Full Description
The cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization. It is also one of the most beguiling, thanks to more than a century of manipulation at the hands of tobacco industry chemists. In "Golden Holocaust", Robert N. Proctor draws on reams of formerly-secret industry documents to explore how the cigarette came to be the most widely-used drug on the planet, with six trillion sticks sold per year. He paints a harrowing picture of tobacco manufacturers conspiring to block the recognition of tobacco-cancer hazards, even as they ensnare legions of scientists and politicians in a web of denial. Proctor tells heretofore untold stories of fraud and subterfuge, and he makes the strongest case to date for a simple yet ambitious remedy: a ban on the manufacture and sale of cigarettes.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Prologue
Introduction: Who Knew What and When?
PART ONE. The Triumph of the Cigarette
1. The Flue-Curing Revolution
2. Matches and Mechanization
3. War Likes Tobacco, Tobacco Likes War
4. Taxation:The Second Addiction
5. Marketing Genius Unleashed
6. Sponsoring Sports to Sell Smoke
7. Parties, the Arts, and Extreme Expeditions
8. Clouding the Web: Tobacco 2.0
PART TWO. Discovering the Cancer Hazard
9. Early Experimental Carcinogenesis
10. Roffo's Foray and the Nazi Response
11. "Sold American": Tobacco-Friendly Research at the Medical College of Virginia
12. A Most Feared Document: Claude E. Teague's 1953 "Survey of Cancer Research"
13. "Silent Collaborators": Clandestine Cancer Research Financed by Tobacco via the Damon Runyon Fund
14. Ecusta's Experiments
15. Consensus, Hubris, and Duplicity
PART THREE. Conspiracy on a Grand Scale
16. The Council for tobacco Research: Distraction Research, Decoy Research, Filibuster Research
17. Agnotology in Action
18. Measuring Ignorance: The Impact of Industry Disinformation on Popular Knowledge of Tobacco Hazards
19. Filter Flimflam
20. The Grand Fraud of Ventilation
21. Crack Nicotine: Freebasing to Augment a Cigarette's "Kick"
22. The "Light Cigarette" Scam
23. Penetrating the Universities
24. Historians Join the Conspiracy
PART FOUR. Radiant Filth and Redemption
25. What's Actually in your Cigarette?
26. Radioactivity in Cigarette Smoke: "Three Mile Marlboro" and the Sleeping Giant
27. The Odd Business of Butts—and the Global Warming Wild Card
28. "Safer" Cigarettes?
29. Globalizing Death
30. What Must Be Done
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Lexicon of Tobacco Industry Jargon
Timeline of Global Tobacco Mergers and Acquisitions
Timeline of Tobacco Industry Diversification into Candy, Food, Alcohol, and Other Products
Acknowledgments
Index
