Tobacco industry hypotheses

This article is part of the Tobacco portal on Sourcewatch funded from 2006 - 2009 by the American Legacy Foundation.

A tobacco industry hypothesis is any working theory that the tobacco industry considered as a way to demonstrate that tobacco-related diseases result from causative factors other than cigarettes. It can pertain to anything from smoking-related disease to target marketing, to scientific inquiry about their products, such as tobacco blends or chemical additives. You can research tobacco industry hypotheses by going to the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library and entering the search criteria "hypothesis."

Tobacco industry hypotheses:

• Smokers cause their own cancer
• Reverse Hypothesis (the "Carrot Memo": Lung disease causes smoking)
• The Constitutional Hypothesis (People have a genetic predisposition for difficulty adapting to the problems of existence that leads to early mortality)
• The Theory of Excesses (People by their nature engage in excessive behaviors, some to their own detriment, including cigarette smoking)
• Over-eating theory (attempted to link lung cancer to overeating)
• The Initiator-Promoter Hypothesis (British-American Tobacco, 1974) - (Pollution is the initiator)
• The Multi-factorial hypothesis - as science advances more factors come under suspicion as contributing to the

illnesses for which smoking is blamed -- air pollution, viruses, food additives, occupational hazards and stresses.

References

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