Pans fight, but smokers suffer: how BigPharma is fighting the tobacco industry

A smoker with 60 years of experience, Alexander Morozov dedicated his post to one of the most taboo topics in the world media. Let's say right away and unconditionally: we in no way justify smoking tobacco for anyone else! Proving the harm of smoking is still arguing about where the sun rises and where it sets. However, in any discussion, the quality of the arguments is important, and here, as it turned out, not everything is going well with the main opponents of smoking.

Morozov, for example, complains that over the past 20 years, bans have been based on falsified reports from the US Department of Health on the dangers of smoking for smokers and those around them and the World Health Organization and the authorities of many countries who sing along with him.

The fact is that back in 2014, the court of the District of Columbia, the United States, established that this was not the case, considering the so-called “corrupt experts” case. The court then decided to remove from the lists of anti-tobacco propaganda materials the reports of the US Department of Health on the dangers of smoking for smokers and those around them, as well as punish the three experts involved in drawing up these documents, since they were kept by the pharmaceutical companies Glaxo and Pfizer. And these companies, in turn, fought against smoking around the world, creating special funds through which hundreds of millions of dollars passed annually.

However, these amounts turned out to be a trifle in comparison with BigPharma's profits from the sale of anti-tobacco drugs.

Meanwhile, the reports argued that nicotine addiction is stronger than even heroin, so that smokers are hard addicts. In much the same vein, a report on the dangers of secondhand smoke was drawn up, and the trio of corrupt experts have received grants and awards for three decades from pharmaceutical corporations with a high interest in getting smokers to "turn to experts to quit the habit".

Judge Richard Leon only revealed the selfish goals of the American medical lobby. The fact that the anti-tobacco campaign around the world is funded by the largest pharmaceutical companies. It would seem that if the court found the truth, most of the information about the dangers of tobacco should be refuted. Moreover, there is an extensive literature, which tells exactly what methods the "experts" received their frightening numbers.

For example, sociologist Michael McFadden found that the information that after the bans on smoking in the United States has sharply reduced mortality from heart attacks, as well as that lung cancer is a "privilege" of smokers, was falsified by the same "experts", but in reality the risk getting lung cancer is quite large for nonsmokers and is definitely not a "privilege" of smokers. The same applies to information that passive smoking allegedly causes periodontal disease. It's funny that these data were obtained as a result of experiments on rats, which were driven into tiny rooms, pumping tobacco smoke there in a concentration of smoke from ten thousand cigarettes in a telephone booth. But the rats survived, although some strange formations appeared on their gums. That is, according to the author, information about the fatal harm of secondhand smoke is clearly not proven!

The situation is no better with active smoking, since the figure of 400 thousand deaths annually in America alone does not correspond to reality: half of these victims are 72 years old, and a fifth is more than 80 ...

So the "anti-tobacco campaign" has largely become a showdown between the drug business, one of the branches of which are pharmaceutical firms, and the tobacco business...