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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.

ObjectiveTo investigate how and why Japan Tobacco, Inc. (JT) in 1986 established the Smoking Research Foundation (SRF), a research-funding institution, and to explore the extent to which SRF has influenced science and health policy in Japan.MethodsWe analysed documents in the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents archive, along with recent Japanese litigation documents and published documents.ResultsJT’s effort to combat effective tobacco control was strengthened in the mid-1980s, following privatisation of the company. While remaining under the protection of Japan’s Ministry of Finance, the semiprivatised company lost its ‘access to politicos’, opening up a perceived need for collaboration with global cigarette makers. One solution, arrived at through clandestine planning with American companies, was to establish a third-party organisation, SRF, with the hope of capturing scientific and medical authority for the industry. Guarded by powerful people in government and academia, SRF was launched with the covert goal of influencing tobacco policy both inside and outside Japan. Scholars funded by SRF have participated in international conferences, national advisory committees and tobacco litigation, in most instances helping the industry to maintain a favourable climate for the continued sale of cigarettes.ConclusionsContrary to industry claims, SRF was never meant to be independent or neutral. With active support from foreign cigarette manufacturers, SRF represents the expansion into Asia of the denialist campaign that began in the USA in 1953.

Tobacco is the world's single most avoidable cause of death. The World Health Organization has calculated that the 5.6 trillion cigarettes smoked per year at the close of the twentieth century will cause nearly 10 million fatalities per year by 2030. Lung cancer is the most common tobacco-related cause of cancer mortality, with one case being produced for every 3 million cigarettes smoked. How was the global lung cancer epidemic recognized, and what can we expect in the future?

Robert Proctor e Ian Bolin acuñaron el término agnotología para designar el estudio de la ignorancia. Este escrito propone superar la visión de la ignorancia como un vacío que puede ser llenado por el conocimiento e invita a pensar en las formas en que hoy se produce, en forma premeditada y estructural: por negligencia, miopía, secreto o supresión. El autor muestra que la creación deliberada de la ignorancia es una estrategia para engañar y sembrar dudas sobre los hechos observados y sobre el conocimiento científico, tomando como ejemplos el papel de los secretos comerciales, la actividad de las tabacaleras para negar la relación causal entre el consumo de cigarrillos y el cáncer y el papel del secreto militar. Por último analiza algunos casos en que la ignorancia es una expresión de valores morales, como la prohibición, en algunas universidades, de investigaciones cuyo único fin es el afán de lucro y, en algunas revistas científicas, de publicar trabajos financiados por ciertas fuentes, así como el rechazo de ciertas tecnologías por razones intelectuales y morales bien fundadas.

The cigarette is the deadliest artefact in the history of human civilisation. Most of the richer countries of the globe, however, are making progress in reducing both smoking rates and overall consumption. Many different methods have been proposed to steepen this downward slope, including increased taxation, bans on advertising, promotion of cessation, and expansion of smoke-free spaces. One option that deserves more attention is the enactment of local or national bans on the sale of cigarettes. There are precedents: 15 US states enacted bans on the sale of cigarettes from 1890 to 1927, for instance, and such laws are still fully within the power of local communities and state governments. Apart from reducing human suffering, abolishing the sale of cigarettes would result in savings in the realm of healthcare costs, increased labour productivity, lessened harms from fires, reduced consumption of scarce physical resources, and a smaller global carbon footprint. Abolition would also put a halt to one of the principal sources of corruption in modern civilisation, and would effectively eliminate one of the historical forces behind global warming denial and environmental obfuscation. The primary reason for abolition, however, is that smokers themselves dislike the fact they smoke. Smoking is not a recreational drug, and abolishing cigarettes would therefore enlarge rather than restrict human liberties. Abolition would also help cigarette makers fulfil their repeated promises to ‘cease production’ if cigarettes were ever found to be causing harm.

ObjectiveTo use methods from computational linguistics to identify differences in the rhetorical strategies deployed by defence versus plaintiffs’ lawyers in cigarette litigation.MethodsFrom 318 closing arguments in 159 Engle progeny trials (2008–2016) archived in the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents, we calculated frequency scores and Mann-Whitney Rho scores of plaintiffs versus defence corpora to discover ‘tropes’ (terms used disproportionately by one side) and ‘taboos’ (terms scrupulously avoided by one side or the other).ResultsDefence attorneys seek to place the smoker on trial, using his or her friends and family members to demonstrate that he or she must have been fully aware of the harms caused by smoking. We show that ‘free choice,’ ‘common knowledge’ and ‘personal responsibility’ remain key strategies in cigarette litigation, but algorithmic analysis allows us to understand how such strategies can be deployed without actually using these expressions. Industry attorneys rarely mention personal responsibility, for example, but invoke that concept indirectly, by talking about ‘decisions’ made by the individual smoker and ‘risks’ they assumed.ConclusionsQuantitative analysis can reveal heretofore hidden patterns in courtroom rhetoric, including the weaponisation of pronouns and the systematic avoidance of certain terms, such as ‘profits’ or ‘customer.’ While cigarette makers use words that focus on the individual smoker, attorneys for the plaintiffs refocus agency onto the industry. We show how even seemingly trivial parts of speech—like pronouns—along with references to family members or words like ‘truth’ and ‘facts’ have been weaponised for use in litigation.

As public health advocates struggle over how best to end the cigarette epidemic, one persistent obstacle to developing appropriate policies has been the lingering spectre of ‘prohibition’. A misunderstanding of the USA’s experience with the national ban on sales of alcohol more than a century ago has led even public health advocates to claim that we cannot end the sale of cigarettes because ‘prohibition does not work’: a ban on sales, we hear, would lead to crime and to black markets, among many other negatives. In this Special Communication, we show how the tobacco industry has carefully constructed and reinforced this imagined impossibility, creating a false analogy between cigarettes and alcohol. This improper analogy, with its multiple negative associations, continues to block intelligent thinking about how to end cigarette sales. Instead of prohibition, we propose abolition as a term that better captures what ending sales of the single most deadly consumer product in history will actually do: enhance human health and freedom.

Correspondence to Dr Robert N Proctor, Department of History, Stanford University, Bldg 200, Stanford, California 94305, USA; rproctor@stanford.edu On 28 July 2017, US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Chief Scott Gottlieb, MD, announced a bold new plan to limit the nicotine allowed in manufactured cigarettes.1 Gottlieb, a Trump appointee revealing C Everett Koop-like potential, pointed out that cigarettes remain the leading preventable cause of death in the USA, killing nearly half a million Americans every year.2 But of course it is the nicotine in cigarettes—kept above some crucial level and potency—that keeps people smoking and ultimately leads to disease, death and the suffering of families. Gottlieb’s announcement caused a panic on Wall Street, where cigarette stocks took a plunge not seen for decades. Altria’s market value was briefly down nearly 20%, and other cigarette makers suffered significant losses. The decade-long conspiracy that continues even today in certain respects was privately described in the industry’s own documents as a ‘holding strategy’.6 For decades the companies have known that while cigarettes are ultimately a lost cause, every year they can delay the inevitable is billions more in profits and those ‘unattractive side effects’ they have been so willing to tolerate.

The fact is that cigarette use remains the world's leading preventable cause of death, killing roughly 6 million people every year. That number will stay high over the next couple of decades, as the toll of present habits is taken.