the suffrage movement. But it like cigarettes do play a significant role in the increasing acceptance of of social equality for women, because men and women spend time together to smoke. Yeah, it makes not an on factor. Yeah. It's definitely a time period when there's generally this change in gender roles, right, with women working in a First World War. Well, that's yeah, that's another part of it, right? Is like women are taking on men's jobs. Why wouldn't they be able to smoke? And, you know, it's a it's a whole thing. So smokers also started to organize to establish more public smoking places. Tobacco dealers would often back and fund local efforts to lobby for smoking

cars on trains or to allow the smoking of cigarettes on the rear platform of street cars. Within the military, there were strenuous debates as to whether or not tobacco should be legal for soldiers. In 1907, the Surgeon General of the Navy had recommended that sailors under 21 be banned from smoking cigarettes. This was outrageous to the actual men of the Navy. And one enlisted man wrote this in response, if this cigarette recommendation has made the rule and such a thing is ordered, it's going to put all us young fellows who like them on the beam. It's all right to talk about your cigars and your pipes, but cigarettes are cigarettes. And when you once get to liking the little sticks, there's nothing that can take their place.

Then don't forget that life on the ocean with none of your women, folks or girlfriends around to break the monotony is a lot different from life ashore. And I tell you, those dream sticks help you pass away many a dreary and home stick hour. Just a bunch of Navy boys, no women around, sucking down dream sticks. Dream sticks, yeah. Direct quote from Joe Biden's speech about podding people with marijuana. Dream sticks. In an unrelated note, I saw a picture of Joe Biden with a quantum computer the other day, and it just struck me as the most wrong thing. It's like looking at Winston Churchill with a Game Boy. Like, no, those aren't supposed to be in the same photograph. Joe Biden should never have lived to see a quantum computer. It's like seeing a

Diplodocus or a Tamagotchi hang it out. Yeah, yeah. That's not okay. That's not okay. So opposition to cigarettes in the military disappeared overnight once the United States got into World War One. Much of this had to do with Black Jack Pershing, the leader of the American Expeditionary Force, who when asked what Americans could do to support their soldiers going overseas gave this reply. You ask me what we need to win this war. I answer tobacco as much as bullets. Oh, great. It's so true. It is. Yeah. Yeah. We've spoken about this before, but the universal truth of conflict journalism. If you need something, you're not sure that someone's going to give it to you. You can probably get it by giving someone enough cigarettes. I keep packs

on me every time I'm anywhere near because like, and it's not always just getting something. Some of it is like you meet people and they're standoffish because like, I don't know, they're fucking soldiers in a war zone whose daily life involves dealing with horrible trauma and they don't know you. And then you like bust out some marbles and you sit and smoke for like 20 minutes together. And then they just start talking, you know, like that's a thing. They're useful. They're they work. Yeah. They're a great tool for journalism. Well, they're also in terms of how they're being used that's not unhealthy by the military because cigarettes, spoilers make you worse at everything that is important for soldiers,

almost everything, right? Today, US soldiers who smoke score an average of 35 points lower on PT tests. Cigarette smoking harms your night vision. Like it's bad for your performance. Yes, they are bad for your performance and combat. In addition to like people get shot smoking cigarettes, right? But one thing they do is they are a stress reliever and we can debate in the long term. It's not a great coping strategy. But if your daily job is to get shot at repeatedly, you don't care about the long term. You just want like a moment where things feel okay. There is not a long term for a lot of people in world war one. No, no, no, especially not. And the other thing that they do is as we just talked about, people bond while smoking. It's

a part of why men and women, it's a way in which men and women start to bond socially in a way they had not in a long time in Western society and soldiers in the trenches bond sharing smokes. It is a thing that you do with each other. And you can't, number one, this is a thing I don't think the tobacco industry could have anticipated because it's just a very human thing. And it's also you can't fight this like there's not there's nothing to do about it. It's just a thing that people have adopted for themselves in a difficult time. And so this is a, this is a problem for the anti smoking people. Obviously smoking again, very bad for everything else that makes you be a soldier, but soldiers are not thinking about that in the times when they're smoking them.

And in a lot of military planners cases, like they're also, it's hard to argue, even though you've got people who are in the medical profession for the military being like these probably aren't good for people. It's hard to argue that like a guy who you're asking to run in a machine gun nest doesn't deserve to have like a cigarette. And you know, if you know America, you know that love for our military is basically the not so secret control level lever for the American mind. So cigarettes had been controversial prior to World War One. But once we start sending men in the field and Pershing's like we need cigarettes, organizations that had previously lobbied nationwide for smoking bands like the YMCA prior to World War One, the YMCA is a massive

part of trying to ban public smoking. As soon as the war starts, they start shipping pallets of cigarettes. It's great. It's been a truth for so long. You can just put the, put the support, the troops stand on anything and people will love it here. It's interesting. In the cigarette century, Alan Brandt writes, volunteers organized smoke funds to collect donations to assure that the troops had adequate supplies of cigarettes. The Sun Fund amassed 137 million cigarettes in a two month period. Tobacco may not be a necessity of life in the ordinary sense of the term, explained the New York Times, but it certainly lightens the inevitable hardships of war as nothing else can do. The National Cigarette Service Committee collected the names of soldiers

without families to make sure they received cigarettes. Volunteers prepared packages for shipment to the troops under the auspices of groups, such as the Army Girls Transport Tobacco Fund. Just great. That's sweet. Yeah. Yeah, amazing. I'm sure these people like were also like dying of trench foot and would have really appreciated picking a new pair of socks. Yes, socks probably also would have gone over well. Yeah, coat. I don't know. I mean, I assume the military was already attempting to provide those things. Like it is new that you would provide cigarettes as the military. Yeah. So in the early days of the war, the US war effort, I should say, the fact that most aid organizations in Europe provided cigarettes to soldiers for a fee,

