The Tobacco Master Settlement: That Time We Got Em

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

**Josh** (0:11)
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know. I think part of our ongoing corporate malfeasance edition.

**Chuck** (0:23)
And the beginning of this episode ties in a lot with, we did an episode about the history of the cigarette.

**Josh** (0:29)
Sure.

**Chuck** (0:29)
Like, just the thing that you shouldn't put in your mouth, but people do.

**Josh** (0:34)
Right.

**Chuck** (0:35)
And so we're going to talk a little bit about that here at the beginning, because you need to know a little bit about that as it leads up to what were the, you know, the lawsuits against big tobacco.
And we should start by saying that it's been a long time that we've known that tobacco and smoking was really bad for you and would kill you. Like, the 1920s we knew for sure. The 1950s we really, really knew. And in the 1960s is when John F. Kennedy finally came out via his surgeon general Luther Terry and said, all right, everybody, it's 1964 I'm finally going to issue a government report based on, you know, about a dozen studies with lots of data about a million male smokers. And this stuff is really bad for you. So we're going to have to start putting warning labels on packages.

**Josh** (1:30)
Yeah. The great thing about those warning labels, though, is you were educated to imagine Sammy Davis Jr. saying it in your head.

**Chuck** (1:40)
That's right.

**Josh** (1:42)
So the cigarette companies, this is the beginning of their playbook, and their playbook was basically, nah, prove it. You can't prove it. This is the whole idea of settled science, the idea that which is just a complete oxymoron. Science is never settled. It's a constant ongoing process. But the idea that you have to have 100% definitive proof before you can even begin talking about whether something is harmful or not, and really exploiting and manipulating the public through really horrible means, this is where that all started. And the first response that cigarette companies came up with was to say, all right, how about we put filters on cigarettes? Because as everybody knows, cigarettes make your throat kind of scratchy. Sometimes they can make you hoarse, and that's okay. That's just part of smoking. These new filters are going to help with all of that. And there you go. Cigarettes are healthy, everybody.

**Chuck** (2:40)
That's right. In the 60s and 70s, that's when we saw lighter cigarettes or low tar cigarettes. In the 50s, they got really sort of organized and official about their PR campaigns, I guess, their propaganda campaigns. When they formed the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, under the guise of studying the health hazards of smoking, but it was very much just a PR move.
They put out an ad called A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers early on, which said, like, hey, we're really, like, your health is paramount to us as we sell you cigarettes. It's hard not to laugh. It's just so dumb to think about that people would have bought this.

**Josh** (3:24)
Yeah, but also just so cynical that they would even say this, too, you know?

**Chuck** (3:28)
But they said, all right, we're really going to pledge to research this, everyone, because we care about your health. But also, again, like, you can't really prove that it's just a cigarette. It's like, how do you know that these people dying of lung cancer didn't also get it from all the other stuff that's going on in the world?

**Josh** (3:44)
Yeah. And actually, that would become kind of codified in what's called the Roper proposal. There was a Tobacco Institute Vice President. So in addition to the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, they also came up with the Tobacco Institute, and then they renamed the TIRC, the Council for Tobacco Research. No word of the industry in it, so it's even more trustworthy, right?
And Fred Panzer was Vice President of the Tobacco Institute, and he wrote a memo in 1972 that said, essentially, here's what we should do. We need to create doubt about the health charge without actually denying it. And essentially, it's a variation on the theme that the case is not proved.
And he said kind of what you were saying, that these are, you can't really prove that it's cigarettes. So for example, extroverts are more likely to smoke cigarettes, but they're also more likely to get out in the world and drop dead of a heart attack. So maybe it's just that extroverts smoke cigarettes, or that there was one called the Constitutional Hypothesis. That was people who get sick from smoking are biologically predisposed to get sick in general. So it's really them. This was all just thrown about in 1972 to basically lie to the public and confuse the public about whether or not cigarettes were unhealthy or harmful.