The public's right to know: how tobacco companies have tried for decades to hide the medical harm of smoking - the greatest enemy to our health
Prof. Ben-Ami Sela
Prof. Ben-Ami Sela is the director of the Institute of Pathological Chemistry, Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, Department of Clinical Biochemistry, Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University and a member of the update committee on lung cancer at the Cancer Society
Ben-Ami.Sela@sheba.health.gov.il
For decades, the tobacco industry has claimed that the proof of the negative effects of tobacco products is inconclusive, and that it has always felt responsible for the health of smokers, and that this policy has not changed since the statement that this industry published in the American press in January 1954 with these words: "We have an interest in public health, and we We see this as our basic responsibility, which surpasses any other consideration related to our involvement in tobacco and its products." But recently even the tobacco industry has felt that this self-righteous stance regarding the health effects of active smoking is nothing more than a pretense, and indefensible against the intensifying public criticism. In 2000, the British Parliament's Health Affairs Committee concluded its investigation into smoking issues with these words: "...it seems to us that the tobacco companies have constantly tried to undermine the scientific-medical consensus regarding the harms of smoking, until their stubborn position began to look ridiculous." And this committee further determined: "...today, the tobacco companies are forced to accept the convention that smoking is indeed harmful and dangerous, and yet they continue to express arguments "that it is apparently not possible to adopt epidemiological data on the harms of smoking because epidemiology is not an exact science, and the numbers The numbers of smoking victims are definitely exaggerated." One of the typical examples of the chronic position of the tobacco industry is its testimony at a hearing before the House of Representatives committee in Washington in 1994, when all seven heads of the US tobacco companies who appeared before the committee, unanimously testified under oath that according to their understanding "nicotine is not addictive" even though internal documents of The tobacco industry, known as the "Brown and Williamson" documents written in 1963, stated in this language: "Nicotine is an addictive substance and we sell tobacco products containing nicotine to help smokers get rid of stress and depression." The American tobacco industry was so convinced of the addictive potential of nicotine that in a 1967 document from the American Tobacco Company, this company considers the possibility of extracting this drug from the stems of the Nicotiana Rustica plant, rich in nicotine, and adding it to cigarettes to increase the level of nicotine in them. And just as the tobacco industry denied for years that nicotine is an addictive drug, they show great determination in the last 10 women in their opposition to the harm that cigarette smoke causes to the passive smoker, the "second hand smoker".
One of the persistent arguments of the tobacco companies over the years was that this industry is not aware of any biological evidence of the harms of smoking, and in particular that the tobacco industry has never engaged in such studies on its own initiative. But the testimony from the 70s of a senior scientist at the Philip Morris company was somewhat different: "In order to protect our industry from claims by the heirs of those who died from the effects of smoking, we must present a position according to which our industry has never conducted any biological research in its laboratories, and accordingly no We were aware of any connection between smoking and morbidity." As will be described later, the Philip Morris company hired the services of a German company called INBIFO from the city of Cologne, and in the laboratories of the latter, the biological medical research on the effects of smoking and its damages was carried out for years. This connection between the Philip Morris company and INBIFO was supposed to be a top secret, in such a way that it would never be possible to attribute to Philip Morris all the information discovered in the INBIFO laboratories. This hidden connection began to emerge following the legal settlement agreement signed between the state of Minnesota and the six leading tobacco companies in the US, according to which these companies were forced to make available to the public on websites, millions of pages of documents of these companies' internal reports. These websites, such as http://www.tobaccodocuments.org and http://www.pmdocs.com, pointed out among other things that already in 1968 Helmut Wakeham, one of the vice presidents of the Philip Morris company, pointed out the danger arising from "opponents of smoking that effectively influence public opinion, which obliges the company to acquire biological and medical knowledge about the effects of smoking, so that the company can deal with the negative rumors about tobacco that are increasing". Indeed, in 1969 Wakeham wrote that "we must ourselves carry out studies in mice on the effect of smoking on their breathing, and on the possibility that smoking has the potential to cause cancerous tumors in these animals". According to Wakeham, "this knowledge that we will acquire on our own, will allow us to deal with data that will be heard by our competitors or by anti-smokers, against our products". It seems that Wakeham's idea was too bold for the taste of the president of the Philip-Morris company at the time, Joseph F. Cullman, who agreed to a compromise, to immediately stop the preliminary biological studies already carried out by the Philip-Morris company in Boston, and to copy them to Europe in a way that would facilitate their concealment, or any connection to this tobacco company.