often substantial, regularly made the news back home. Soldiers are like, we're paying as much for a cigarette at the front as we have to pay back at home. Like that's kind of fucked up. Now, donated cigarettes were only able to solve a small portion of this problem. One hundred and thirty nine million cigarettes is not a lot. If you if you know anything about cigarettes, that's not very many. Sounds like a lot. It is not. A fucking army in the field will smoke through one hundred and thirty nine million cigarettes quicker than they'll go through that many bullets. Yeah, that is true. Donated cigarettes only, yeah, solved a small number of the problems. So the War Department had to make the decision to issue tobacco rations

to soldiers starting in May of 1918. The New York Times wrote of the decision, quote, a wave of joy swept through the American army today. Great. And then have it. War fever means a temporary end to the anti smoking movement. Many men who had hated cigarettes prior to the war had become addicts while overseas, right? They, you know, they're they're big hygiene guys before and then they get shot at and they have a smoke in the fucking trench with their buddy. And then, you know, for the rest of their lives, they think kindly of cigarettes. Yeah. And also, the fact that the cigarette is now associated with the hard bit and trench fighter means that you can't attack the moral character of smokers. The anti smoking women, they're only

smoked by criminals and not white people, right? And now they're like they're they're part of the icon of the heroic, right? Yeah. So in 1900, again, barely five percent of the country smoked or like 1904, something like that. By 1940. And again, sorry. But in like the start of the 1900s, about five percent of the country who smokes tobacco smokes, right? Yeah. By 1940, 40 percent of the United States adult population smokes on a daily basis. Whoa. Yeah. Yeah. It is a huge increase. Yeah. That is crazy. Average per consumer consumption escalated to in 1900, Americans consumed about 54 cigarettes per person per year, right? That's the average for the whole population. In 1963, Americans consume 4,300 cigarettes per year. Jesus Christ. I was not

expecting that. That is so many cigarettes. Yeah. 4,300 per Jesus Christ. That's quite a few cigarettes. Yeah. Yeah. You're really upping the intake. They're going to get through those Pokemon card collections now. Oh, yeah. No. No. A lot of kids are getting a lot of baseball cards. Yeah. You know, those numbers are drive driven up by all of the 11 year old smoking 12,000 cigarettes. Smoking four cigarettes at once. Just burning through an entire carton in a day. Yeah. So this new wave of smokers brought with it changes in American smoking habits, largely driven by RJ Reynolds, president of the Reynolds Tobacco Company. Richard Joshua Reynolds had been born on July 20th, 1850 in Patrick County, Virginia. His father was a tobacco farmer,

and as a young man, Reynolds worked for his dad's plantation, which absolutely included a fuckload of enslaved people. RJ was just 15 when the Civil War ended, bringing with it the first tiny surge in cigarette usage. He quickly fell in love with the things and he turned his father's company into an industry leading producer. And RJ Reynolds is different from Duke in that Duke, when he smokes, smokes cigars, right? He wants to sell cigarettes. He thinks they're a good business. He doesn't understand them, right? He understands how to get people to want to buy something. He's a good marketer. He doesn't really get what people like in a cigarette. There is nothing that RJ Reynolds loves more than cigarettes. This man,

like, you have never loved a human being in your life the way this man loves the concept of a cigarette. He is such a cigarette lover that he attempts to avoid getting into Duke's tobacco trust, right? He has his own way he wants to do things. He doesn't want to get involved in this trust. He wants to sell his cigarettes the way he wants to. He actually gets forced by Duke into the trust because Duke uses shady methods to buy two-thirds of Reynolds tobacco stock to force the company into American tobacco. And despite this, RJ Reynolds refuses to work with Duke and he even secretly helps the US government build an antitrust case against American tobacco. When the Supreme Court broke the trust, Reynolds had one goal, to fuck over

Buck Duke and his company. In 1913, he created a new cigarette, which featured a mix of American and Turkish tobacco to create a blended cigarette. He called this new cigarette the camel. Oh, there it is. Camel cigarettes. Why did he choose camel? Because it's Turkish tobacco. Turkey, camels, two things that are constantly associated with each other. Just imagine how much better it would be if he just called it the turkey. The turkey, right. Because angry Turkish nationalists love the fact that those two things are sort of, they sound the same, but they mean different things. He should have called it the Greek and then had just a drawing of the Anatolian Peninsula on it.

They'd be banned there to this day. There would have been more wars in 20th century Europe. I'm going to quote now from the cigarette century. To help distinguish it from its competition, Reynolds offered no promotions. Smokers realized that the value was in the cigarettes and do not expect promotions or coupons, he explained. Against Duke's earlier advertising devoted to these now traditional promotional devices, Reynolds went modern. Reynolds committed unprecedented advertising money to promote this single product, creating a national campaign to make the camel cigarette a truly national brand. In 1914, newspapers throughout the country ran ads several days

in succession that announced simply, the camels are coming. They were followed by a second wave of ads proclaiming, tomorrow there will be more in this town than all of Asia and Africa combined. Creating such expectations and their fulfillment would become a central technique of modern consumer advertising. The third ad portraying the camel cigarette package read, camel cigarettes are here. This advertising campaign and here the term campaign appropriately reflects the strategic technique met with unprecedented success. Look at that. Yeah. Yeah. Smart man. Yeah. It is like an iconic brand. Okay. Cigarettes like, I know there are many brands that seem to like be as iconic as cigarette brands in its global and yeah. And this is the start of that part of it,

