The cigarette in global lung history: How flue curing, matches, mechanization, and mass marketing led to mass death and deception

This seminar, which is being extended to you by invitation only, is based on a registration of a first sign up basis. Seating is limited, so you are encouraged to register as soon as possible by replying to Barb Edwards at bae1@psu.edu. (This seminar will not be teleconferenced or recorded.) "Who Owns Our Species? Past, Present, Future" Seminar Readings for the seminar will be provided upon registration. About 6 trillion cigarettes are smoked every year. With 6 billion people on earth, this means a global consumption of about 1000 per person per year. Cigarettes are about 3.5 inches long, which means that 350 million miles are smoked per annum--enough to make a continuous chain from the earth to the sun and back--with enough left over for a couple of side trips to Mars, or to circle the globe 15,000 times. More than 60 million kg of soot, tar, ash, nicotine, hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde and radioactive polonium-210 are inhaled by smokers every year, with grisly consequences: 5 million people die every year from smoking, a number expected to grow to 10 million/year over the next few decades. Tobacco killed an estimated 100 million in the twentieth century is on track to kill about a billion in the present century--more than one percent of all who have lived since the evolution of Homo sapiens. How did we come into such a world, which London's Royal College of Physicians has characterized as the "present holocaust"? The modern cigarette must be seen as the outcome of mass marketing and mass deception, combined with creative feats of chemical and pharmacologic engineering. No small object has been more carefully designed. The tobacco industry has also fought research with research, with one goal being the perpetuation of popular ignorance and political quiescence. Litigation against the industry has become one way to curb tobacco use in the U.S, but thousands of scholars have also defended the industry in court (as expert witnesses), raising novel issues of moral and social responsibility. Historians have also worked extensively for the industry, earning millions of dollars. Here I shall trace the origins of this epidemic, comparing also the historiography of plaintiffs v. industry defendants in court as part of a larger epidemiology of expertise. I'll also say a bit about eavescasting and the changing rhetorics of gigantism, the origins of tobacco free-basing ("crack nicotine"), and some of the intricacies of decoy, distraction and filibuster research.

Contact

Barbara Edwards
bae1@psu.edu