The opportunity arose in 1970 when a German company for industrial and biological research called INBIFO was founded in Cologne, and Wakeham offered to purchase it so that research on the psychological, biological and epidemiological aspects of smoking could be carried out in its laboratories. To make the relationship between Philip Morris and INBIFO even more secret, the purchase of the German company was made by a Swiss subsidiary in the city of Neuchatel, and in 1972 an agreement was drawn up to transfer secret information from Germany to the USA about the findings of the laboratory experiments. And in order to further obscure any possible connection between the American tobacco company and the German company, another strawman was added: a coordinator who would serve as another middleman, a Swedish researcher from the University of Gothenburg named Ragner Rylander, so that the transfer of the test data would be transferred through him to the US and not directly. And what were the results of the studies conducted in the INBIFO laboratories whose results the Philip-Morris company was so determined not to be identified with? There seems to have been a gap between some INBIFO reports for internal use and those intended for publication in scientific journals. For example, we will examine the studies of the German company referring to the "sidestream smoke" which is commonly called sidestream smoke. The findings seemed clear and consistent. We will quote an example from a certain experimental report: "All the rats that were exposed to smoke as passive smokers showed signs of exhaustion at the end of a day of such exposure. Compared to rats that were directly exposed to cigarette smoke by "smoking machines" with a filter or filter or what is called mainstream smoke, and which recovered completely the next morning, the passive rats that were exposed to sidestream smoke showed irregular fur (shaggy fur) the next morning and irregularity of their breathing which was expressed in whistles and grunts.
These experiments therefore yielded an unexpected surprise: it turned out that the potential damage caused by exposure to secondhand smoke is greater than that caused by direct inhalation of the smoke known as mainstream, in the greater damage that the secondhand smoke caused to the passive rats, both in necrosis or degeneration of the covering layer (epithelium) of the nose, as well as damage to the squamous cells in the ciliated epithelium of the nasal cavity. We know today that the sidestream smoke is released directly into the air from the burning end of the cigarette, and therefore this smoke does not pass and filter through its filter, therefore it is more dangerous than the direct smoke absorbed by the smoker when it is filtered. Different studies show that the amount of tar and nicotine in side smoke is 3 times greater than in direct smoke, while the amount of carbon monoxide CO is 3 times greater in side smoke. The surprise in these findings was mainly due to the comparison of the particulate matter found in the direct (mainstream) cigarette smoke, which is 4 times greater than that measured in the side smoke. Nevertheless the toxic effect of the side smoke was greater! And in a certainly not unexpected way, the INBIFO company preferred to summarize the latest findings in internal reports that were discovered only recently, but on the other hand, INBIFO continued to publish in the public scientific press the results of studies that had no correlation between them and the harms of smoking, while preferring to warn the public about the harms of other products in order to distract his opinion of the harms of cigarette smoke. As a typical example of INBIFO's aforementioned relationship of silence, "Philip-Morris' research subsidiary, it makes sure to publish an article in 1990 in the journal Environment Research signed by Rylander and his people under the title: Lung cancer risk and mutagenicity of tea"!!! Fate laughed and maybe he cried: Aliba Damdani INBIFO, the fact that 85% of lung cancer patients contracted the disease because of the mutations caused to their lung cells by the substances protected in tobacco, is not a reason for research or publication of its results. What worries the "INBIFO scientists" is the ability of green tea to cause mutations and lung cancer. Real distractors!
But let's return to the subject of INBIFO research in the field of the side smoke emitted from the burning cigarette and turning "non-smokers" into "unwitting smokers". Today we already know that between 1981 and 1994, INBIFO wrote over 800 (!!) scientific reports on the dangerous effects of sidestream smoke, but during this period it did not bother, or was afraid to publish a single article in the public scientific press. The fact that INBIFO scientists already knew in 1982 about the serious damages of secondhand smoke, was carefully hidden from the public eye, and at the same time Philip Morris spokesmen continued to put up a smokescreen aimed at refuting any possibility of the harm of smoking to passive smokers. In April 2002, in a federal court, representatives of Philip Morris continued to claim that "to the best of their knowledge and understanding, there is no connection between smoke emitted from cigarettes in the immediate environment and illness"!
At the beginning of November 2004, an international convention with many participants was held in Washington on the subject of Public Health and Environment and one of the "hot" topics was ETS or Environment tobacco smoke or the effect of cigarette smoke on our environment. Prof. Stanton Glantz from San Francisco, one of the greatest experts in this field, said, among other things, the following: "Between the years 1981 and 2000, INBIFO researchers in Germany performed 36 large experiments on laboratory animals to test the effect of second-hand cigarette smoke. Their conclusion was surprising but clear, in a way that indicated the health damage of second-hand smoke beyond what was expected. The Philip Morris company, the largest cigarette manufacturer in the world, and its hidden owners of the INBIOFO company, knew more in the 80s about the harms of passive smoking than the entire medical-scientific community in the world knows about this subject even in these days of late 2004. Despite this knowledge, Philip Morris continues deny any connection between smoking and environmental damage, and of course continues to oppose all restrictions and supervision of smoking in the public domain"
And why dedicate an entire article to such a "sided" aspect of the harms of smoking? These things are written for the information of the great majority of the non-smoking public, so that they know how to stand up for their rights in restaurants, and in the smoke-filled corridors of hospitals, and in countless other closed places where they are entitled to breathe fresh air, and breathe in the dangerous "side smoke" of inconsiderate smokers... Law.
