Tobacco Science - Strategy Explained
Today the fact that industrial
tobacco products are harmful has become common knowledge. However when the
cigarette companies began their business, people were drawn to the product in
hordes. The game continues even today and the harm was hidden from the general
population for a considerably long period. How did that happen? Due to a
strategy now known universally as "Tobacco Science". What was that
strategy?
- Market the product as essential for
health and happiness
- Link it to sports and other
entertainment activities
- Make it a lifestyle product
- Heavily advertise it through all
media outlets
- Link it to the health and happiness
of all sections of society
- Pay doctors and celebrities to
endorse and advertise the product
- Sponsor biased studies to link it
to health benefits
- Ensure favourable reports and
studies are published in ‘scientific’ journals
- Threaten and abuse detractors
- Pay doctors and medical scientists
to publicly voice dissent against adverse opinions expressed
- Fund medical associations and force
them to endorse the product
- Create lingo to mainstream the
smoking habit into thought patterns
- Sponsor studies to refute evidence
of harm
- Indulge in character assassination and
ensure end of professional careers of dissenters of repute
- Obfuscate the issue and point out
that the harm is caused by external factors
- Abuse and threaten victims who
protest
- Mock at victims and question their
mental capacity
- Portray victims as suffering from inferiority
complex and invent new scientific names of perceived disorders
- Mock at the social protest using
similar tactics by grouping protestors as fringe elements and lunatics
- Employ highly paid professional
lawyers and firms to fight cases
- Fund the Human Genome Project to
blame the tobacco cancer association on genes when the going got tough
- Force policy makers to go slow on
policies to ban tobacco and keep loopholes so that the industry can keep
functioning
- Ensure marketing through agents
despite restrictions posing to reach those “deprived” of pleasure
- Keep dissent to the minimum and
ensure only lone voices
Sounds familiar? Where else are you
observing the “Tobacco Science” strategies performing in full?
Inventing Conflicts of Interest: A History of Tobacco Industry Tactics
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/
The Realities
of Tobacco-science in Medical Research
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