Given the case as put forth in "Tobacco Wars," it's amazing this country's jails aren't teeming with tobacco company executives. But even if they aren't, the show suggests, the road to hell will be.
A devastating, one-sided indictment of the tobacco industry, "Tobacco Wars" posits that the only reason people continue to smoke is the underhanded tactics it says are used by cigarette manufacturers.
Of course, that's not exactly true. Some people smoke because it calms their nerves (which is one of the reasons early cigarettes were so popular during World War I). Others smoke because it seems like a lesser vice than some of the other habits they could pick up. And still others smoke precisely because everyone tells them not to.
But "Tobacco Wars," a three-part co-production of the BBC and The Learning Channel (which explains why the series pays equal attention to Brits and Americans, to the exclusion of just about everyone else), makes no pretense about being balanced. What it does is try to figure out how something that is so clearly a health hazard remains largely unregulated and easily available.
The answer, according to the series, is basic economics: tobacco makes a lot of money for a lot of people, and those people are willing to do just about anything to keep the cash flow going. Over the years, that has grown from flashy gimmicks and deceptive advertising to suppressed scientific studies and even perjury.
Sometimes, the industry's tactics seem ludicrous, as when one executive suggests that government attempts to regulate tobacco will lead to government regulation of such other pleasurable activities as sex. But other tactics over the years have been far more clandestine -- and effective.
Tonight's Part 1, "Lighting Up," looks at the origins of both cigarettes -- a late-19th century invention that unwittingly made all of tobacco's dangerous properties even worse -- and smoking as a billion-dollar mega-industry.
It introduces some of the early major players, including Buck Duke, the tobacco mogul whose ham-fisted attempts to monopolize the tobacco industry led to bloodshed; heart surgeon Michael DeBakey, who before World War II became one of the first researchers to equate smoking with lung cancer, a rare disease until cigarettes made the scene; and marketer Edward Bernays, who had the bright idea of equating equal rights for women with cigarette smoking. If men frowned on women smoking cigarettes, Bernays' ad campaigns suggested, what better way to show equality than by lighting up?
