Originally Posted By FrankGrimes29⏩

Originally Posted By sugalump5⏩

Originally Posted By FrankGrimes29⏩

Originally Posted By hamburgerbread⏩

Evidence linking smoking and cancer appeared in the 1920s (15). Between 1920 and 1940, a chemist named Angel Honorio Roffo published several articles showing that cancers could be experimentally induced by exposure to tars from burned tobacco (16). Roffo et al. further showed that cancer could be induced by using nicotine-free tobacco, which means that tar, with or without nicotine, was carcinogenic. Research implicating smoking as a cause of cancer began to mount during the 1950s, with several landmark publications in leading medical journals (17-23). The first official U.S. government statement on smoking and health was issued by the Surgeon General Leroy Burney in a televised press conference in 1957, wherein he reported that the scientific evidence supported cigarette smoking as a causative factor in the etiology of lung cancer (24, 25). By 1960, Joseph Garland, Editor of the New England Journal, wrote, “No responsible observer can deny this association, and the evidence is now sufficiently strong to suggest a causative role” (26).

In their public statements, tobacco companies held that cigarettes had not been proven to be injurious to health. For example, a November 1953 press release issued by the American Tobacco Company stated, “…no one has yet proved that lung cancer in any human being is directly traceable to tobacco or its products in any form” (27). In a New York Times story based on this press release, the headline states that Mr. Hahn (President of the American Tobacco Company) characterizes the evidence of a link between cigarette smoking and an increase in the incidence of lung cancer as “Loose Talk” (28). In 1954, Philip Morris Vice President George Weissman announced that if the company had any thought or knowledge that in any way we were selling a product harmful to consumers, that they would stop business immediately (29). Senior scientists and executives at tobacco companies, however, knew about the potential cancer risk of smoking as early as the 1940s, and most accepted the fact that smoking caused cancer by the late 1950s (30-34).

A 1939 memorandum from the American Tobacco Company Research Director Hiram Hanmer noted, “We have been following Roffo's work for some time, and I feel that it is rather unfortunate that a statement such as his [implicating smoking in cancer] is widely disseminated” (30). A few years later, H.B. Parmele, a scientist working for the Lorillard Tobacco Company, wrote a report to the company's manufacturing committee observing that, “Certain scientists and medical authorities have claimed for many years that the use of tobacco contributes to cancer development in susceptible people. Just enough evidence has been presented to justify the possibility of such a presumption…benzpyrene is presumed to be a combustion product of burning tobacco and, by animal experiments, it has been shown to possess definite carcinogenic properties” (31). In 1953, a chemist at R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, Claude Teague, produced a literature survey on smoking and cancer referencing 78 articles, which offered the following conclusion: “…studies of clinical data tend to confirm the relationship between heavy and prolonged tobacco smoking and incidence of cancer of the lung” (32). Three scientists from the British American Tobacco Company reported in 1958 on the results of a visit to the United States, investigating the extent to which tobacco industry and non-industry scientists accepted the premise that cigarette smoke was a cause of lung cancer (33). Their report concludes that “With one exception [HSN Green from Yale University] the individuals with whom we met believed that smoking causes lung cancer, if by ‘causation’ we mean any chain of events which leads finally to lung cancer and which involves smoking as an indispensable link” (33).