Collection: More Doctors Smoke Camels
tobacco.stanford.edu
tobacco.stanford.edu
It was a different time and people genuinely did not know the harms of smoking like we do now, but this would be wrong to a caveman from 10000 BC
Ethical standards are exactly the same, it’s regulation that is very different, let’s not give credit to corporations that they absolutely not deserve
These days, they are very adamant that tobacco is a big factor.
Also, I believe that a lot of stress research (the one that created the "Type A personality") was funded by the tobacco industry.
Not that different.
> and people genuinely did not know the harms of smoking like we do now
The tobacco companies knew very well. IIRC, the medical community kinda-sorta knew and kinda-sorta suppressed the knowledge.
My grandmother (born in 1928, started smoking at 13) said that, growing up, people casually referred to cigarettes as "cancer sticks".
If this ad campaign was mostly run in women's magazines, that supports the same hypothesis - presumably camel was running a different message to advertise toward men.
But I'm not actually able to tell from the pictures which magazine the ad ran in - am I missing that somewhere?
https://tobacco.stanford.edu/cigarettes/light-super-ultra-li...
https://www.mccormickfona.com/articles/2014/12/purchasing-po...
This example magazine has a number of single page ads with a good bit of copy in them. I'm trying to find an example magazine with those multi-page ads at the moment though.
I often think about how so many things now have been optimized (mostly for profit) to the extreme by data-driven processes, with big corporate marketing certainly being one of them.
Up until two or three decades ago, I suspect that it was all based on tradition and the "gut feel" of out-of-touch and arrogant executives talking to each other over drinks (thinking of scenes from Mad Men here).
Yes. Sometimes it was a deliberate tactic - mostly adverts would go for the 'just an evocative picture', but a few would go the 'wall of text' route. My memory pops up the name Alan Sugar for an example of those - really dense walls ...
When I was a child magazines were still very popular and I would not rest until every last millimeter of each one was examined in detail multiple times.
[2] https://archive.org/details/OTRR_Certified_Abbot_and_Costell...
> Take this one: "27 percent of a large sample of eminent physicians smoke Throaties--more than any other brand." The figure itself may be phony, of course, in any of several ways, but that really doesn't make any difference. The only answer to a figure so irrelevant is "So what?" With all proper respect toward the medical profession, do doctors know any more about tobacco brands than you do? Do they have any inside information that permits them to choose the least harmful among cigarettes? Of course they don't, and your doctor would be the first to say so. Yet that "27 percent" somehow manages to sound as if it meant something.
That book specifies many other examples (from this time period in America) of misleading claims that sound statistically significant upon an uncritical, cursory reading.
More generally I'm all for evidence showing what's healthy - eat some fruit and vegetables occasionally, get some exercise, don't smoke, don't drink - but I don't think any of these things are mysterious. Generally people have a good handle on what's good and what's bad for them. Now, they don't always do it but that's less to do with evidence then people seem to commonly suppose.
Hard disagree, the cultural norms play a huge role and the changes are slow. I'm like 95% sure the unabated addiction to social media so prevalent nowadays will be regarded similarly to how smoking and drinking is seen now.
We should be really extrapolating what we know about tobacco now and the things they claimed in the past towards currently relevant issues e.g. "Facebook papers"-type materials.
This isn't true—people had been connecting the dots for a few decades by the time these ads were running [0], and right around the start of the run (1940) was when strong evidence was starting to get published:
> Scholars started noting the parallel rise in cigarette consumption and lung cancer, and by the 1930s had begun to investigate this relationship using the methods of case-control epidemiology. Franz Hermann Müller at Cologne Hospital in 1939 published the first such study, comparing 86 lung cancer ‘cases’ and a similar number of cancer-free controls. Müller was able to show that people with lung cancer were far more likely than non-cancer controls to have smoked, a fact confirmed by Eberhard Schairer and Eric Schöniger at the University of Jena in an even more ambitious study from 1943. These German results were subsequently verified and amplified by UK and American scholars: in 1950 alone, five separate epidemiological studies were published, including papers by Ernst Wynder and Evarts Graham in the USA and Richard Doll and A Bradford Hill in England. All confirmed this growing suspicion, that smokers of cigarettes were far more likely to contract lung cancer than non-smokers.
So it's less a case of people intuiting what was bad for them and more a case of the industry trying (and for a few decades succeeding) to get ahead of a growing scientific consensus by advertising it into irrelevance.
