Cigarettes Not Addictive? Or Cancer-Causing? Uh-Huh
Broccoli and tobacco, two of our most controversial plants, were in the news again last week. I don’t know which is more disgusting.
On the veggie front, medical researchers at Johns Hopkins University announced that a compound in broccoli blocks the growth of tumors in rats exposed to a carcinogen.
Too bad for our broccoli-hating former President, I thought. Or maybe not, since all your cruciferous veggies do the job--your cauliflower, your Brussels sprouts, your cabbage.
But good news for people at high-risk of developing cancer.
On the tobacco front, the chief executives of seven American tobacco companies were hauled before a testy, virulently anti-smoking Rep. Henry Waxman and his House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health and the environment in Washington, D.C. They came to answer questions about whether nicotine is added to cigarettes to ensure the continuing patronage of smokers through addiction. (Of course not! said the Marlboro Men, who said they sometimes blend higher-nicotine with lower-nicotine tobacco, but only for flavor. )
My world view has always been this: Broccoli is good for you. Tobacco is bad.
I have felt confident in this, certain that no new scientific evidence would turn up any time soon contradicting the broccoli-tobacco dichotomy.
And none has, despite the slick, all-out efforts of the Cigarette Seven.
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Waxman was hellbent--as only a politician on the popular side of a public-policy debate can be--on getting the tobacco men to admit that the business in which they are engaged is nefarious, dangerous, sneaky . . . and may even result in bad breath. (OK, I made up that last part.)
The tobacco men were not about to go down without a fight.
For entertainment value, the hearing didn’t have the feel-good potential of, say, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” but it was a whole lot funnier in a darkly comic way. More John Waters than Walt Disney.
When Waxman asked the CEOs one by one whether they believe cigarettes to be addictive, the answers were predictable: Seven little ix - nays all in a row.
Now, many of us have some experience with cigarettes and addiction.
Even more of us are familiar with the dynamics of the coping phenomenon known as denial.
Denial is when your kid tells you that the birth control pills/crack pipe/marijuana you found in her drawer belong to her best friend . . . and you believe her.
Denial is when your husband comes home stinking drunk, sporting lipstick on his collar, and tells you that he must have brushed up against someone in an elevator . . . and you believe him.
Denial is when seven grown men sit in front of a congressional panel and tell the American people that they do not believe cigarettes cause lung cancer or emphysema, although they would all prefer that their children not smoke.
Denial is when the president of U.S. Tobacco, Joseph Taddeo, is told that people who use snuff are 50 times more likely to develop oral cancer than people who do not, and moments later, with a straight face, states: “Oral tobacco has not been established as a cause of mouth cancer.”
And the moon, as studies funded by the tobacco industry have shown, is made of green cheese.
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Other unsavory bits of information floated out of last week’s hearings like someone else’s ashes drifting onto your plate.
The head of R.J. Reynolds, James Johnston, said he was very sorry for the Joe Camel ad that proposed a way for young men to meet potential love interests: Drag women swimmers from the water, pretending to think the women are drowning.
“It was offensive,” Johnston said. “It was stupid. We do make mistakes.”
How many mistakes? Oh, lots. . . .
The head of Philip Morris U.S.A., maker of Marlboro, testified that he had blocked publication of a company study supporting the contention that nicotine is addictive.
An executive from Lorillard Tobacco Co., maker of True, Kent and Newport, disclosed that he recently gave Congress bafflingly incorrect data. In March, he told the very same subcommittee that the nicotine levels in cigarettes had dropped 10% since 1982. Last week, he admitted that he had erred, and that nicotine levels had actually risen by more than 10% since 1982. How did the error occur? “I don’t know,” he replied, scientifically.
But for the fact that denial is such a potent survival tool--and they are fighting for survival--one is sorely tempted to call the tobacco executives, oh, disingenuous.
“Every time a kid lights up, we get blamed,” sniffed Donald Johnson, head of American Tobacco Co., which makes Lucky Strike, Pall Mall and Tareyton.
Tobacco industry officials, who said last week that cigarette additives include ammonia and insecticide--but, incredibly, not broccoli--want to protect children, not harm them. Johnston of R.J. Reynolds pointed out that if cigarettes are banned on the grounds they are too dangerous to be sold, “People will be selling cigarettes out of the trunks of cars, cigarettes made by who knows who, made of who knows what.”
Back-alley cigarettes. For someone else’s kids.
