Continued from The Persuasion unto Death: Moral Fiction and Propaganda of Innocence in the Tobacco Industry Papers

“In general none of the managers of RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company smoked. I asked them why they aren’t smokers. … One said: ‘We don’t smoke this shit, we only sell it.’ … He added: ‘We reserve the right to smoke for the young, the poor, the black and the stupid’.” — David Garlitz, former Winston promoter

The Tobacco Industry presents itself as a protector and defender of adult freedom of choice. People should be allowed to choose to smoke, and companies allowed to provide smokers with cigarettes, whatever the health risks of smoking because it’s a free country.

The story the tobacco companies tell about smoking is this: smoking cigarettes has health risks, yes, but if people know about these risks [and everyone does] and they choose to smoke, that is their right. It is an exercise of their free will, a cherished value that American society is allegedly built upon. Adults make choices. They, and only they, are responsible for these choices and their consequences It is deceptive to talk about cigarette smoking as an addiction — because unlike drug addicts, cigarette smokers hold down respectable jobs, do not engage in crime to support their habit, and so forth. The main point of calling something an addiction is to deny that the addict can exercise free will over his habit. But on the contrary, the freedom of the smoker to smoke or not is clear — smokers have that choice, because millions and millions of them have quit.The major tenets of this story — freedom, adult choice, individual responsibility, (not) addiction and the common knowledge of the health risks of smoking can each be analyzed usefully — each reveals and hides some important aspect of human experience. But I think it’s more interesting to ask whether, even if all these claims about freedom and responsibility are valid, would this establish the innocence of the Tobacco Industry. I want to show that this intended exculpatory conclusion does not follow. And so, for the sake of this argument, let’s grant that there is truth to each of these major claims of the Big Tobacco Innocence Project; that is, that smokers:

LLFCC is pleased to publish 's series exploring the logic of the tobacco industry's use of media and propaganda to accomplish its goals.

Introduction: Given the overwhelming evidence of corporate crime in the tobacco industry documents, I propose a framework for understanding the industry’s successful ongoing project of evading culpability for those crimes. I call this framework The Big Tobacco Innocence Project.

Evidence: The tobacco industry carried out a self-confessed conspiracy to hide, minimize and undermine public awareness of the enormous suffering and death caused by cigarette smoking over many decades. The singularly well documented evidence of this is available at legacy.library.ucsf.edu and bat.library.ucsf.edu.

Innocence: The Big Tobacco Innocence Project [BTIP] comprises all the propaganda that denies or minimizes the culpability of the tobacco corporations for the crimes mentioned above. I will attempt a justification of the term ‘propaganda’ below. The BTIP rests on a set of concepts that I try to unpack in this essay. I list these now, describing them in the way the BTIP presents them. Later I will analyze them in their social context in what I hope is a realistic, rather than propagandistic, way: