This blog entry is going to have a rather unfortunate number of the words “opinion” and “apparently”, getting in the way of the prose. Normal people realise that when I say that X is a scum-sucking, arse-licking slimy snake, I don’t really mean it literally and that it is an opinion. Abnormal people on the other hand are likely to see an opportunity to silence a critic. In my opinion the tobacco industry is inclined to keep hunting packs of rabid attack lawyers ready to pull to pieces the most trivial critic, so it is wise to be a little cautious.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the tobacco industry was just another industry – perhaps a little hick in my opinion as it merely added a bit of value to an agricultural product by rolling up leaves in cigarette papers in a ready to smoke form. But people did not assign tobacco company executives to the same category as corrupt politicians, child molesters and serial killers.
Somewhere along the way it changed as the health risks of smoking gradually become known – with the tobacco industry apparently fighting every step of the way. At some point every tobacco executive woke up to realise he was going into work to help his company kill zillions of people with their product. And apparently the instant reaction from every single tobacco company was to fight the truth.
It must have been easy to deny the truth in the beginning where it was the opinion of one established industry against the opinion of a few wacko medical researchers. Fair enough. Who is going to give up a good income because some odd-ball begins to suspect that smoking tobacco may not be healthy.
But when the evidence began to pile up, wasn’t there one tobacco executive who sat back and said “Hey! This is wrong” ? Nope. I mean sure there was Jeffrey Wigand but he was not so much a tobacco executive as a researcher (who became an executive) who worked in the tobacco industry. And in that case we are talking about the 1990s which is far later than when the tobacco companies first knew that they were selling poison.
So it seems that every tobacco executive since the 1950s has felt that his (or her) income and the safety of the company they worked for was more important than the fact that they were in my opinion going out of their way to kill their customers.
Is there something specially corrupt about tobacco executives ? Well, we can probably guess that they were not necessarily the brightest sparks in the box – how much intelligence does it take to sell drugs to a drug addict ? But they were probably no more morally corrupt than any other company executive.
Which brings us to the question, should we really entrust power to the kind of people who become company executives ?