People obviously knew smoking was unhealthy, but chose to do so anyhow. And companies naturally worked to trt to strengthen that cognitive dissonance. Same thing today, but it's slightly more subtle. For instance in a typical Coke ad you'll generally see people that look nothing like regular Coke drinkers - health, fitness, and good body weights abounds.
Ronaldo's Coke/water moment gave me a vast amount of respect for him - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x2ZLS1V3iMw&pp=ygUbUm9uYWxkbyd... It's how the sort of people Coke gets to pose with their product actually feel about it.
There was another ad where they put quotes from tobacco farmers that said "nobody pays more for my tobacco than..."
I knew the first cigarette I smoked was a cancer causing terrible idea.
The reason I did was because I was young and most other people I knew were doing the same thing. Same with social media.
[0] https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruse...
During the early 90s, RJ Reynolds had a promotion called "Camel Cash", where each pack of cigarettes came with a coupon that could be redeemed for Camel merch (tshirts, beach towels, etc.) Our car was covered in cigarette ash, a vaguely sticky layer of tar, and stacks and stacks of Camel Cash. Most of the instrument cluster was obscured by Camel Cash stacked in front of it. We were Camel Cash millionaires.
If memory serves, cigarette packs were priced fairly close to each other. They were implying they did not skimp on the quality of the source product (unlike the other brands' thieving profiteers ;-)
T is for Taste ... T is fore Throat
Just wow.
People often interpret the "I don't trust X" statement to be "belief in the opposite", i.e. P(¬A|X_A) = 1. This is obviously stupid since someone you distrust could happily manufacture evidence for ¬A and then you'd conclude P(¬¬A|X_¬A) = 1 so they could make you believe anything, which is obviously not something you want someone you distrust to do to you.
Anyhow, almost everybody knows today that, for example, eating too much sugar is bad for you, but the majority of the population still does it. That's how humans behave. Often times people do something because it's bad, taboo, or dangerous. And not everybody centers their lifestyle around good health; some people are just trying to get through the day. Today we still have doctors who smoke, dentists who drink soda, etc, though those particular vices are less popular than they once were. And let's not forget, while cigarette smoking has been in free fall doctors have been happily handing out prescriptions to smoke marijuana, even though inhaling marijuana smoke is at least as harmful as cigarettes (most people smoke it less frequently, but that's beside the point). Just because something is accepted as normal doesn't mean the harms are being outright denied.
Although generally the US just has bad tobacco habits. 'European' style smoking of a cigarette with coffee a couple times a week likely will kill you slower than whatever was going to get you like cooking and eating smoky grilled meats.
what else would you suggest?
edit: because i'm being rate-limited for some reason (thanks mods), i'm refering to stuff like this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210402002315/https://www.msnbc...
> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
Hey, the media, the CDC, "the science" says that if you're vaccinated, you're safe, you won't infect your immunocompromised grandma, you won't get sick, you won't spread covid. I mean... don't be a skeptic, "trust" them.
Or you can say "even if you're vaccinated, you'll still get covid and still infect grandma", and be censored from most platforms" (back then).
you don't get to point to Facebook posts by uncle Rob who reposts crackpot ideas 24/7 and call that "a controversy". there is such a thing as being wrong.
Not "be skeptical, verify, repeat, etc.", but "trust".... you shouldn't have to blidndly trust science, that's reserved for nutjobs speaking to god by yelling into a hat, where there's no way to verify.
Many people also got vaccinated because the science mentioned 94% (or whatever) effciveness against covid infections, about preventing spread, and guess what, trusting that killed immunocompromised grandma too.
This is the sort of stuff that I was referring to above. It sounds shocking and plausible, but at the end of the day, if you flatly ask someone "would you like a 10% chance to die from covid (being a grandma), or would you like (some lower %) chance to die to prevent it", then why not try?
For a while, this was what those around me were saying. It was much, much later that covid itself was associated with even more myocarditis than the vaccine.
for values of "unknown chance" well under 1 in 100,000. you sound like the same kind of American who prefers the quarter pounder to the third pounder because 4 > 3.
get your head out of your arse.
> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
...and the visit grandma, who cannot get vaccinated (immunocompromised), because you're vaccinated, and don't carry the virus and don't get sick?
