
How War Made the Cigarette - benbreen
https://newrepublic.com/article/155164/war-made-cigarette
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sverige
I had an elderly friend (now deceased) who grew up in Durham, NC, in the teens
and twenties. He knew the Duke family.

He told me a fascinating story about how the Duke family gave some Union
soldiers cigarettes when they were in North Carolina during the war. After the
war was over, some of those soldiers wrote to the Dukes asking them to send
more cigarettes. They were hooked, and the Dukes realized they had a big
seller. According to my friend, it was the basis of their wealth and allowed
them to expand into other areas. (Duke Power was founded by the same family,
for example.)

Their company, American Tobacco, was also the target of some of the first big
successful anti-monopoly actions by the federal government.

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diffeomorphism
> The lessons of her book remain stunningly relevant today. We’re in the midst
> of revelations that the sugar industry similarly relied on advertising to
> distract consumers from its extreme addictiveness. In the NFL’s fights with
> former football players dying of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, the
> League hired the same lawyers, consultants, and lobbyists that Big Tobacco
> used. Cellphone companies have worked tirelessly to obscure evidence of the
> connection between cellular radiation and all manner of negative health
> impacts. Even with mass shootings a daily occurrence, the gun industry has
> lobbied its way out of any meaningful oversight. Most noxious of all, fossil
> fuel companies have relied on shoddy science, constant PR, and the
> deliberate dissemination of doubt to cover up the connection between oil and
> gas and climate change—a business decision that raised short-term profits
> but may have doomed our entire civilization.

One of these is not like the others...

~~~
whatshisface
To that kind of person, being right or wrong is irrelevant. The same methods
of lying, cheating and advertising are employed whether the public fear is
irrational or spot-on. For example, you can find many crooked things done _in
support_ of global warming awareness. Across the board, whether they are right
or wrong, the biggest thing in common between skeptics of the mainstream
position (global warming skeptics, sugar-is-good-for-you skeptics, vaccine
safety skeptics) is that they can all give you a long list of corporate tricks
done to weaken their position - the point being, it doesn't matter if the evil
corporation is right, they'll still use backhanded tactics to convince
everyone of their point.

~~~
jdsully
When I was in University I witnessed a strange sight: Half the student council
running through the building, sitting down in a corner and holding a quick
vote. The odd behavior was so that they could have a quorum _without_ certain
undesirable people who would vote the wrong way.

The common thread with these underhanded tactics is people feel the ends
justify the means. The ones doing it for profit are far less scary to me than
those doing it “for the global good”.

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BXLE_1-1-BitIs1
I suspect the toll from cigarettes vastly outweighs that from all illegal
drugs combined. The US government was pusher in chief.

