Tobacco companies and marijuana proponents compared
Hopefully, one learns from previous mistakes. The parallels between then and now, are not easily dismissed.
Recently, the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment declared that marijuana smoke causes cancer. Whether that call came from a statistical evaluation or hard science, we should be able to extrapolate from tobacco’s history how big a mistake adding another toxic drug to those already legal would cost society.
Can you recall the unethical tactics tobacco companies used or have you been told? Is the same thing going on with marijuana proponents?
In 1964 the Surgeon General, Dr. Luther L. Terry, issued a report stating that cigarette smoking was the primary cause of lung cancer. The 1971 book “Cigarette Country”, written by Susan Wagner, documented how the tobacco industry and the media worked together to discredit the surgeon general’s report and keep the public in the dark.
This same phenomenon is going on today with illicit drugs, particularly with marijuana and ecstasy, the two drugs favored by the media.
In 1968 Free lance writer Stanley Frank wrote an article for True Magazine entitled “To Smoke or Not to Smoke — that Is Still the Question,” which concluded that the “hazards of cigarette smoking may not be so real as we have been led to believe”(1) and that “Statistics alone link cigarettes with lung cancer, a correlation that is not accepted as scientific proof of the cause and effect.”
He stated further that “…there is absolutely no proof that smoking causes human cancer.” (2).
A few months later another article “Cigarette Cancer Link Is Bunk” echoing the exact same refrain, appeared in the National Inquirer. This article carried the byline Charles Golden. In 1968 a curious senator, Warren Magnuson, asked the new Surgeon General, William H. Stewart to take a look at the two articles. It was discovered that Frank “worked for a public relations firm that had been on retainer to the Tobacco Institute since 1963.” Alerted to a possible conspiracy, writer Ronald Kessler of the Wall Street Journal looked into the matter and found that that at least 600,000 copies of the True article had been sent out by a Tobacco Institute PR firm to influential individuals throughout the country, and further, that writer Stanley Frank had authored both articles. (3)
The FTC inquiry further found that a tobacco company attorney had supplied Stanley Frank with “the materials used in writing the True article.”. … the result is the purest trash–dated, biased and without present justification.” (4)
Surgeon General Stewart stated that “According to the Public Health Service, the True article conformed to a pattern of attack on former Surgeon General Terry and his advisory committee on smoking and health.” Dr. Terry had stated several years earlier that such attacks “are repetitious and cleverly manipulated in a continuing program to shake public confidence in the [Surgeon General's 1964 tobacco] Report.” (5)
This was despite the fact that “…the most common type of lung cancer–bronchogenic or squamos-cell carcinoma–occurs almost entirely among cigarette smokers and rarely in those who have never smoked.” (6)
What we see here is a complicity of the media in writing articles supporting a political agenda rather than doing the labor-intensive investigative reporting necessary to provide an unbiased and factual story.
The most glaring example of this today, and an exact parallel, are the articles being written by John Cloud of Time Magazine. Last February Cloud was one of the plenary presenters at a San Francisco conference promoting Ecstasy.
The “State of Ecstasy” conference was co-hosted by the Soros-funded Lindesmith Center, directed since its inception by pro-drug proponent Ethan Nadelmann. Cloud stated, “… Ethan [Nadelmann] … He calls me every couple of months about pitching stories.
Cloud has recently written another article for Time Magazine titled “This Bud’s Not for You,” protesting the Drug Enforcement Administration’s position against the use of hemp oil in food products.
… This is not journalism. At best, it is ‘tabloid-ism.’ The beat goes on … more tomorrow, but are you seeing a pattern here yet?
© Examiner