Or are you one of those 'conspiracy theorists' who say "the vaccinated are carrying the virus, even if you're vaccinated, you'll still get sick and kill grandma"?
that's because you don't have the skills for it. you can't even deal with poor reporting, but you want to verify/repeat?
did you also let your kids operate the oven before they could walk?
And what skills do I need? "The science" was literally changing every few days.
Trust us, vaccinated pople don't carry the virus.
And then a few months later "whoops".
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fact-checkoutdated-vid...
> In the clip, Dr Fauci says “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”
Trust us, there's no reason to be walking around with a mask.
And then a few weeks later, again "trust us, you need a mask".
To simplify for you, you can trust yor girlfriend (boyfriend, whatver), but after s/he cheats on you multiple times and changes her(his) story the same amount of times, the trust is lost.
the world's sum total knowledge about the virus was changing from day to day - what did you want - stone tablets and burning bushes?
the mask message made sense: they were very clear, that in the early stages, it didn't make sense for everybody to wear them (community transmission was still low) and deprive medical personnel who needed them desperately (they were far more likely to encounter the virus for reasons I hope you are smart enough to figure out for yourself - but shout out and I'll try to explain further if it's not clear).
later on when community transmission was high and we had much larger supplies of masks, it made sense for more people to wear them, because then it would make a difference to the total transmission.
it seems that you just wanted an all knowing parental figure to tell you what to do and never change their opinion - that's not how real life works. in the adult world, when new information becomes available, or the situation changes, the rules can be changed. this isn't church.
and yes, even the chief of the cdc can be wrong, speak wrong, make mistakes, or get a message across poorly trying to produce short and snappy soundbites that the likes of you have a chance of remembering. but the underlying message wasn't wrong, it was correct based on available evidence at the time. it was a stressful situation and they probably didn't get much sleep for several months.
The first mask message was that you don't need a mask. If you then censor and ban everyone who says "don't listen to fauci, buy a mask", and a few weeks later ban everyone who says "listen to fauci's statement two weeks ago, you don't need a mask", who's left then? If the "science changed", then the people not trusting the first "truth" were correct in not trusting it. But we censored them and called them idiots for buying and wearing masks, before the 'science changed'. They didn't trust fauci and the science, and had masks, the ones who trusted, didn't.
People literally died, that could have been saved by wearing a mask before mask mandates. Also people died because they trusted the vaccines, and killed other people, because they trusted the vaccines wold prevent spread. If you trusted the CDC director and visited grandma, you might have killed her. If you didnt trust the effectiveness of vaccines, you didn't visit her, and she could be still alive.
We had 4 types of vaccines in my country, astrazeneca, j&j, moderna and pfizer. All of them were "safe and effective". Then astrazeneca was pulled out, because of heart issues, but the other three were safe and effective. Then j&j was pulled out. Then moderna. In my country (~2mio pop), we had 5 deaths with(!) covid in the sub 35yo group (with the wonky counting of deaths), which is less than suicide deaths, overdoses, etc. Also 1 vaccine death ( https://www.gov.si/en/news/2021-11-30-expert-commission-conf... )
Look, I know what you're trying to say, scientists know what they're doing, but i'm pointing out that "trust" is not the right word to be used with science. Church? Sure, trust someone with some imaginary friend, because more than trust is impossible. But with science (as you said "total knowledge about the virus was changing from day to day"), you cannot call people to 'trust' it, because (again, as you said yourself), the science was wrong and "changed" and trust is broken.
Also "hey, we lied to you before, because we were incompetent at buying masks for medcical workers, so we instead chose to risk your life instead" is a stupid argument. This is how you lose what little is left of "trust" in those authorities.
TLDR: if you trust, you're stuck with stone tablets and burning bushes (well, leeches and smoke enemas in case of medical treatments). Only with distrust can science go forwards. If we banned all the smoke-enema skeptics back then, we'd never more onwards from there.
Firstly, nobody in the medical establishment nor government told anybody they were idiots for wearing a mask. They said masks were not necessary. Nobody censored them, you are getting your timelines confused. You should talk to a medical professional about that. The people whose comments had a "fact check" added were the ones saying you shouldn't wear a mask when it became important to wear one.
