Out of the ashes

To: Retort
From: RP

[Robert sends us the English text of a remarkable editorial to be published next week in Sueddeutsche Zeitung. Robert's forthcoming book, entitled Golden Holocaust, continues his unflinching excavations in the grisly annals of tobacco, published in Cancer Wars and The Nazi War on Cancer. Since becoming the lead witness on the history of smoking in several class action suits against the industry, Robert has attracted the serious attention of Big Tobacco's legal goons - more than two dozen of them permanently assigned to discredit his lonely, fearless, scholarship. This editorial shows why. IB] 

The Golden Holocaust:  Germany’s Contribution
Robert N. Proctor
30 xii 2007

We live in a world of ignorance.  In the United States, the Republican presidential candidate now leading the field—former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee—believes that God created the earth about 6000 years ago, and he is not alone.  Surveys show that about two thirds of all Republicans in the U.S. don’t believe that humans share a common ancestor with apes.  Our current president is chief among them.  

Ignorance has many faces, however, and not all are from failures of education.  The United States has 4,400 official censors, for example, whose principal job is to classify as “secret” the massive outflux of documents from the country’s weapons laboratories.  Many millions of pages per year.

An even deadlier kind of ignorance, however, is that produced by the tobacco industry, which has made a career out of disputing tobacco hazards.  “Doubt is our product” reads the Brown & Williamson memo from 1969, meaning:  we can only keep making cigarettes if people can be distracted from the fact that cigarettes kill.  The industry has been clever in how it went about this, fighting science with science, hiring experts to research “alternate explanations,” getting newspapers to believe there were “two sides” to a purported “tobacco controversy,” and so forth.

This so-called “open controversy” has been a pillar of the tobacco industry’s agnotology project, and not just in the U.S.  Manufacturers in many other countries have followed suit, worried that breaking ranks would either harm the American legal situation or reduce sales at home.  Elaborate logics of denial have been developed and franchised into other arenas, such as global warming.  The consensus on global climate change was delayed as long as it was, partly because Big Oil was able to team up with Big Tobacco—often using the very same experts--to create doubt, sow confusion.

Tobacco death, like global warming, has this ugly time line:  the bad we do today doesn’t show up until decades later.  Which makes it easier to ignore.  The industry likes to deride the tobacco holocaust as “old news,” but most of the epidemic actually lies in the future.  A hundred million people died from smoking in the twentieth century, but that number is expected to grow ten fold in the present century, as smoking spreads throughout the world.  The World Health Organization estimates that five million people die every year from smoking; that number will grow to about ten million per year over the next couple of decades, as exposures from the past take their toll.  

This public health catastrophe—by far the largest the world has ever seen—is aided by the tobacco industry’s ability to make itself invisible.  Cigarettes are smoked, but we aren’t supposed to think about how they are produced.  That is one reason the public has been so easily mollified:  cigarettes have never been properly recognized as world-class polluters.   
Cigarettes are a major source of deforestation, and a significant cause of global warming.  An estimated two percent of all global deforestation is due to clear-cutting for tobacco fields, and millions of trees are cut every year to make the charcoal needed for flue curing.  In the U.S. alone, an estimated ten million kilos of pesticides are applied on tobacco farms.  Cigarette butts are the world’s number one source of litter, and the carbon footprint from the making and smoking of cigarettes exceeds that for many other modern industries.  Cigarettes are the world’s largest cause of fires (and fire deaths), and a leading cause of industrial accidents.  Eliminate cigarettes, and you eliminate a greenhouse gas emitter equivalent to raising automotive fuel efficiencies by dozens of kilometers per liter. 

It is hard, in fact, to grasp the scale of cigarette production—the numbers are just too big.  The world now consumes about six trillion cigarettes (6,000,000,000,000) per annum, which is nearly a thousand for every man, woman and child on earth.  Cigarettes are about 80 mm long each, which means that 500 million kilometers of cigarettes get smoked every year.  That is enough to make a continuous chain from the earth to the sun and back, with enough left over for a few round trips to Mars.


