-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">
</A> -Cui Bono?-
from:
The Nazi War on Smoking, by Lauren A. Colby
<http://www.lcolby.com/nazi.html>
November 5, 1999
Recently, we have been bombarded by a series of
articles and TV documentaries, extolling the war
against smoking conducted by authorities in Nazi
Germany. These articles praise the Nazis for their
foresight and vision, in "discovering" that smoking
causes lung cancer (as well as nearly every other
disease known to man).
All of this stems from a book, written by Robert N.
Proctor, entitled "The Nazi War on Cancer". In the
book, Proctor goes on and on, raving about the great
work the Nazis did in finding a cure for cancer: i.e.,
the abolition of tobacco smoking. In page after page,
Proctor describes and praises the work of the Nazi
scientists. He is, however, long on hyperbole and
adulation and short on descriptions of any real
scientific studies, until we get to page 194, where we
are told about "an exquisite piece of scholarship" by
one Hans Muller who, in a paper published in 1939,
finally "proved" that smoking causes lung cancer. Let's
take a look at this "exquisite piece of scholarship".
What Muller did was to send a questionnaire to the
relatives of deceased lung cancer victims. The
questionnaire read as follows:
"1. Was the deceased Herr_____ a smoker? If so, what
his daily consumption of cigars, cigarettes, or pipe
tobacco? Please be numerically precise in your answer!
2. Did the deceased smoke at some point in his life and
then stop? Until when did he smoke? If he did smoke,
what was his daily consumption of cigars, cigarettes or
pipe tobacco. (Please be precise!)
3. Did the deceased ever cut down on his smoking? How
high was his daily use of tobacco products, before and
after he cut back? (Please be precise!)
4. Can you say whether the deceased was ever exposed to
polluted air for any length of time, either at work or
off the job? Did this unclean air contain smoke, soot,
dust, tar, fumes, motor exhaust, coal dust or metallic
dust, industrial chemicals, cigarette smoke, or similar
substances?"
Muller's paper does not state exactly how many
questionnaires were sent out but he advised that 96
"cases" were obtained - 86 males and 10 females (which
seems strange, since the questionnaire, by its express
language, referred only to males). Anyway, the 86 males
were divided into five classes: extremely heavy smoker,
very heavy smoker, heavy smoker, moderate smoker, or
non-smoker. The same was done for a group of 86
"controls" of the same age as the cases.
Proctor tells us that the results were "stunning"; the
lung cancer victims were more than six times as likely
to be extremely heavy smokers as the controls. 16% of
the healthy group were non-smokers as opposed to 3.5%
of the lung cancer victims. The lung cancer victims
smoked a total of 2,900 grams of tobacco per day; the
healthy controls smoked only 1,250 grams.
While Proctor may have considered this to be an
"exquisite piece of scholarship", I demur. To me, it is
a piece of trash. Why?
Well, for starters, we don't know how Muller selected
either the lung cancer victims or the controls. Since
he didn't tell us how many questionnaires he sent out,
he was free, if he wished, to select from the
questionnaires that came back, and cull out "faulty"
questionnaires, just as do election judges in Chicago,
when picking which ballots to be accepted or rejected.
Furthermore, he was free to select his controls - the
healthy people - on any criterion he might choose.
Even more important, Muller compared apples with
oranges. He compared the recollections of relatives
concerning the smoking habits of the deceased lung
cancer victims, with the recollections of living people
concerning their own smoking habits. That is a "no-no".
Whenever the survivors of dead people are asked about
the deceased's smoking habits, they always exaggerate
those habits. In Germany in the 1930's, as in the U.S.
today, a virulent propaganda campaign was underway,
blaming smoking for lung cancer and almost every other
disease known to man. Thus, when Hermann's widow was
asked how much he smoked, her natural tendency was to
visualize Hermann with a deadly cigarette in his mouth
and respond, "He smoked a lot".
A reverse bias existed, for the healthy controls.
Propaganda Minister Goebbels had been saturating the
German press with advertisements and articles,
suggesting that smokers were nearly as bad as Jews.
