Misinformation about smoking

Tobacco myths

Nature

The effects of smoking tobacco on human health are becoming startlingly clear. The reason for the long delay in recognising these health effects is in part due to the delay between starting smoking and the advent of health effects. The tobacco industry has been aware of these adverse health effects and has played them down over the years, even going to ellaborate lengths, providing counter-arguement scientific data, disputing prevailing scientific thinking, criticising anti-smoking lobbies and, through advertising and public media, presenting confusing and distorted information on the health effects of smoking.

Background

Four myths about the effects of smoking are, (1) that only heavy smoking is fatal, (2) that stopping smoking after many years has little effect, (3) that smoking only kills people in old age, and (4) that there are comparable causes of cancer.

The US agreement established in 1998 between state authorities and the tobacco manufacturing industry includes provision to address misinformation. The agreement aims to stop the conspiracy to hide research regarding smoking and health. It prohibits manufacturers from jointly contracting or conspiring to: limit information about the health hazards from the use of their products; limit or suppress research into smoking and health; and, limit or suppress research into the marketing or development of new products. It prohibits the industry from making any material misrepresentations regarding the health consequences of smoking.

Counter-claim

Industry double-talk notwithstanding, warnings about the health risks of smoking go back hundreds of years. James I, in his 1604 Counterblaste to Tobacco, called smoking "a custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs." In every generation, tobacco's opponents have echoed him, attributing a long list of maladies to smoking. Persuasive scientific evidence of tobacco's hazards, which began to emerge in the early 1930s, has received widespread attention since the '50s. Likewise, the difficulty of giving up the tobacco habit has been common knowledge for centuries. James I's lord chancellor, Sir Francis Bacon, observed, "In our times the use of tobacco is growing greatly and conquers men with a certain secret pleasure, so that those who have once become accustomed thereto can later hardly be restrained therefrom." The 17th-century polemicist Johann Michael Moscherosch called smokers "thralls to the tobacco fiend," while Cotton Mather dubbed them "Slaves to the pipe." Fagon, Louis XIV's court physician, described the tobacco habit as "a fatal, insatiable necessity - a permanent epilepsy."