How War Made the Cigarette | Hacker News Reader

How War Made the Cigarette

newrepublic.com

71 pointsbenbreen11 comments

I had an elderly friend (now deceased) who grew up in Durham, NC, in the teens and twenties. He knew the Duke family.

He told me a fascinating story about how the Duke family gave some Union soldiers cigarettes when they were in North Carolina during the war. After the war was over, some of those soldiers wrote to the Dukes asking them to send more cigarettes. They were hooked, and the Dukes realized they had a big seller. According to my friend, it was the basis of their wealth and allowed them to expand into other areas. (Duke Power was founded by the same family, for example.)

Their company, American Tobacco, was also the target of some of the first big successful anti-monopoly actions by the federal government.

> The lessons of her book remain stunningly relevant today. We’re in the midst of revelations that the sugar industry similarly relied on advertising to distract consumers from its extreme addictiveness. In the NFL’s fights with former football players dying of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, the League hired the same lawyers, consultants, and lobbyists that Big Tobacco used. Cellphone companies have worked tirelessly to obscure evidence of the connection between cellular radiation and all manner of negative health impacts. Even with mass shootings a daily occurrence, the gun industry has lobbied its way out of any meaningful oversight. Most noxious of all, fossil fuel companies have relied on shoddy science, constant PR, and the deliberate dissemination of doubt to cover up the connection between oil and gas and climate change—a business decision that raised short-term profits but may have doomed our entire civilization.

One of these is not like the others...

Guns are highly regulated (insane number of hoops to jump through for anything commercial). The cell phone cancer link is tenuous at best. The whole paragraph is sloppy.

> The cell phone cancer link is tenuous at best.

That is the one I had in mind, but I wanted to see which one people pick out.

>Even with mass shootings a daily occurrence, the gun industry has lobbied its way out of any meaningful oversight.

As another posted has stated: guns are highly regulated. The conditions used to infer "mass shootings a daily occurrence" selects every event involving a firearm and at least 4 people regardless of their level of involvement.

This also discounts defensive gun use numbers.

Does anyone know how to respond to the cell radiation one? There is no established link, although theoretically the frequencies used could interact with biological molecules (mainly microwave frequencies and water) which makes it hard to refute.

>The National Toxicology Program (NTP) concluded in two final reports released Nov. 1 that there is clear evidence that male rats exposed to high levels of radio frequency radiation (RFR), like that used in 2G and 3G cell phones, developed cancerous heart tumors. There was also some evidence of tumors in the brain and adrenal gland of exposed male rats.

https://factor.niehs.nih.gov/2018/11/feature/1-feature-radia...

> The lowest exposure level used in the studies was equal to the maximum local tissue exposure currently allowed for cell phone use. This power level rarely occurs with typical usage patterns. The highest exposure level in the studies was four times higher than the maximum power level permitted for local tissues.

To that kind of person, being right or wrong is irrelevant. The same methods of lying, cheating and advertising are employed whether the public fear is irrational or spot-on. For example, you can find many crooked things done in support of global warming awareness. Across the board, whether they are right or wrong, the biggest thing in common between skeptics of the mainstream position (global warming skeptics, sugar-is-good-for-you skeptics, vaccine safety skeptics) is that they can all give you a long list of corporate tricks done to weaken their position - the point being, it doesn't matter if the evil corporation is right, they'll still use backhanded tactics to convince everyone of their point.

When I was in University I witnessed a strange sight: Half the student council running through the building, sitting down in a corner and holding a quick vote. The odd behavior was so that they could have a quorum without certain undesirable people who would vote the wrong way.

The common thread with these underhanded tactics is people feel the ends justify the means. The ones doing it for profit are far less scary to me than those doing it “for the global good”.

The other commenters mention guns, but surely you mean the cellular towers/radiation one?

I suspect the toll from cigarettes vastly outweighs that from all illegal drugs combined. The US government was pusher in chief.

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