Not Cancer in a Carload
NORR, ROY
Not a Cancer in a Carload Science Looks at Smoking. Reviewed by Roy Norr By Eric Northrup. Editor, "Norr Newsletter on Smoking Coward-McCann. 190 pp. $3.00. and Health"; contributor, "Reader's...
...It features an introduction by Dr...
...Be that as it may...
...After all, no scientist has ever charged that opium, like cigarettes, may cause a heart victim to drop dead suddenly, or that hemp, like tobacco, is incontrovertibly associated with lung cancer...
...The filter-tip gadget had completely filtered out the chain-smoker's fears...
...But, judging by the way millions are rushing to the fake "health protection" of filter tips, not too many Americans are eager to play Russian roulette with their lives when the risk is cancer...
...Alton Ochsner of the famous Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans—the first great cancer surgeon to declare unequivocally that excessive smoking was a causal factor in lung cancer—is referred to in the book as "one of the small group of men of medicine who have convinced themselves, and many readers of the press, that smoke contains a powerful cancer-producing agent for humans...
...Life at best is a losing proposition...
...Happy days were here again...
...Northrup does not mention the series which the present reviewer wrote on "The Great Filter-Tip Hoax" almost a year ago...
...Sydney Russ, a "noted British cancer researcher," is that "of the world's three great smokes—tobacco, opium and hemp—tobacco is without doubt the least harmful to body and mind...
...The somber warnings of medical scientists that the more you smoke the quicker you die had dissolved into sound and fury, signifying nothing...
...contributor, "Reader's Digest" Until a few weeks ago, if you read the tobacco press, joy unconfined reigned in the cigarette industry...
...It includes the famous research team of the American Cancer Society...
...As Mark Twain puts it, nobody ever came out of it alive...
...After all, living is a series of calculated risks, the author declares in his concluding paragraph...
...It was the first to crash the smoke-barrier erected by the cigarette industry against the facts hitherto largely buried in medical literature...
...Science Looks at Smoking is by Eric Northrup, a writer on the staff of a medical house-organ published by a pharmaceutical company...
...Harry S. N. Greene, Yale pathologist...
...Science Looks at Smoking looks fondly in the direction of the cigarette huckster...
...It includes the Study Group on Smoking and Health—seven leading American scientists—appointed by the National Cancer Institute, National Heart Institute, American Cancer Society and American Heart Association, which reported that the "sum total of scientific evidence has established beyond reasonable doubt that smoking is a cause of the rapidly increasing incidence of lung cancer...
...What the outraged dope pushers will say to all this is quite another matter...
...Cigarette smoking—he quotes again—represents "a healthy adult continuation of the 'oral erotic impulse' which the baby expresses in suckling...
...Cigarettes are a reward—Northrup quotes—"that we can give ourselves as often as we wish...
...And profits taste good—"like a cigarette should...
...Now the "cancer scare" is back again, brought back by the findings that filter tips often funnel more nicotine and tars into the smoker's lungs than plain cigarettes...
...On the medical side, Dr...
...Their joint theme, which Northrup quotes approvingly from a book by Dr...
...Greene, whose scientific detachment is indicated by the fact that he never refers to his medical peers' findings other than by the phrase "cancer scare," has a low opinion of the massive statistical information which proponents of the tobacco-cancer theory have presented to date, and an even lower opinion of the pathologic findings and animal experimentation which point to excessive smoking as a cause of the worldwide lung-cancer epidemic...
...The tobacco forces have gathered behind this hurriedly prepared book...
...To yield small pleasures without protest is a thoughtless waste...
...Ex-smokers in droves were flocking back to their accustomed suck of nicotine and tars...
...On the whole, so completely is tobacco whitewashed of any serious effects on the human system that the book might have been better titled Not a Cancer in a Carload...
...The strumpet call of "Pleasure for sale...
...big, BIG pleasure" if you smoked 'em kingsize—was taking its toll of youth and bringing new profits to the industry...
...The "small" group now includes, among many others, the Surgeon-General of the United States, who recently announced on behalf of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare: "It is clear that there is now an increasing and consistent body of evidence that cigarette smoking is one of the causative factors in lung cancer...
...It includes the British Ministry of Health and the Medical Research Council (comprising the most eminent British medical opinion), as well as leading health authorities and cancer workers in Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, Finland, Czechoslovakia and other countries...
...Northrup indicates that the leading lay scaremonger was the author of "Cancer by the Carton," published "in a magazine that is read in tens of millions of copies"—referring, of course, to the Reader s Digest, which carried the report written by this reviewer in 1952...
...Gone was the "cancer scare...
Vol. 40 • September 1957 • No. 38