Thus, when the living people were asked about their
smoking habits, a strong bias existed to minimize the
amount that they smoked. Simple conformity dictated
that a Good German, like his leader, Adolf Hitler,
didn't smoke or at least, didn't smoke very much - and
the Germans were a very conformist people.
At the end of his book, Proctor cites figures, provided
by the American Cancer Society and some German group
called "Krebsforschungszentrum", purporting to show
that the lung cancer death rate in West Germany in 1952
was 22 per 100,000 population in men and 4 for women,
compared to 25 for men and 5 for women in the U.S. By
1990, allegedly because of the delayed effects of the
successful Nazi efforts to eliminate smoking,
especially among women, the German rates were 49 for
men and 8 for women, while the U.S. rates were said to
have climbed to 75 for men and 32 for women. We are
told that these figures are "age adjusted".
I'm always a little suspicious of figures released by
the cancer societies, because they have an ax to grind,
and I'm especially suspicious of figures which are
adjusted, when I'm not told exactly how the adjustment
was made. Fortunately, we have the means to test these
figures. If, as the anti-smokers claim, the elimination
of smoking leads to the elimination of all sorts of
diseases ranging from lung cancer to emphysema, and if,
as they also claim, it takes anywhere from 25 to 45
years for the effects of youthful smoking to take their
deadly toll, it follows that in Germany, where tobacco
was in very short supply during and after World War II,
and where women were virtually forbidden to smoke, the
beneficial effects of smoking cessation should be
reflected in a significant improvement in life
expectancy. They are not.
To the contrary, according to a 1987 data base , West
German women had a life expectancy of 78 years,
compared to 79 for their free smoking sisters in the
United States, while German men had a life expectancy
of 71, as compared to 72 for their brethren in this
country. In neighboring Switzerland, which remained
neutral during the War and where tobacco was never in
short supply, the comparable life expectancies for
women and men were 80 years and 73 years, respectively.
So the notion that doing away with smoking leads to an
elimination of disease and a longer healthier life is
scarcely born out by the German experience. In
particular, it is not born out by the life expectancies
of German women, which turn out to be less, 42 years
after the War and 37 years after the end of the tobacco
shortage in Germany, than those of women in the United
States who smoked freely during the same time when
smoking was either banned for German women or
unavailable to them because of shortages of tobacco.
Table of Contents
<http://www.lcolby.com/index.html>
� 1999, Lauren A. Colby
--
IN DEFENSE OF SMOKERS
� 1999, Lauren A. Colby. Version 2.3
FORWARD
Foreword
This book had its genesis in some reading and research
that I did, a couple of years ago, relating to the
causes of the disease, AIDS. Most people think that
AIDS is caused by a virus, the HIV virus. There are,
however, a substantial number of dissident scientists,
who question whether the HIV virus is the true cause of
AIDS. Some even question whether the virus, itself, has
been isolated. An excellent book, dealing with this
controversy is Re-Thinking AIDS, by Robert
Root-Bernstein, ISBN 0-02-926905-9, The Free Press,
1993.
Now, I never did decide whether the so-called "HIV
virus" causes AIDS, or not. There are excellent
arguments on both sides. Some, like Professor Duesberg,
argue that the virus exists, but is harmless. He points
out that AIDS, supposedly, does not develop until many
years after exposure to the virus. That requires the
hypothesis that there is something like a "lenticular"
(delayed reaction) virus at work. But no such
"lenticular virus" has been found to cause any other
disease, in humans. According to Duesberg and others in
his camp, the HIV virus is just a pussycat; infection
might bring on some mild flu-like symptoms, but there
should be no long term effects. The tests for the AIDS
virus don't really test for the presence of the virus
at all. Rather, they test whether a person has
developed antibodies against the virus. But with other
viruses, the development of antibodies generally means
that the individual has developed successful defenses
against the disease. Why, Duesberg argues, should the
AIDS virus be different?