right? Because cigarettes have started to go viral in this, but not necessarily on a brand basis, right? You do have kind of some of these early brands, but they all like every tobacco company has a bunch of different brands and they sell different ones in different regions. Yeah. Reynolds is the first guy to be like, no, not only do I want my company to be the biggest, I want this one specific kind of cigarette to be everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. So when World War One ended, camel accounted for more than 30% of the US cigarette market. Camels came into vogue just as a new generation of female smokers came onto the scene. These women had traditionally taken male job, had taken traditionally male jobs from men who'd

left to fight. And after helping to save the US economy, they didn't take well to the argument that them enjoying a smoke was some sort of sin against femininity from the Washington Post. Cigarette advertising companies, which at the time primarily employed Mabel advertising executives, quickly co-opted the ideas of independence that women began to assert at the polls and in the workplace. They targeted women conveying the notions that women who smoked were independent, attractive and even athletic. Lucky Strikes 1925 marketing pitch to women told them to reach for a lucky instead of a sweet. The message, smoke and you'll be thin. Oh, great. There it is. Yeah. It's pretty fun. Yeah.

Wonder how long that would take. And this is number one. One thing that starts to happen in this is a whole new generation of extremely skinny female models starts to become popular because of this Lucky Strike ad campaign. They help to create like that, that whole great thing, that whole trend. Yeah. Yeah. Body image. There's a backlash to this. And there's kind of a war between cigarettes in the candy industry. And it's very funny that one of the cigarettes that will come in the market at this time, I think it might be Marlboro's, their advertising campaign is to like push back at Camel by being like, no, cigarettes and candy are both good for you. You should have your cigarette and your chocolate. They're a healthy treat. But no, the candy industry has to be like,

the fuck are you saying about people not eating candy? Come on. We're not trying to shit on cigarettes here. It's too nice. What the fuck? Yeah. And just when they start making candy cigarettes and really, well, yeah, this is that. And in this period, one of the interesting things about candy cigarettes, when they first get made, they're all made with the brands of real cigarettes. So there'll be camels. Now, not legally, they're all illegal. They're all candy companies using a brand illegally. The cigarette industry makes a concerted decision to never pursue charges over it to never go after them because they're like, well, if kids get used to picking up a pack of camels, that's a win for us. Yeah. Like there's no downside to us letting

them do this. Yeah, it's a win for everyone. Great. Yeah. Now, one thing that does happen in the post war period is that female smokers are an easier target for anti smoking advocates than soldiers who are heroic and stuff. When the 18th Amendment gets passed banning the sale of alcohol, moral crusaders like evangelist Billy Sunday turned their attention to tobacco, saying in one speech, prohibition is one now for tobacco. The Women's Christian Temperance Union issued a pamphlet titled Smoking Next. The first success in this wave of the anti smoking movement came in Utah, which banned the sale, giving away or other exchange of cigarettes. The bill's advocates included the WCTU and the Mormon Church, both of which emphasized the moral risks of letting

women be seen smoking. Senator Edward Southwick, who wrote the bill, quoted US Surgeon General Hugh Cumming, which was his real name, as saying, if American women generally contract the habit, as reports now indicate they are doing, the entire American nation will suffer. The physical tone of the whole nation will be lowered. This is one of the most evil influences in American life today. The habit harms a woman more than it does a man. Great. Thanks, Hugh. Yeah. You coming for name and intellect. Yeah. Yeah. Real, real smart guy, real cummer, Hugh. Yeah. There were other names he could have been cursed with, which could have been, his first name could have been worse, but yeah. Yeah. But there we are. But you know what will make you cum, James? Please enlighten me.

The sponsors of our podcast, not their products, which are asexual, but the actual people who run an own stock in the companies. Anytime you ask for it. That's good to know. That's a promise. Yeah. I'll put that in the old context, but. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season we'll take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy, voiced,

cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with

no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. We're talking about come. You know, every time I talk about come on this show, somebody gets up in the subreddit and they're like, I wish they wouldn't make juvenile jokes about come. It's not very funny. It's exceptionally funny to make juvenile jokes.

Yeah, look, I am never going to stop making cut jokes about come. And I'm never going to stop telling people that when Mitch McConnell comes, all that exits his penis is a mix of dry scabs and spider legs. That while no juvenile is still funny. It is. It's funny and true. It's exceptionally funny. Yeah, it's true. And he can serve a server. It will take him to court. Show us the evidence, Mitch. Yeah, show us the evidence, Mitch. Show us the evidence that when you come, the dry scabs exiting your urethra, don't make a sound exactly like crabs scuttling on a soapstone bed. Prove it to me. Prove it to me, Mitch. I'm now physically unwell. Would you like a cigarette? Yeah, I think I've been traumatized on a level that's

a little bit more. I'd like to shorten my life. Yes. Well, why don't you reach for a lucky instead of a sweet? That will help me stay, maintain my girlish physique. So as we've just come back, the surgeon general has been like, this is going to lower the moral tone of women. And again, I just so that I'm not mistaken. Cigarettes are bad. Don't smoke them. These people are technically in the right, but they're in the right for the wrong reasons usually. So fuck them. I'm going to quote again from Alan Brandt here. Another supporter of the legislation noted that the fingers of our girls are being varnished with

the stains of those harmful little instruments of destruction. Just as earlier opponents of the cigarette had done, Senator Southwick argued that the use of the cigarette violated the liberties of nonsmokers, which is fair, offended moral sensibilities, which is unfair and polluted public space, which is we'll call that one mixed. We cannot bring our wives and daughters to the city, he wrote, and cannot come along without encountering tobacco smoke everywhere as it that saturates our clothing and nauseates us. Personal liberty. Ours is as inviolate or as or should be as theirs. Amazing. Like I am when like industry is ripping children's arms off their bodies. Oh, yeah. No, people are just burning pure petroleum jelly in the back of a fucking model tea.

