LYING IS, among other things, an art. There are many ways to deceive, however, and it generally works best when you can cast yourself as an authority—or better yet, harness the authority of others. The marketing genius of the tobacco industry was carefully developed in the 1930s, with the goal being to “engineer consent” through multiple methods of persuasion. One was to go for the gut; another was to capture the media; another was to make so many groups dependent on you that to question cigarettes was to undermine the economic well-being of the nation. Or at least to generate such a specter.

How, though, was science harnessed to exculpate cigarettes? How did this particular form of duplicity get going, and why was it so successful? The terrain here is different from what we sometimes imagine when we think of corrupt science. The key is not so much that the companies suppressed science (which they certainly did), nor even that they spent far more to promote cigarettes than to study their health effects—which is also true. The genius of the industry was rather in using even “good” science, narrowly defined, as a distraction, something to hold up to say, in effect: See how responsible we are? Look at how much research we are funding!

Most of the research funded by the industry, though, had little to do with smoking and health. That was the whole point, to throw cash at projects that would pose no threat to business as usual. And in this they succeeded. The industry becomes a substantial funder of basic biomedical research, albeit research whose principal raison d’être was to distract from the reality of tobacco hazards. In this, the industry’s support even for “good” science was part of the largest and deadliest campaign of deception the world has ever known. And many of those who took this money became its unwitting pawns.

Our task here is to explore this support for science, recognizing the tobacco industry first and foremost as a disease vector, in the apt formulation of Eric LeGresley, a lawyer with the World Health Organization’s Tobacco Free Initiative:

The world’s most widespread, serious infection is purposely spread by its vector: the tobacco industry. To reduce the 500 million deaths tobacco industry products are projected to cause amongst those presently alive, public health advocates must study the life patterns of the tobacco industry as earnestly as they would any other disease vector. The investigative tools, however, are different. Rather than a tiny insect, this vector has economic resources rivalling those of many of the world’s largest governments. . . .

With more than a billion smokers worldwide, tobacco is mankind’s most widespread serious infection, and among its most contagious. The pathway has recently become known: Its spread is mapped out in mahogany-lined boardrooms; it breeds its resistance to countermeasures in political backrooms; and it seizes its victims in adolescent bedrooms.1

LeGresley goes on to point out that one difference between tobacco and, say, a mosquito transmitting malaria is that the cigarette men know they are being studied. That is why “third party” agents are so often used—to disguise the nature of the process of contagion. Which is also why, as LeGresley notes, the tobacco industry now “more often appears cloaked as something else.” Science, as we shall see, has served this purpose rather well.