by CYNTHIA HAVEN
The holiday season is upon us, bringing eggnog, fruitcake, plenty of brandy – and a lot of stress. Time to take a break, light up, have a smoke, and postpone that “quit” pledge till 2012…
Stop! Consider this post a Public Service Announcement. My article from earlier this week, from a new book about smoking, is perhaps the best Christmas present I can give to the readers of The Book Haven:
The cigarette industry is not dying. It continues to reap unimaginable profits. It’s still winning lawsuits. And cigarettes still kill millions every year.
So says Stanford’s Robert Proctor, author of the new bombshell study, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, a book the tobacco industry tried to stop with subpoenas and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.
Proctor, the first historian to testify in court against the tobacco industry (in 1998), warns that the worst of the health catastrophe is still ahead of us: Thanks to the long-term effects of cigarettes, “If everyone stopped smoking today, there would still be millions of deaths a year for decades to come.”
“Low-tar” cigarettes? “Light” cigarettes? Better filters? Forget it, he said. They don’t work. Today’s cigarettes are deadlier even than those made 60 years ago, gram for gram.
Half the people who smoke will die from their habit. A surprising number will die from stroke and heart attacks, not cancer.
Moreover, he asks, “How many people know that tobacco is a major cause of blindness, baldness and bladder cancer, not to mention cataracts, ankle fractures, early onset menopause, ectopic pregnancy, spontaneous abortion and erectile dysfunction?”
Six trillion cigarettes are smoked every year – that’s 6,000,000,000,000. Proctor said that’s “enough to make a continuous chain from Earth to the sun and back, with enough left over for a couple of round trips to Mars.”
His 750-page book, a decade in the making, has already earned high praise, with terms like “a real page-turner,” “a must-read,” “the most important book on smoking in 50 years.”
“This book is a remarkable compendium of evil,” wrote Columbia’s David Rosner, an author of Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution. “It will keep you spinning from page one through the last. … It is the type of book that makes you wonder how, in God’s name, this could have happened.”
According to Donald Kennedy, Stanford president emeritus and former editor of the journal Science, the book “unpacks the sad history of an industrial fraud. [Proctor’s] tightly reasoned exploration touches on all topics on which the tobacco makers lied repeatedly to Congress and the public.”
The hefty book has not only won him accolades, but it’s personally cost Proctor $50,000 in legal fees to defend himself against the industry, which subpoenaed his email and unpublished manuscript.
According to an article in The Nation last year, Proctor is one of only two historians who currently testify on behalf of smokers injured by tobacco products; 50 have testified on behalf of the industry. Academics from virtually every discipline have been collaborating with the Marlboro Men – and made big money doing so.
Watch Robert Proctor talk about his book Golden Holocaust
Book Haven for more
via 3 Quarks Daily