I think I can see where you're struggling. It's likely you are too stupid to understand it, but I'm feeling generous, so I'm going to try anyway. Early on in a pandemic, if you have 300M people, and 1% have the virus, and 1% of that shows symptoms and go to the hospital, you have 30,000 people showing up at hospitals with the potential to infect say 10 medical personel they come into contact each - so you need fully 300,000 masks being worn by the professionals. If the national supply of masks is 500,000, then it makes no sense for the whole population to wear them. The individual non-medical person is very unlikely to come across an infected person during their day, while the doctors desperately need them to be able to keep helping those who need it. Does that make sense?
Once there is community transmission, and 20% of the population has the virus, then the average person has a much higher probability of coming across the virus and getting infected - this was also much later in the pandemic, so the supply of masks was much higher. Then it makes sense for everybody to wear them, and cunts like you who then went around pulling them off people's faces put them at risk. Do you get it?
There is a very big difference here, and I really hope you get it this time, I have tried really hard to explain it.
> But for science to change, you must NOT trust existing science. The opposite of what 'the science' was telling people to do - "trust science".
Who's "you"? You? No, you're a dumb idiot. It's not about not trusting - it's about knowing that new information could justify a change in policy and not trying to hide it. This isn't the republican convention or the catholic church trying to hide criminal evidence - it's about accepting that new information can and should change your mind.
> People literally died, that could have been saved by wearing a mask before mask mandates.
I think you're full of shit. Nobody was stopped from wearing a mask if they wanted. The message was that there was no need for the general population to wear them and deprive the doctors who did absolutely need them. People with compromised immune systems were told early on to avoid crowds, to take precautions, etc. I suspect a very small number of people died from that. If you think it's a significant population, that's on you to provide evidence.
> Also people died because they trusted the vaccines,
This one is very well documented - a minuscule number of people died from the vaccines, and they had conditions that would have killed them if they got the actual virus anyway. It wasn't a vaccine specific issue.
> and killed other people, because they trusted the vaccines wold prevent spread. If you trusted the CDC director and visited grandma, you might have killed her. If you didnt trust the effectiveness of vaccines, you didn't visit her, and she could be still alive.
Again, I think you are full of shit. The people who decided to visit and kill grandma were specifically those who didn't give a shit about anybody but themselves, and were doing it anyway. They weren't likely to have been vaccinated in the first place.
> We had 4 types of vaccines in my country, astrazeneca, j&j, moderna and pfizer. All of them were "safe and effective". Then astrazeneca was pulled out, because of heart issues, but the other three were safe and effective. Then j&j was pulled out. Then moderna. In my country (~2mio pop), we had 5 deaths with(!) covid in the sub 35yo group (with the wonky counting of deaths), which is less than suicide deaths, overdoses, etc
They weren't pulled out because of heart issues, they were replaced by newer versions for the new variants. Pull your head out of your arse for once.
> Look, I know what you're trying to say, scientists know what they're doing, but i'm pointing out that "trust" is not the right word to be used with science. Church? Sure, trust someone with some imaginary friend, because more than trust is impossible. But with science (as you said "total knowledge about the virus was changing from day to day"), you cannot call people to 'trust' it, because (again, as you said yourself), the science was wrong and "changed" and trust is broken.
The word you're thinking about is faith. You want unshakable faith in the word of the great leader - you're not going to find peace that way.
to my knowledge, this is not what the science said. the science always said "if youre vaccinated, you are less likely to experience severe covid symptoms"
Meanwhile, actual science, medical practitioners, have been clear for many decades that vaccines reduce infection and transmission rates, etc.
Vaccines didn't "cure Polio" in any absolute sense, but they did make it possible to suppress it until it no longer appeared "in the wild" .. until it came back again.
Questionable.
> and that's still true when they tell you what they're saying is "the science".
Ditto "the earth is flat", "they are eating the cats", "it was a lab leak", .. etc.
These are opinions not science.
It is certainly arguable that the American style is to extreme on the freedom side. There is little punishment for the immense amount of malicious lying by too many actors in the system
Journalists are not scientists, and they are especially not scientists, and they do not have the foundation and fundamentals necessary to evaluate whether a paper backs up what a university PR department tells them to publish.
The wealth of human knowledge is insanely vast, and basically infinitely recursive. A scientist in one tiny niche of physics can barely evaluate the papers of a scientist in another tiny niche of physics. Most niches in most sciences can't even fill an auditorium with experts.
The most important thing to know in science is that if you are not reading the actual paper, you aren't getting scientific information but rather someone's interpretation and marketing copy. The second most important thing to know is that if you haven't written a scientific paper in the same domain, you will likely struggle to accurately interpret the results of one.