Robert Gallo, the government scientist who claims to
have discovered the HIV virus, obviously takes a
different point of view. He asserts that the virus and
nothing but the virus is the cause of AIDS. So, indeed,
does every scientist and researcher employed by the
government or any private organization receiving
research money from the government. Dissenting views
are not permitted and, indeed, Duesberg has been unable
to obtain funds for his own research, and learned
scientific journals have refused to publish his papers,
lest they incur the ire of the "health establishment".
While I never did decide whether AIDS is caused by a
virus or by something else, I began to see, rather
clearly, that there is a "health establishment",
composed of officials in such agencies as the Public
Health Service, the Centers for Disease Control, the
National Institutes of Health, etc., and researchers
and scientists in the private center who depend upon
government funds for research grants. It also became
very evident to me that the health establishment is
very powerful; and that it enforces conventional and
rigid dogma and brooks no dissent.
Moreover, it soon became apparent that the health
establishment regularly "cooks the books"; that
statistics and other data are regularly folded, stapled
and mutilated to "prove" that the official dogma is
true. The CDC, for example, has changed the definition
of AIDS three times. Moreover, there is a trend to the
changes. Each time the definition was changed, it
included more and more women (under the latest
definition, any woman with cervical cancer who tests
positive under the official HIV tests is considered to
have AIDS). Furthermore, each change in the definition
broadened the number of people considered to have AIDS
so that, while using the original definition, the AIDS
epidemic appeared to be winding down, the new
definitions made it appear that the epidemic was
exploding.
I recalled that Matilda Krim, a private AIDS researcher
who receives government funds, had appeared on
television some 7 or 8 years ago, to state that there
were 2,000,000 HIV infected people in the U.S., and
that, supposedly, we'd soon see 2,000,000 cases of AIDS
(it didn't happen).
I asked myself, why were these people cooking the
books? The answer came through, loud and clear: MONEY.
The government folks wanted to expand and enlarge their
agencies and promote their careers; and the folks
outside government wanted more and more money for their
private research projects.
Up to that time, I'd pretty much accepted the
establishment view of smoking, i.e., that it's bad for
you and may lead to lung cancer. But when I saw what
the health establishment was doing in the field of
AIDS, I began ask myself some questions. Could it be
that the government figures on smoking, like those on
AIDS, were cooked to produce a desired result? I began
a two year research project, which resulted in this
book.
As a result of that project, I learned many things.
Most important, I'm afraid, I learned that government
statistics on smoking, like those on AIDS, cannot be
trusted. Important figures, like the 400,000 "smoking
related deaths every year", are made up out of whole
cloth. Studies which appear to refute the "dangers" of
smoking, e.g., animal studies or some of the second
hand smoke studies, are either ignored or subjected to
manipulation and distortion to make them fit the
official line.
I wrote this book to refute the wild, irresponsible and
untruthful anti-smoking propaganda which obscures the
truth. I do not expect it will ever make any money, nor
do I want it to make any money. Copies of the book were
sent to numerous publishers, but even the subsidy
publishers, who print and promote books for money, were
unwilling to take it. All of which proves that in this
country, "If you want a free press, you'd better own a
press".
Numerous people assisted me in the project. My wife,
Kristine, while a non-smoker, never-the-less encouraged
me in the effort and I dedicate this book to her. Peter
Petrakis, a former Washington, D.C., health writer now
living in Washington State, provided much of the early
material, including the Mark Twain quotes and the
autopsy studies. I drew ideas from writings posted on
the Internet alt.smokers newsgroup by such persons as
Joe Dawson, Robert Wagner, and Ed Dambik. Jennifer
Kraljevich did the cover design.
A disclaimer should not be necessary, but I furnish
one, anyway. I am not an employee of any tobacco
company. I own no tobacco stocks. I have never worked
for any tobacco company as a lawyer or in other
capacity. Neither am I a tobacco grower, nor do I
participate in any business of any kind in which I
profit from the growing, sale, or distribution of any
tobacco product.
Table of Contents | First Chapter: The Hysteria
<http://www.lcolby.com/b-chap1.htm>
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