Who, though, is making all those cigarettes?  And how?  That is where the Germans come in.
Mechanization is the sine qua non of modern tobacco manufacturing.  The story begins in the nineteenth century, when James Bonsack of Virginia modified a carding device in his father’s woolen factory, producing a machine that could roll out a cigarette of indefinite length, which was then cut up into individual sticks.  The Bonsack machine dramatically cut the cost of manufacturing, but also increased the rate at which cigarettes could be produced.  So whereas the factory girls of Richmond or Dresden could hand-roll maybe a thousand cigarettes per day, Bonsack’s machine could extrude a hundred thousand—without tiring or striking for better working conditions.  

But that was only the beginning.  Cigarette machine speeds increased throughout the twentieth century.  The Mark I made in London by the Molins Co. in 1926 could make about 1000 cigarettes per minute, four times the rate of the best Bonsack machine.  A Molins Mark VIII from 1956 doubled this rate, and the American Machine and Foundry’s Ypsilon Maker from 1970 cranked out 4000 ciggies per minute.  Leave it to the Germans, though, to make the best—and deadliest—machines.


German manufacturing capacity was not in great shape after the War.  Hitler had never liked tobacco, denouncing the evil weed as “die Rache des weissen Mannes” dafür, dass der Weiße ihm den Schnaps gebracht habe.  The Führer had provided funds to establish the world’s first Institut zur Erforschung der Tabakgefarhren at the University of Jena, which dutifully coughed up world-class epidemiology, revealing cigarettes as the principal cause of lung cancer.  Cigarettes were barred from the offices of the Nazi party, and from many public spaces.


After the war, though, cigarettes had lots of friends.  The Americans encouraged the habit, and tobacco actually formed a sizable chunk of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe:  for every two dollars in food aid, one dollar was given in the form of tobacco.  Plus of course there was the useful stigma of Nazism.  The Nazis were anti-tobacco, so tobacco’s critics must be Nazis.  Cigarettes, by contrast, were “torches of freedom,” edgy symbols of rebellion.

Out of these ashes, the German cigarette industry began to rebuild itself.  Reemtsma regrouped in Hamburg, and the East Germans got their Dresden factories going.  And a Diplom Ingenieure by the name of Dr. Kurt A. Körber started making and repairing cigarette machines.  Germans were early fans of filters, and Dr. Körber figured out how to attach these onto cigarette sticks, and to do so very fast.  In 1946 he founded the Hauni Maschinenbau AG in Hamburg, quickly earning respect for quality service and technical finesse.  

Hauni Maschinenbau today is the world’s largest producer of cigarette machines, supplying tobacco factories all over the globe with the deadliest machines ever made.  The company makes several different models, but the piece de resistance is the Protos-M5, a veritable killing machine, capable of churning out five million cigarettes per 8-hour shift.  Running a modest two shifts a day for, say, 200 days a year yields two billion cigarettes per annum.  

And what kind of damage can that do?  Recall that cigarettes cause about one death for every million smoked.  That is not a “risk” but a fact:  take the number of cigarettes smoked in a society and divide by a million, and that’s how many premature deaths you will find from smoking, 20-30 years later.  Most will be from heart disease, about a third will be from lung cancer.

This means that a machine like Hauni’s Protos-M5 will cause about 2000 deaths per year.  Of course, a nice modern factory will have several such machines, dozens in fact.  Don’t take my word for it, go to http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/, the formerly secret documents from U.S. litigation, and search “Hauni” and see for yourself.  Or go to Hauni’s website, which boasts that when it comes to cigarette production “anything is possible.”  

Let us hope not.  All men must die, that is the Socratic syllogism.  But do we really want to have this hastened by beast machines like the Protos-M5?  Francis Bacon had it only half right:  ignorance is also power.  But if ignorance can be created, it can also be destroyed.  Let us hope so.