Yeah. Yeah. Just pouring some lead into the reserve lead tank. Yeah. Again, fucking 1922. Your your worst encounter is not going to be with tobacco smoke in the streets of the city. The coal burning colonialism factory isn't a problem. It's women smoking that we need to worry about. Now, by 1922, 16 states had banned or restricted cigarette sales and promotion. But none of these restrictions lasted long. The disaster that was prohibition and the growing number of tobacco addicts made the anti smoking cause untenable. A chief issue with the fight to restrict smoking was the fact that it rested mostly on moral panic grounds. Right. Again, if all of these people are saying smoking is horrible for your health,

then surely shouldn't be doing it. That's one thing. But a lot of them are being like, well, women shouldn't be smoking. It's bad for kids to see it. It's going to stay in their hands. They don't have at this point, they don't have widely agreed upon medical evidence that smoking is bad for you. And in fact, a lot of doctors will argue that smoking is if not healthy, then not a serious harm. It was not as common in this period for to have doctors be like, smoking clears your lungs. But most of them tended to be like, well, it's not that bad for you, right? It's like it's like it is like eating candy, right? That's that's what they it's not like eating candy. Please. I'm not saying that someone's going to get really angry at me. I'm

just saying if you're a doctor in the 20s, odds are rather than saying smoking is bad for you, you're saying like, well, it's probably okay to have the occasional cigarette as part of a balanced diet or whatever, you know, right? And again, doctors are heavily debating as the 30s dawn whether or not smoking causes cancer. There were studies by this point that showed a correlation between self reported smoking habits and lung cancer. And by the 1920s, rates of lung cancer had started to soar. Given all of this, it might seem easy to prove a link between cigarettes and lung cancer. But it's not all all you've got in the 20s is that there's a correlation between the two. But obviously, cigarettes aren't the only thing that's been introduced to modern life in

the early part of the 20th century, right? There's cars now suddenly, people are getting a whole bunch of different medications that didn't used to exist. All sorts of shit is around that just wasn't before. So how do you know how do you know think about this? How can you prove if you're just a dude in 19, 20 fucking two, that the thing causing lung cancer in your friends is the cigarette and not the car or the fucking fluorescent light bulbs, right? Like, you don't know, there's not there's not evidence at this point, you know, yeah, part of this industrial modernity. Yeah, a lot has changed really quickly. Yeah. And there's actually there's some surprisingly logical reasons to question the early science. One doctor in critic over fears of cigarette

use, one of the guys who's arguing against the people saying that lung cancer and smoking are correlated. One of the things he says is that like, well, when we get lung cancer patients, they have a lung in one, they have a tumor in one lung or the other. Very few of them have tumors in both lungs. But when you smoke, the smoke is drawn into both lungs equally. So if smoking is causing lung cancer, why wouldn't it be causing it in both lungs at the same time? Obviously, we know that just that's just the way cancer works, right? But again, based on the knowledge at the time, that's not a bad point to make, right? He's wrong. But you can see how a person who is not like in the pocket of big tobacco could make that mistake. Yeah. Yeah.

His reasoning is not inherently unsound, right? He's wrong. But but not because he's like, again, later, all the scientists on the other side of this will be doing something fundamentally dishonest. These are just people trying to understand the human body in a period in which we don't have that much information about it. Other scientists would argue that the rise in lung cancer was attributed to the fact that life expectancy had risen a lot in the first quarter of the 20th century. People were getting more weird cancers, they argued, because people were living longer. Maybe lung cancer has always been normal once you hit a certain age, and we just didn't have that many people reaching it, you know? Yeah, makes sense. Again, these are not

inherently illogical arguments. Now, there were, however, doctors early on who were who figured out what was happening, who knew and who put together that there was a link between smoking and lung cancer. But it took data a long time to catch up with that. For one thing, epidemiology is in its infancy in this period of time. The first small batch studies and by the late 20s, we have studies that show a correlation between smoking and lung cancer. But there's no control group. So all they show it. So there's no group of people who don't smoke to see what their lung cancer rates are, because that's not a normal part of medical science yet. They're starting to do that. They're figuring out, like, oh, yeah, you should have fucking control groups in your medical studies.

But it's not the thing that you just do deregure at this point in time. It becomes partly as a result of this research. And in fact, there's a 1928 article in the New England Journal of Medicine in which that points out, like, it shows a link between smoking and lung cancer. But it also points out that their study and other similar studies are of little value without similar studies on individuals without cancer, without control groups, right? So part of why that becomes more common in this period is scientists trying to figure out if there's a link between smoking and lung cancer. The scientists who write that 1928 study, Herbert Lombard and Carl During, carried out their own small 200 person study with a control group. And this is the first

good quality study we have that shows lung cancer is it shows a bunch of things. Number one, I shouldn't say shows, it suggests a bunch of things. Number one, it suggests that lung cancer is not a contagious disease, which how would you have known that, you know, without, you don't know that people aren't giving it to each other, right? That it's not some weird thing that people got when they started walking in the Amazon or whatever, right? How would you know? They know they find they or at least the data suggests that it's also there's not a correlation between lung cancer and low quality housing, which was another thing people didn't know is it's something about the way we insulate our homes, you know, they also find out that it's not associated with

constipation, which was a thing that some doc. And again, we can laugh about that, but how would you know if you didn't do the study? Yeah, right. Yeah. The primary like damning thing the study finds is that self reported heavy smokers are 27% likely to get lung cancer. This is the first scientifically solid evidence linking cigarettes to lung cancer. Now, 200 person study with a 200 person control group, that's not definitive, right? That's enough to justify further research. Sure. But that's not a huge study. The 1930s are where we're going to see the first attempts on a large scale to document the relationship between cigarettes and cancer. The impetus to this, the impetus for this research actually comes from one of the few industries that can rival

