Golden Holocaust- La conspiration des industriels du tabac

The front shirt pocket that now adorns the dress of virtually every American male, for example, was born from an effort to make a place to park your cigarette pack.

There is some evidence that the industry targets the mentally ill - through Project Scum, for example, a 1996 plan to market Camel cigarettes to San Francisco "head shops" and "street people". (What kind of business refers to its clients as "scums" ?) [scum = racaille, vermine, etc.]

Cigarette death in the United States alone is like two jumbo jets crashing every day.

Most people will be surprised to learn that tobacco was a large part of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe. The total value of all goods shipped to Europe from 1947 through 1951 was about $13 billion, about $1 billion of which was tobacco. Nearly a third (!) of all "food-related" funding in the plan went for tobacco. [...] George Seldes [...]: "the hungry people of Europe, wether they like it or not, will have to take almost half as much in tobacco as in bread and other foodstuffs, because there is an unsaleable surplus of tobacco in the US." Seldes reported speculations that American tobacco interests were hoping to use the plan to spread the demand for American-style cigarettes into Europe. Tobacco was supposed to be part of an effort to halt the expansion of communism. [...] [Virginia Congressman John W. Flannagan in 1948:] tobacco gifts to Europe "will aid in eliminating or retading the spread of ideologies antagonistic to democracy and to world peace."

Flue-curing [façon de faire sécher et de traiter le tabac qui permet dès le 19ème siècle d'inhaler la fumée] may well be the deadliest invention in the history of modern manufacturing. Gunpowder and nuclear weapons have killed far fewer people, as has all the world of iron. [...] An estimated 100 million people died from smoking in the twentieth century, and hundreds of millions more will die in the twenty-first if the epidemic is not curbed. The industry could easily have prevented many of these deaths - the majority of all lung cancers, for example - by making a cigarette that was difficult to inhale.

It is a callous calculus, but governments are likely to do the right thing only when they realize that the cost of paying for smoking-caused diseases cuts perilously deep into the benefits derived from [tobacco] taxation.

A 1935 estimate figured that European governments on average obtained about 15% of their income from tobacco taxes.

Six trillion [cigarettes] - that's 6,000,000,000,000 - are smoked every year, enough to make a continuous chain from the earth to the sun and back, with enough left over for a couple of round trips to Mars [...].

How many know about the filth sometimes found in cigarettes -dirt and mold, of course, but also worms, wire, and insect excrements?

Les segments sont souvent scindés en plusieurs sous-segments, et, dans les années 80, Reynolds subdivisa son marché jeune en Goody Goodies [petits saints], Preps [élèves de classes préparatoires], GQ [pour Gentlemen's Quaterly, magasine masculin créé en 1931], DISCOs, Rockers, Party Parties [désignant les fêtes fortement alcoolisée], Punks et enfin les victimes de burnout (syndrome d'épuisement professionnel). On aurait sans doute également visé les singes et les morts, si l'on avait pu trouver le moyen de les faire cracher au bassinet. Les hommes de Marlboro eurent même un jour cette formule : "Tout ce qui a des lèvres est bon à prendre".