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Science (Journal)
Secondhand smoke (also known by its tobacco industry name “environmental tobacco smoke”) is the smoke that non-cigarette smokers accidentally inhale when near people who are smoking. It is highly toxic and causes many of the same damaging health effects as smoking itself.
Secondhand Smoke Quotes in Merchants of Doubt
The Merchants of Doubt quotes below are all either spoken by Secondhand Smoke or refer to Secondhand Smoke. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Introduction
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Millions of pages of documents released during tobacco litigation demonstrate these links. They show the crucial role that scientists played in sowing doubt about the links between smoking and health risks. These documents—which have scarcely been studied except by lawyers and a handful of academics—also show that the same strategy was applied not only to global warming, but to a laundry list of environmental and health concerns, including asbestos, secondhand smoke, acid rain, and the ozone hole.
Call it the “Tobacco Strategy.” Its target was science, and so it relied heavily on scientists—with guidance from industry lawyers and public relations experts—willing to hold the rifle and pull the trigger.
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Chapter 1
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Doubt is crucial to science—in the version we call curiosity or healthy skepticism, it drives science forward—but it also makes science vulnerable to misrepresentation, because it is easy to take uncertainties out of context and create the impression that everything is unresolved. This was the tobacco industry’s key insight: that you could use normal scientific uncertainty to undermine the status of actual scientific knowledge. As in jujitsu, you could use science against itself.
Chapter 5
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Russell Seitz and the defenders of tobacco invoked liberty, too. But as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin sagely pointed out, liberty for wolves means death to lambs. Our society has always understood that freedoms are never absolute. This is what we mean by the rule of law.
Chapter 7
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Sometimes reopening an old debate can serve present purposes. […] In the demonizing of Rachel Carson, free marketeers realized that if you could convince people that an example of successful government regulation wasn’t, in fact, successful—that it was actually a mistake—you could strengthen the argument against regulation in general.
Accepting that by-products of industrial civilization were irreparably damaging the global environment was to accept the reality of market failure. It was to acknowledge the limits of free market capitalism.
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Secondhand Smoke Term Timeline in Merchants of Doubt
The timeline below shows where the term Secondhand Smoke appears in Merchants of Doubt. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Introduction
...the tobacco industry paid Singer to publicly question the EPA’s findings on the dangers of secondhand smoke in 1990.
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Chapter 5
...that year, a major Surgeon General’s report concluded that even non-smokers could get cancer from “secondhand” cigarette smoke . The EPA started to limit smoking indoors, so the tobacco industry hired Fred Singer...
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A Brief History of Secondhand Smoke. Tobacco industry scientists already knew about secondhand smoke ’s dangers in the 1970s. In 1980, other researchers found that working in a smoky...
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...governments started banning public smoking, and in 1986, the Surgeon General released his report describing secondhand smoke as a serious danger. Tobacco companies responded with every tactic imaginable: they paid off scientists...
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The scientific evidence on secondhand smoke was very strong—the best studies showed that smokers’ spouses had much higher risks of lung...
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...Of course, the handbook focused on the EPA. It declared that the EPA report on secondhand smoke was “widely criticized within the scientific community”—even though the only scientists criticizing it were the...
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...company began secretly funding the George C. Marshall Institute in exchange for press coverage defending secondhand smoke . Through the lobbyist Steven Milloy, Philip Morris founded a group called The Advancement of...
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...hired the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, a pro-business think tank, to produce a report defending secondhand smoke . Its authors, Fred Singer and the conservative lawyer Kent Jeffreys, accused the EPA of...
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...they did recommend significant changes: they thought that the EPA was understating the risks of secondhand smoke , especially on children. Since scientists already knew that cigarette smoking severely harms people’s health,...
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...built a website to respond to the tobacco industry’s attacks and explain its findings about secondhand smoke , including why it accepted 90 percent confidence levels and rejected the threshold effect theory....
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