big tobacco for sheer evil, the insurance industry. They are the people who are going to because they see this early research and they're like, wait a second, we're paying a shitload of money out on all these fuckers dying of lung cancer. If cigarettes cause it, we need to be charging people more if they smoke, right? Like they're doing it for evil reasons, but it is important research. King Kong versus Godzilla. Exactly. So one of the chief drivers of this is a guy named Frederick Hoffman, who is a student, a statistician at Prudential. And Hoffman notices in 1931 that a lot of fucking life insurance policies are being filled for dead lung cancer patients. If smoking was the cause, then again, you're going to need to restructure

the way premiums work. A lot of money is at stake, which is obviously what interests Prudential. They don't care about the cost of human life. So the thing that Hoffman notices is that in 1915, the lung cancer rate stands at about 0.7 people per thousand people, right? About 0.7 people per every thousand in the population are likely to get lung cancer. By 1920, it's risen to 1.1 per thousand. It's 1.6 per thousand by 1924 and 1.9 per thousand by 1928. That means in 13 years, the rate of lung cancer has nearly tripled. Now, Hoffman is not bound by the ethical constraints of a doctor, right? He doesn't have to wait until he has really good data to be like smoking causes lung cancer. He sees this, he puts two and two together, and he becomes the first

prominent figure to publish a claim that tobacco use is associated with a heightened rate of cancer and early death. And he's doing it again to warn insurance companies. A new wave of studies follows. And as the 1930s gives away to the 40s, the tobacco industry keeps a worried, watchful eye on this emerging science. They also start exploding their advertising budgets in order to kind of make up for the increasing talk in the background about maybe cigarettes aren't so great to look for us. In 1911, prior to the bust of the American Tobacco Trust, the entire cigarette industry profited about $13 million a year. By 1918, the big five tobacco companies were spending more than $13 million every year just in ads. In doing so, they helped create the very language

of American culture. And I'm going to quote from a write up in the Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice by Richard Pole. Cigarette sellers were among the most enthusiastic pioneers in the use of network broadcasting for coast-to-coast advertising. By 1930, American Tobacco, Brown and Williamson, P. Laurelard, and R.J. Reynolds were all buying network radio time. There has been no greater enthusiast for radio advertising than George W. Hill of the ATC, whose business for the first five months of 1930 surpassed all records. The company sponsors the Lucky Strike Dance Orchestra in three hour broadcasts each week. Lucky Strike sponsored many radio comedies and musical shows, such as Jack Benny and the K. Kayser College of Musical Knowledge, and the best known and

longest-running popular musical shows, Lucky Strike's Hit Parade. This show started in 1928 and ran into the 1950s on television. It featured teen idol Frank Sinatra when he was launching his career. So popular was this show in 1938 that a sweepstakes promotion offering free cartons of luckies for the names of the three most popular tunes drew nearly 7 million entries per week. The Lucky Strike Hit Parade was the first show to rank popular music releases in an ongoing basis. This is where we get the top 40. The entire structure of the musical industry comes out of Lucky Strike's Hit Parade. So they gave us all those crappy Christmas number one singles, and it seems like podcasts more or less. And podcasts! We all owe a debt to Lucky Strike.

Yeah, every time you read a dick-pull advert, just think of Lucky, well, in more ways than one, actually. Let's all give the good folks at Lucky Strike a solid go and pick out a pack right now that you don't have to give it to a kid. You know, they love to smoke. Sophie, what? I'm done with my script. I'm throwing to ads now. I'm throwing to ads like the Good Men at RJ Reynolds and Laura Lard and the other greats of the tobacco industry taught me to. Sophie, I'm honoring our ancestors. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI

sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of goods. He's a shark, and on the good badass way, and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI

isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me

from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So we all had a cigarette, and we're ready to go. Cigarettes have now just invented the modern music industry. The lunatics taken over the asylum now. James, do not encourage his behavior. The lunatics have taken over. They had a couple of lucky strikes. They felt better, and they took over the asylum. Yeah, that is a lucky strike, if you ask me. So the need to capture smokers young, because market research had shown that people tended to be brand loyal, also helped to create the modern conception of ad demographics, right? Advertisers start learning how to differentiate and split, you know, the idea that like the 18

to 35 males is like the most valuable, that comes out here, right? Oh, wow. And it's because like those are the, that's when you got to get them fucking smoking, right? Yeah, yeah. Earlier, possible. Yeah, yeah. And living to 18 is really the key. Ideally, I like 11 or 12. They advertise a lot in colleges, and they also, it leads tobacco companies to steer more and more towards funding children's entertainment. This starts with the comics pages, a syndicated weekly pop collection called Puck is like massive for cigarette ads. But as Polay writes, it quickly expanded beyond that. Quote, in the 1950s, many brands used cartoon trade characters in their advertising. The ads on lucky strikes hit parade for a while featured a cute animated character called scoop,

who threw the then impressive technical feat of super imposition and peered on a on screen with the show star Dorothy Collins. So that's where we get who framed Roger Rabbit, motherfuckers. Cigarettes taught us how to do that. Yeah, great. They gave us avatar. Yeah. Philip Morris's US, Philip Morris's cartoons when advertising on I love Philip Morris used cartoons when advertising on I love Lucy. Laura Lard created TV cartoon ads for old gold that featured the voices of their honeymooners stars, Jackie Gleason and Art Carney. This presaged the Winston spots that employ the animated hit characters from the Flintstones, a totally cartoon show they sponsored, whose voices structure and sense of humor all imitated

the honeymooners. And I think a lot of people are vaguely aware that the Flintstones used to have cigarette ads. You knew that, right? No. Oh, that's why it was created. The Flintstones were made as a cigarette ad. And to get an idea for how blatant this advertising was, you need to see some old episodes of the Flintstones. And I think this one includes a representative scene. You should know to understand what's happening on screen. Right at the start of this, we see Fred and Barney kind of like hanging out in the yard on their asses while their wives are doing like yard work and house chores. So they're like, chill it out from watching their wives work. Right. Good stuff.

