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Nan Enstad, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume 69, Issue 2, April 2014, Pages 338–340, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrt028
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Extract
Robert N. Proctor is trying to get our attention. Leaving aside for a moment his provocative use of the words “holocaust” and “abolition” in the title of his book on the cigarette industry, Proctor's prose rings with urgency and impatience. The cigarette is a defective product because “it kills when used as directed” (34). Flue curing of tobacco leaves is the “deadliest invention in the history of modern manufacturing” (34). Regulation has been stymied because of governments' “secondary addiction” (49) to cigarette taxation, with the result that “dog food has been more tightly regulated” (3). Proctor's book is an unapologetic polemic with the aim of freeing us from “laissez-fumer carcinogenic capitalism,” (540) and ends with a series of policy recommendations. If Proctor's language reads as “biased” to scholars accustomed to a more moderated tone, they have missed one of his most important points: the infiltration of cigarette corporations into the workings of science, medicine, history, and the law since the 1930s has been so fundamental as to reshape knowledge production and legal arbitration in the United States. So tainted is the ground upon which we stand that we need first to understand how profoundly the tobacco industry tilted professional scholarship, journals, and organizations to its own benefit—that is, how biased our baseline of scholarship and popular discourse has become—before we can achieve a free and open academic and societal exchange about tobacco. It is time, Proctor proclaims, to “think outside the pack” (5).
