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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.
Price: $39.95
Pages: 774
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date:
28 February 2012
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520270169
Format: Hardcover
“Draws on previously confidential industry documents and Proctor’s own experience as the first historian to testify in court about [industry] lies. What lies? How deep into the pleural linings did they go? All the way.”
“Lays out in head-shaking detail how a handful of companies painstakingly designed, produced, and mass-marketed the most lethal product on the planet.”
“[A] monumental and sobering indictment.”
“Proctor documents a breadth and depth of the industry’s duplicitous actions that is astounding.”
“A nearly 800-page book that begins as the Bible of the twentieth-century cigarette industry only to end as its millennial counterblaste.”
— Joshua Cohen
“Proctor challenges his readers to conceptualize a much happier and healthier world in which the manufacture and sale of cigarettes is prohibited.”
“A landmark study in medicine and the history of science, and of an industry [Proctor] describes as ‘evil.’”
“Proctor’s extensive use of previously secret tobacco industry documents makes his case convincing, even compelling.”
— Katherine E. Kenny Sociology/Science Studies, University of California San Diego
“An invaluable reference for historians interested in the tobacco industry, health and medicine, or marketing in the twentieth century.”
— Karen Miller Russell, University of Georgia
“A comprehensive and devastating account of tobacco industry perfidy in promoting the sale of its deadly cigarettes.”
— Barron H. Lerner, New York University School of Medicine
“A historian’s testimony on his own terms. . . . Entertaining and hard-hitting.”
— Carol Benedict, Georgetown University
“A passionate work and not for the faint of heart.”
“Engaging, inexhaustible with information, and driven.”
"Proctor’s book will be of great interest . . . it debunks fraudulent industry claims past and present, provides credible arguments for banning cigarettes, and delineates steps to take before abolition is politically possible. . . . For historians, Proctor’s book particularly calls for serious conversation about ethics and best practices in our era of decreased public support of universities and rising dependence on corporate donors."
— Nan Enstad
Robert N. Proctor is Professor of the History of Science at Stanford University and author of Cancer Wars, Racial Hygiene, and The Nazi War on Cancer He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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
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