The Golden Weed,America's Most Deadly Drug

摘要

Tobacco is the world's largest single cause of preventable death. Five million people die every year from smoking, a number that will grow to circa ten million over the next two decades. A hundred million died from smoking in the 20th century, and ten times that will die in the present century if current trends continue. The tobacco industry is notorious for its decades-long campaign to manufacture ignorance, to distract from hazards, to filibuster its way past inconvenient facts and the crushing weight of medical indictments. Theirs may well be the longest-running campaign of deception ever organized by an industry, and it was not until the 1990s that manufacturers admitted any real harms caused by smoking. Part of this about-face was dictated by a change in legal strategy, which by this time had recentered around the argument that "everyone has always known" that smoking is bad for you—so people have only themselves to blame for whatever diseases they contract from the habit.