They sure work hard, don't they buddy? Yeah. Oh, you can see them work so hard. Yeah, me too. And let's go around back. Well, we can't see them. Gee, we ought to do something, Fred. Okay. How's it about taking a nap? Hey, I got a better idea. Let's take a Winston break. That's it. Winston, the one who built the cigarette that delivers flavor 20 times a pack. Winston's got that built-up blend. The year, Fred. Built-up blend makes the big taste difference, and only Winston has it up front where it counts. Here, ahead of the pure white filter, Winston packs rich tobaccos, specially selected, and specially processed for good flavor in filter smoking. Yeah.

They're still going. Winston tastes good like a cigarette chun. Oh, yeah. That is a lot of cigarette advertising. Yeah, I was at first I was appalled by the directors of it, but then just a duration of it. Yeah. Wow. They really were committed to selling kids cigarettes. Yeah. Yeah. Winston also, not a great name compared to like Camel. No, no. Camel Marlboro. Yeah. Just a dude called Winston with little imagination. Yeah. Wow. That was amazing. Yeah, it's the best. Yeah. That is like Alex Jones tier, just transition from content to ads. Fucking Barney Rubble wants to get your ass into a pack of Winston's.

Yeah. It's going to be doing what is it? Fucking Silver or whatever. Alex Jones is trying to sell you now. Yeah. Colloidal Silver. Yeah. To see that you can shoot up your ass. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Nor do I care. I don't think our listenership overlaps, so no one else knows either, so it's fine. No, our listeners are buying a lot of gold now because of those gold ads running. Oh, yeah. Well, that's good. It's been a success. We have to get them back for the next season. Yeah. We love the gold ad people. You know, I'm just going to do a free ad right now. Buy gold. It's the cigarettes of currency. Well, actually, that's cigarettes. Gold's almost as valuable as cigarettes in a pinch. So it picks them up today. Smoke it.

You know what, James? I have an idea. Why don't we make a lot of money? We get cigarettes, grind up gold into them, pour gold flakes into the cigarettes, and then sell them to rich assholes who have tech tax. Yeah, it's definitely. There's like a thing. Isn't there like a vodka or something that has gold? Oh, yeah. There's a couple of liquors that have it. Yeah, you may see it as unnecessary, but I need to say so many so many gold, gold, unnecessary gold. So you know how there's, you know, it is necessary. Robert getting back to the script.

Pour out some gold liquor and yeah. Yeah. I'm back. Wrap a cigarette. There was no gold, but I've got my glass of lead. So during the late forties to the early fifties, the science coming out about cigarettes and cancer starts to look worse and worse. The R.J. Reynolds company launches a new campaign for camel cigarettes in 1946, centered around the slogan, more doctors smoke camels than any other cigarette. Six years. This is like, this is their main advertising push for six years. The dentist and toothbrush thing was cigarettes from amazing.

Great. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. The cigarette that nine out of 10 doctors recommend. Reynolds backs up their claim that's more sick doctors smoke camels than any other cigarette with surveys that they said had been conducted by, quote, three leading independent research organizations. Now they don't name these organizations. One representative ad claims that a survey of 113,597 doctors from, quote, every branch of medicine had shown that camels were the brand most often smoked by doctors. That's what you want is to cigarette your podiatrist chooses. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I want to know. Yeah. Nobody knows what you should be smoking

better than a fucking proctologist. That's who's got it down. Yeah. As an obstetrician. My urologist chooses Winston's. Yeah, that would be quite funny. Boy, women seem to really want a cigarette after giving birth. Probably good for you. Why not drink? So R.J. Reynolds assured customers that this survey, which totally existed, was an actual fact and not a casual claim. And their competitors were all doing the same thing. American Tobacco President George Washington Hill contracted the legendary ad executive Albert Lasker and tasked him to come up with a reason why customers should smoke his cigarettes.

And I want to quote now from a write up in the American Journal of Public Health. With no real scientific evidence to back their claims, American Tobacco insisted that the toasting process that Lucky Strikes Tobacco underwent decreased throat irritation. In fact, Lucky Strikes' curing process did not significantly differ from that of other brands. Related campaigns emphasized that Lucky's would help consumers, especially women, their new market, stay trim since they could reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet. Along with these persistent health claims, a typical advertisement from 1930 boldly stated that 20,679 physicians say Lucky's are less irritating.

Great. Now, James, do you want to know how they'd gotten the information that Lucky's were seen as less irritating by doctors? Did they send a packet of Lucky Strikes and also just a box of asbestos? They sure did. Yeah, their advertising agency Lloyd Thomas and Logan sent cigarette cartons to physicians in 1926, 1927, and 1928. And then asked them to answer, are Lucky's strike cigarettes less irritating to tinderthroats than other cigarettes? And the doctors were like, yeah, I want more free cigarettes. Sure. Yeah, why do I want free cigarette box? Cool. I'll take that one. Great. Good. That's how science is done. That is how science is done.

Now, touting the toasting process and the accompanying cover letter, advertising executive Thomas Logan pointed out the virtues of Lucky Strikes and claimed that they had, quote, heard from a good many people that they could smoke Lucky Strikes with perfect comfort to their throats. American tobacco used doctors' responses to this survey in order to like push the claim that Lucky Strikes are less irritating. The toasting, as they explained, is, quote, your throat protection against irritation, against cough. Thank God. Thank God, they figured out toasting. Otherwise, these cigarettes might really hurt people. Yeah, you got to toast them. That's how you spot pick up the cigarettes in your toaster.

