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The Frank Statement: How Big Tobacco Built a Fifty-Year Lie
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
In 1953, tobacco companies learned their product caused cancer — and spent fifty years making sure you didn't believe it. From the Mouse Painting Studies to the Frank Statement, this is where the cover-up begins.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
For most of the twentieth century, the best-selling consumer product in America was designed to kill you. The people selling it knew.
Start in December of nineteen fifty-three. A researcher named Ernst Wynder, working with Evarts Graham and Adele Croninger, painted concentrated tobacco tar onto the shaved backs of laboratory mice.
The industry's response was swift, organized, and cynical in ways that are hard to overstate even now. In January of nineteen fifty-four, the leaders of the major tobacco companies placed a full-page advertisement in newspapers across the country.
The science was one problem. The other problem was the product itself.
The Marlboro campaign wasn't the only place where the industry deployed its marketing genius with precision and intent. In the nineteen seventies, an advertising executive named Tom Burrell was hired to extend the Marlboro brand into African American communities.
For decades, the industry's defense had one central pillar: we don't know that our product is dangerous. Whatever the external science suggested, the companies publicly maintained uncertainty.
In February of nineteen ninety-six, Jeffrey Wigand appeared on sixty Minutes. Wigand had been the Vice President of Research and Development at Brown and Williamson.
By nineteen ninety-seven and ninety-eight, the legal pressure had become unsustainable. The Minnesota tobacco trial was the turning point.
What came next was vaping. The same companies that had spent fifty years denying that cigarettes were dangerous began repositioning themselves as harm-reduction advocates.
What the full arc of this story reveals is that the deception wasn't incidental to the business. It was the business.
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