UNDERMINING VICTIM BLAMING

There are three cornerstones that can together work both legally and rhetorically to undermine the powerful victim blaming frame. The first is the Pied Piper metaphor. For all the sanctimonious rebirthing that has taken place in the tobacco industry (tobacco now “causes” disease—see News Analysis p172), it is significant that the industry has resolutely clung to its public position that it does not want children to smoke. It knows that all societies revile those who would seduce and harm children, exploiting their innocence. It is thus inconceivable that the industry might ever swallow a truth serum powerful enough to cause it to say “We confess: we love it when children smoke! As our shareholders know, children's money is as good as any adult's. The earlier they start, the more money we get.” With tobacco, the script for the Pied Piper metaphor could have been written in Business Studies 101: “Realistically, if our company is to survive and prosper . . .we must get our share of the youth market”⁶ and no amount of denial and sugar coated earnestness about “adult choice” can ever make this bottom line reality go away. Thanks again to the revelations in their own documents, robotic denials about their designs on children may now be comprehensively matched with hundreds of gloating sales forecasts about the contributions of new smokers from the teenage market and focus group research on how children might use different brands to badge themselves, totemic style, in their relentless pursuit of teenage tribal identity.

The acres of documentary evidence now available on industry nicotine manipulation . . .evoke nothing less than imagery of scheming industrial chemists setting out to maximise addiction

The industry's second bête noir is addiction. As a now infamous 1980 Tobacco Institute memo expressed so plainly: “Shook, Hardy and Bacon [the tobacco industry's lawyers] reminds us . . .that the entire matter of addiction is the most potent weapon a prosecuting attorney can have in a lung cancer/cigarette case. We can't defend continued smoking as `free choice' if the person was `addicted'.”⁷ The acres of documentary evidence now available on industry nicotine manipulation (for example, Philip Morris Australia arranging to have Marlboro reformulated: “our aim is to make Red and Special Mild as close as possible to the USA blend and thus make it harder for existing smokers to leave the product”) evoke nothing less than imagery of scheming industrial chemists setting out to maximise addiction.⁸ When this material is set next to the industry's blue-in-the-face denials on addiction, its desperate efforts to resist “addiction” on pack warnings, and its trivialisation via comparisons with chewing gum, chocolate, and television viewing, recourse to glib talk about free choice sounds simply puerile.

Finally, there is the sordid 40 year history now being painstakingly unearthed by tobacco control's document archaeologists who have found pharaohs' tombs full of private acknowledgement about tobacco causing disease, overlain by massive international programmes of public obfuscation and reassurance, and tame scientist dissembling. For every newspaper report that smoking was harmful, there were dozens of advertisements whose entire choreography said “forget all that! This is what smoking means!”. And sprinkled liberally throughout the bad news on smoking were hundreds of carefully orchestrated stories placed by the industry's PR machine about air pollution causing all the cancer, confounders like diet and pet bird keeping, and apparent anomalies of low lung cancer in high smoking populations. The industry built lists of everyday agents and practices said to be dangerous which had ever been the subject of news reports, and distributed these to its spokespeople so that they could put it to audiences that “scientists” warned us that Brussels sprouts, bubble bath, and books were dangerous too⁹ . . .so what were we to make of their claims that smoking was harmful? Stock phrases like “the jury is still out” and “only a statistical association” that fed the ordinary person's scepticism about science were grist to the same mill.

The victim blamers would have it that if, like Rolah McCabe, you were a 12 year old girl, awkward about your identity, and reassured by advertising that promised friendship and togetherness from smoking (Rolah McCabe smoked Escort, advertised with the cheery ditty “Join the Club”), you were to blame. If your nicotine receptors became rapidly primed via the best nicotine pharmacology that the industry's scientists could secrete without any warning into their chemical cocktails, again, it was your fault that you became addicted. And if you were stupid enough to have ever fallen for any of the scientific denials peddled by credentialed industry scientific stooges (“Light up, drink up and stay healthy! That's the good news from American expert Dr Carl Seltzer who claims that smoking is not related to heart disease . . .The Harvard University lecturer says he's never been challenged by the medical profession . . .Dr Seltzer's word must be taken very seriously. After all, he IS the doctor of Harvard University”¹⁰), then you deserved what was coming to you.

All over the world, smoking and the diseases it causes are increasingly becoming the providence of nations' poorest and least educated subpopulations. Such people are the least able to assess the complexities of conflicting epidemiological evidence. They are also the very same people for whom aspirational brand names like Hope, Holiday, and Longbeach and the ad campaigns that accompany them are named by the cynical interpreters of tobacco industry smoker focus groups.

The mass document shredding uncovered in the McCabe case adds another potent element to the discourse about tobacco industry culpability. It is difficult to conceive of any industry other than criminal enterprises who would feel so ashamed and vulnerable about their work as to systematically destroy evidence about their core activity. Ordinary people like the citizens who make up juries know that this is what the guilty do when they know they are in the wrong. While the evidence from undestroyed internal documents is damning enough, one can only begin to imagine the contents of the material that went into the shredders.

Tobacco Control has secured support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to provide sets of Powerpoint slides on most of the leading topics in contemporary tobacco control. We have commissioned 20 different topics from some of the leading researchers in our field. These will be placed on the Tobacco Control website over the next six months. Among these will be slide sets showing the “worst of” the tobacco industry documents. We believe these powerful tools will greatly assist advocates around the world to shame the industry, to bring justice to its victims, and to inspire governments to exert further control over the industry's activities.