By the 1950s, tobacco executives held a lethal secret: their internal research proved cigarettes caused lung cancer and nicotine was fiercely addictive. Fearing financial ruin, they didn’t alter the product. Instead, they weaponized information.
In 1953, the CEOs of America’s largest tobacco companies devised a strategy to manufacture endless doubt. They formed a front group, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, to mimic independent science. They poured millions into funding flawed studies, hiring compromised scientists, and paying off medical professionals. Soon, advertisements featured smiling doctors asserting that the link between smoking and cancer was “not definitive.”
As one executive famously noted, “Doubt is our product.” By framing established scientific truth as an ongoing debate, …
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