When everyone was freaking out over LK-99, none of the losers on here or twitter were able to accurately assess the situation, and plenty of people outright bought the lies of that russian furry who claimed to be able to reproduce it, despite any evidence. It took actual domain experts, who were always emphatic that it didn't have good enough evidence to get too excited.
There was a similar situation during the "Cold Fusion" nonsense in 1989. A couple chemists did some mediocre science and went on a PR tour with their "findings", quite literally saying their data was unquestionable and the rest of science needed to adapt their theories to the cold fusion data, which meanwhile was unpublished. These two fairly well trained and practiced scientists went and asked congress for something like $25 million on next to no data. An entire conference of Chemists cheered for them and their "findings". The findings were always invalid. Their experiments never generated the kinds of products you would expect from fusing deuterium.
If even a room full of trained chemists cannot evaluate other chemists making downright basic errors in their research, how can we possibly expect average people with no scientific experience to keep up?
Consider that, if you pay someone to say something as a "testimonial", you can say basically whatever you want and face no legal consequences. It shouldn't be the job of the average consumer to take corps to court for selling shit based on lies, yet it is.
Don't fotget about "accidents" that spread Polio by vaccination on 120000 children, like Cutter incident.
For many values of 'this' in the medical domain, yes.
> Don't fotget about "accidents" that spread Polio by vaccination
Err, the Cutter incident spread Polio via live polio virus rather than by Polio vaccination.
Absolutely an example of a serious and deadly Quality Control f*ckup that led to a complete change in how vaccine production was approached.
are you questioning the link between vaccines and polio almost entirely disappearing from all but about 4 countries on the planet?
what alternative "theory" do you have in this case?
99% polio cases are nowadays in developing countries.
This quote is literally from the director of the CDC (source in comment above). I mean.. who better to 'trust'?
Which peer reviewed paper was that quote sourced from? Which medical conference lecture was that statement made in?
Oh, it was from a regular simplified human to human conversation in which the CDC director was indicating a comparitive result?
WRT ppm's etc was that an accurate call of magnitude of difference in outcomes at that time?
Don't be a skeptic now, trust the science. If we can't trust the director of the CDC, who can we trust? Some rando on youtube saying that vaccines won't protect you from getting and spreading covid? Oh wait.. we banned those people from pretty much every social network, and guess what, they were correct.
Come on.. be fair.. like really... if we were discussing this in the spring of 2021, and that interview was just on tv, and i said:
> "well, she said that vaccinated people won't get sick, won't carry the virus, but i think that she's wrong, she didn't say stuff correctly, vaccinated people will still massively get sick and also carry and spread the virus, her 'real world data' is bullshit, i want to see her sources, she's lying without those"
...what would you tell me? Would you say "yes, you're correct, it was just a human-to-human conversation, it was simplified, there's no data that her sentance is correct, there's no proof of what she said,..."? Or would you just call me an antivaxer?
did I cover everything?
What exactly didn't I understand?
https://web.archive.org/web/20210402002315/https://www.msnbc... <- full transcript, just in case
quote:
> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
What exactly is misunderstood, taken out of context and misrepresented here?
The skeptics, who didn't trust the science, didn't trust the "do not carry the virus, don't get sick,..." quote, were right again.
I'm not saying that everyone is always wrong, i'm saying that you should blindly trust someone, because of science. Especially if they were incorrect previously. Remember the calculations of how many more vaccinations and infections are needed to reach herd immunity? Well... good luck with trusting that science too.
NOT trusting is the basis of all science, even if people don't trust the things you don't want to hear.... and especially if it turns out that they were correct. Blocking/banning/censoring those people is the same as banning non-believers in smoke smoke enemas 200 years ago.
The difference between casual human conversation on a late night panel show and the strict precise statements in actual papers.
The educated with real world exposure to weed eradication, stock control,. past use of vaccines, etc didn't take the "do not carry the virus, don't get sick,..." absolutely literally as if it was deified bible quote either.
They heard that as saying given the data to hand right now (context) that data suggests (qualifier) that the vaccinated aren't carrying the virus nor getting sick (in contrast to those unvaccinated .. as in there is a visible stark difference).
A chat on a late panel show IS NOT "the science" and a paper on the stats coming back from trials would use actual percents, p-values, etc and make it clear.
Conclusion: science is a lie.