Yeah. Yeah, no cancer for you. So self-reported adults smoking peaked in the early 1950s at about 45% of the population. Big tobacco's ploy to buy up doctors had worked for a while. But in late 1953, the first irrefutable studies linking lung cancer to tobacco use were published, to tremendous public interest. Major peer-reviewed journals studies had tied not just cancer, but cardiac disease and serious respiratory illness to smoking. The situation was serious enough that the head executives of the Big Five tobacco companies all came together in December of 1953 to figure out how to respond to this news. They picked the Plaza Hotel in New York City as the

place to map out their strategy. And it is possible that no other location in the United States, including the Pentagon, has been used to make plans that ended with a greater death toll. The master of the moment was John W. Hill, president of the biggest PR firm in the country, Hill & Knowlton. Now, John had been born in Indiana in 1890. He'd spent most of his early career working as a journalist. He's a journalist for 18 years working his way up the ladder to become an editor and a popular columnist. In 1927, he blazed a trail that generations of soulless hacks would follow, and he decided to start a PR firm. By the time 1953 rolled around, it was the largest PR firm on the planet. Hill was worth the money, and in that hotel conference

room he laid out the bones of what would be known as Plan White Coat. The basic idea was to create an industry-sponsored research entity, a think tank of scientists funded by tobacco money but ostensibly independent. This would allow Big Tobacco to claim they were taking fears of lung cancer seriously, while also providing them with disinformation to muddy the waters by painting the existing studies as insufficient. I'm going to quote, yeah, it's awesome. It's so good. I've never done it since. This is not the thing that's going to end all life on this planet. No, Hill did not just build the apocalypse bomb. Yes, yeah, Jesus Christ. Yeah, well, they've given us everything from Pokemon cards to fucking climate change. It's incredible. Cigarettes

are amazing, James. Yes, wow. Yeah, they are something. One of the single most important inventions in the history of the planet. Yeah, God, people die of starvation, you know, and here we are. We've made a cancer stick and we've created new and exciting ways to lie about it. It's amazing. It's so cool. God, what a great product. I'm going to quote now from a 2012 article in the American Journal of Public Health. The industry had supported some individual research in recent years, but Hill's proposal offered the potential of a research program that would be controlled by the industry yet promoted as independent. This was a public relations master stroke. Hill understood that simply giving money to scientists through the National

Institutes of Health or some other entity, for example, offered little opportunity to shape the public relations environment. However, offering funds directly to university-based scientists would enlist their support independence. Moreover, it would have the added benefit of making academic institutions partners with the tobacco industry in its moment of crisis. Hill and his clients had no interest. Great. Yeah, Hill and his clients had no interest in answering a scientific question. Their goal was to maintain vigorous control over the research program to use science in the service of public relations. Although the tobacco executives had proposed forming a cigarette information committee dedicated to defending smoking against the medical

findings, Hill argued aggressively for adding research to the committee's title and agenda. It is believed, he wrote, that the word research is needed in the name to give weight and added credence to the committee's statements. Hill understood that his client should be viewed as embracing science rather than dismissing it. Now, again, Hill's a journalist, right? That's part of how he's able to do this. He understands how to communicate. He understands how people read things. One of the first things he emphasized to the industry leaders was that they had to stop competing with each other, trying to move cartons by convincing customers that their smokes were more soothing or healthier than the others. This was bad, right? Arguing like

lucky strikes are healthier than marbles is bad for the whole industry, so we have to stop it. The key to surviving this, Hill told them, was collective action and one that looked like a commitment to public welfare while actually doing everything possible to harm public welfare. The Tobacco Industry Research Committee was formed in 1954 and announced its existence with full-page ads and more than 400 newspapers. This ad, known as the Frank Statement, claimed that tobacco companies were deeply concerned about the welfare of their customers and would pursue any end to get to the bottom of this whole tobacco equals cancer thing. Quote, we accept an interest in people's health as a basic responsibility paramount to every other

consideration in our business. We believe the products we make are not injurious to health. We always have and always will cooperate closely with those whose task it is to safeguard the public health. That's good. Great. Yeah. Sure. Very honest. Very straightforward. So despite these high-minded claims, the TIRC's agenda was laid out by Hill before he consulted a single scientist. The executive director of the organization, W.T. Hoyt, had no scientific background. His previous job had been selling ads for the Saturday evening post. Within his first few months of operation, Hoyt and other executives of the TIRC put out a statement directly responding to studies that purported to show a link between cigarettes and disease. It is an obligation

of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee at this time to remind the public of these essential points. One, there is no conclusive scientific proof of a link between smoking and cancer. Two, medical research points to many possible causes of cancer. And three, the millions of people who derive pleasure and satisfaction from smoking can be reassured that every scientific means will be used to get all the facts as soon as possible. Great. Yeah. This has got to go well, James. It's got to go really well. Yep. I can see this anyway. So the first scientific director appointed to the TIRC was Clarence Cook Little, an extremely prominent biologist and geneticist who had become extremely prominent because he was a popular eugenicist. Oh, good. Yeah. Fucking magnificent.

It's really funny because Cook, like, a little, the reason he believes that cigarettes, because he truly believes that the people who connect them to cancer is wrong, because he believes that lung cancer is genetic. So it can't be caused by an environmental factor like an ailing 4,500 cigarettes a year. It's got to be, it's got to be something to do with the fact that certain races are more likely to get cancer. Oh, God. It is. One thing I'll have to, you got to say, for a racist, this guy probably killed more white people than any other racist. Yeah. Yeah. He does drop a lot of white folks. Yeah. Yeah. Accidentally based. Well, he drops everyone else too. Yeah, true. Maybe not.

