LEBANON, N.H -- Joking that he was "making up for past family sins," Michael Cummings, a researcher at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute and the grandson of a cigarette company employee, criticized the tobacco industry in a lecture at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center on Thursday.
Focusing on the public health implications of tobacco use rather than the science behind these issues, Cummings addressed the expansion of smoking worldwide, the history of cigarettes, the reasons people smoke and how governments can combat tobacco use.
Cigarette smoking causes 7,500 deaths each week, Cummings said.
"Imagine if those deaths were caused by the 'evil-doers' out there, we'd probably do a lot more to fix it," he said.
Images of the Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar, Osama bin Laden and the founder of Phillip Morris then flashed on the screen behind him.
Cummings colored his lecture with a series of videos and jokes. The first video shown was a well-known mid-century cigarette advertisement with a chipper narrator asking, "What cigarette do you smoke, doctor?" followed by the assertion, "Surveys show more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette."
Cummings explained that the creators of the advertisement had placed Camel cigarettes in the hotel rooms of every doctor at a medical convention, then conducted a survey by asking them the next day what cigarettes they had with them.
There are two reasons people smoke, Cummings said, the first being that they are "confused" and the second that they are addicted to nicotine.
Tobacco companies have long muddled the truth with deceptive advertisements, marketing of "healthier" filtered cigarettes and questionable scientific research designed to maximize controversy, Cummings said.
"The people who eat applesauce die, the people who eat sugar die, the people who smoke cigarettes die," one tobacco executive said on video, arguing why it was impossible to prove that cigarettes are harmful.
Tobacco-funded research made headlines on Wednesday when The New York Times found that a Weill Cornell Medical College study on lung cancer relied heavily on funding from the Liggett Group Inc., a cigarette manufacturer.
Addressing the addictive quality of tobacco, Cummings described cigarettes as a product created through chemistry and engineering to deliver nicotine to the user's brain. He pointed out that tobacco companies have held patents on nicotine-free tobacco plants since the 1920s, but nicotine-free cigarettes have never been marketed.
He also drew attention to the wide variety of harmful and bizarre chemicals in every cigarette.
"They shouldn't call them Newports," he said mockingly. "They should call them New-Pees because they're loaded with urea."
Cummings said a wide range of strategies are available to public health officials to discourage smoking and help people to quit.
He cited an internal study by a tobacco company that showed doubling the price of cigarettes cuts consumption by 30 to 40 percent and another study suggesting that employees of companies that ban workplace smoking quit at twice as high a rate as other workers.
He also disputed any argument that governments need cigarettes for budgetary reasons, pointing out that in one year New York State earned $1 billion from cigarette taxes but spent $8 billion treating tobacco-related illnesses.
"There's a demand out there for smokers to get help to quit," he said, noting that demand for free nicotine patches overwhelmed New York City telephone networks after the city's ban on smoking indoors.
Cummings concluded with a parting shot at tobacco companies.
"They were liars 50 years ago and they're still liars today," he said.
Cummings' presentation, The Science Behind Population Based Interventions to Control Tobacco, is part of the Norris Cotton Cancer Center's grand rounds, a weekly lecture series for doctors, researchers and students.
