The Sick and Crazy Science Tobacco Companies Pursue to Get You Hooked

Those who complain about how the internet or advances in technology haven't done enough to make us smarter or better may not truly remember what life was like before either. For one, digging up any type of public or private information took loads more work, especially when offending parties, from governments to free-marketers, were allowed to hide behind arbitrary legalese and the lawyers who enforce it. Before the Internet, offenders worked in the shadows while their consumers and citizens were overexposed in the light.

But with organizations like the nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) and their various exercises in citizen journalism, those unhappy days have thankfully passed. Check out one of their more interesting wiki projects called Maximum Weirdness, which rifles through declassified files from the University of California, San Francisco's Legacy Tobacco Documents Library and posts both the boring and bizarre results on a wikipedia dedicated strictly to Big Tobacco's metaverse. It might sound like wonk work on paper, but the right mixture of keyword searches can produce some eye-opening, lung-crushing laughs. Or is that cries? You decide.

Consider the machines with electrostatic traps used to conduct analysis of tobacco smoke. On the surface it may read like science, but pulled roughly from a library file it feels like something out of the Terminator:

The machine is equipped with special controls for parameters such as puff duration, interval between puffs, number of puffs, automatic interruption of the puffs at a given butt length, expulsion of the butt, control of puff volume ... At the same time up to 20 cigarettes from different samples can be smoked ... The machine is suitable for both restricted and free smoking and a change between these two conditions can mechanically be achieved in a few seconds.

Normally, nitric oxide is a free radical pollutant belched from cars and factories, but who knew that having it mainlined into your penis from a couple of needles would give you an erection? Well, Tulane evidently, and now you. It's may be a urologist's dream, but most likely it's a cat's worst nightmare.

Of course, there are more damning documents. Brown and Williamson's 1967 brainstorming session suggesting cocaine-enhanced cigarettes or signing on Fonzi from Happy Days as a celebrity endorsement is a good one. One interesting British American Tobacco Company document puts nicotine's lethality into perspective, as its suits try to figure out ways to compete with harder drugs like heroin, cocaine and, yes, glue, all the while rationalizing that cigarettes might one day become as passe as pipes. Punch in some marketing keywords, and you'll find everything from proposals for celebrity smokers programs to cigarettes defiantly named after Death, or even the Black Death. The latter's brainstorming one-sheet, courtesy of Philip Morris, is especially tactical in turning tolerance on its head with a four-point Bill of Rights for people who may be able to indirectly kill you if you're near them while they're smoking. "Black Death cigarettes are a direct protest from smokers against the strongly increasing intolerant anti-smoke movement," it clumsily proclaims without irony about its ironically titled product. "Black Death smokers want to maintain their rights, and they do not want to be socially discriminated by arbitrary legal measures."