Unlike him, cigarettes don't discriminate. Yeah. Oh, dear. God, they really have become a magnet for the shittest things in humanity. It is incredible how many terrible, yeah. It's amazing. What's going to happen next? Are you going to stand with the TERFs or something? Cigarettes. We just don't like weird people. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I tell you, it's probably in the Harry Potter book somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. In 1954, the TIRC's budget was around a million dollars, nearly all of which went to Hill and Nolten and various ads rather than actual science. But by 1963, the TIRC was giving out close to a million dollars in grants. These funded research, actual scientific research, but they picked the kind of research carefully.

So we're not going to do research into what causes lung cancer, but we'll do research into how cancer develops over time and how it grows in the body and ways to fight it and stuff. And this is important stuff so they can keep coming out with these studies funded by TIRC money that are real studies, but none of them happen to look into whether or not smoking causes cancer, right? Great. You can look at how genetics or virology impacts cancer rates, and those are important things to study. But by picking what gets funded specifically, they are very, very purposefully drawing attention away, putting better airbags in the no brakes model of our car. So this strategy worked for decades,

distracting the public and lawmakers from any actions that might negatively impact the rate at which people smoked. Key to the success of this program was Hill's understanding of how journalism worked from that Journal of Public Health article. Hill understood that the success of any public relations came strategy was highly dependent on face-to-face interpersonal relations with important media outlets. Each time the TIRC issued a press release, the Hill and Knowlton organization would initiate a personal contact. The firm systematically documented the courtship of newspapers and magazines where it could urge balance and fairness in the industry. In these entreaties on behalf of the industry, the firm's staffers

repeated several key themes. First, they would note that the industry completely understood its important public responsibilities. Second, they would affirm that the industry was deeply committed to investigating all of the scientific questions relevant to resolving the controversy. Third, they urged skepticism regarding statistical studies. Finally, they offered members of the media a long list of independent skeptics to consult to ensure balance in their presentations. Great. He's also responsible for the dozens of direct marketing emails I get every single day. Great. Now I personally agree for this metaphor. Cigarettes created everything. The primary independent skeptic, of course, was the TIRC's

little. That's the eugenics guy. Given the penchant of the press for controversy and its often naive notion of balance, these appeals were remarkably successful. Hill and Knowlton expertly broadcast their arguments, typically not based on substantive research of any kind, of a small group of skeptics as if their positions represented a dominant perspective on the medical science of the cigarette. In this sense, the public relations campaign advantaged two critical pieces of mid-century media practice. First, journalists' favorite reporting on controversy. Second, by providing opposing positions as if they were equal, they affirmed their commitment to balance. Yeah, that's right, baby. That's right,

baby. Fuck's sake. Why? Piss off. No, they've invented both sides in it. They did invent both sides in it. They gave us Donald Trump. They gave us climate change denial. They gave us a fucking lot of the gun industries. Barry Weiss. Barry Weiss. All of that shit comes from Big Tobacco. They gave us the fucking Iraq war. All of these strategies are the things that they pioneered all of those strategies. That's where we're going to end for the day, James. Yeah. Let's stop. I've become enraged. We will talk in more detail about the tobacco industry later. There's a bigger story in how they kept this up as it became increasingly obvious that cigarettes caused cancer and how they advertised to children in the 90s and stuff and Joe Camel.

There's a story in how they tried to destroy the lives of people who blew the whistle on them, like former tobacco employees. We'll talk about all of those one day, but this is the story of how tobacco invented everything in the modern world. Yeah, great. I feel really good about all the things that we've got from it. It's cool that you can tie Funko Pops climate change denial in the Iraq war all to trying to get people to smoke. Yes. It's really great and capitalism has done us nothing but good. Yeah. Pokemon and medical patents all have cigarettes to thank. Yeah, God. Yeah, it's just unfathomable. It's terrible. It's fucking awful. It's the nature of the system we live in. Maybe change it. It's the nature of the system we live in in part because

of cigarettes. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Good. Maybe consider a different system. Yeah. Maybe consider a system in which it's not possible to do this. Well, the good thing is, Robert, that none of these issues are tied to vaping, which is fine and totally, totally normal and good. And therefore, you should just get a fruit loop vape. Yeah. Get a flavored vape, you know, buy some of that. I don't know. What else? What other drugs do kids like to do today? Get some of that. Get some of that flavored fentanyl. Tide pods. Mix your fentanyl and your tide pods together, kids. Yeah. A good one. That's doing that on taking the talk right now from what I understand. Yeah. Yeah. Tick tock and everything that probably doesn't have consequences.

Is there anything you'd like to plug? Apart from tide pods. Yeah. Let me think again. We talked about a podcast. I've written a book. It's called The Popular Front and the 1936 Barcelona Olympics. You can probably find it at the library, then you won't be helping to create the system, which gave us, you know, Pokemon cards and everyone having cancer. And yeah, you can find me on Twitter. It's just my name, James, like, bomb stat like the beer. Well, that's all. Anarchism is the other thing I always like to plug on podcasts. So maybe yeah, re-cropokin. And we're doing it. It could happen here at live stream virtual show on October 26. Yeah, motherfuckers. Yep. So pick up a pack of lucky strikes. I want to see all of you beautiful people smoking when

we do our live show. Just just really burn them down. Nothing raises the value of a house faster than smoking cigarettes at it. Yeah, bring go back to return to tradition by sticking two cigarettes up, you know, smoking them that way. Yeah, smoke your cigarettes the traditional way. Anyways, yeah. Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt.

I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the

world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.