Industry has a history of concealing the health and safety dangers of products.

Millions of people have paid a price for corporate industry cover-ups. The latest culprits in the dragnet are oil companies, and documents that they were warned by their own scientists about the harm their product could have on climate change.

Journalists with access to Exxon's internal documents recently discovered the company not only knew about their impact on climate change as far back as 1977, but also spent millions of company dollars, actively promoting misinformation about the health concerns of their product.1

There is a long-standing tradition in the U.S. of using litigation to police corporate malfeasance, and it doesn't stop at oil company deceits. 

Foto por Mathew MacQuarrie en Unsplash

The great asbestos cover-up

Back in the 1980s, asbestos companies were famously found liable for not warning the public about the hazardous nature of their product. The connection between asbestos exposure and serious respiratory disease was uncovered in the 1930s. 

During this time, doctors began warning asbestos manufacturers and associated industries of the dangers. Despite these alerts, business owners consciously chose to withhold this information and continue raking in the big bucks - they didn't even provide any protective gear to their workers to prevent them from inhaling the dangerous fibers. This inaction was presumably to avoid the truth being uncovered and the bottom falling out of their profitable enterprise.

Corporate Cover-Ups Can Kill

1977 was quite a year for industry cover-ups.

In addition to the Exxon scientist's climate change warning, the infamous Ford Pinto internal corporate memo was published by Mother Jones. 

Known as the Pinto Memo, this document revealed that Ford knew their Pinto subcompact car was inadequately designed, raising the risk of its gas tank catching fire or exploding in an automotive accident. They decided to take a calculated risk, without informing the consumers.

And in 1977, the asbestos industry's decades-long cover-up was exposed.

A plaintiff's attorney suing on behalf of an industrial worker with asbestos illnesses discovered secret company documents dating back almost half a century. And so began the uncovering of one of the most harmful cover-ups in history, with letters and memoranda revealing asbestos executives' conscious pattern of concealing negative health and safety evidence about their product. 

Companies quietly paid off employees who developed health conditions due to asbestos, and when their own health research showed asbestos could cause cancer, edited it out of the published report.

Big Tobacco's history of misinformation

Sadly, this ruthless pursuit for profit-at-all-costs didn't end with those industries. 

In 1950, the British Medical Journal published an article that linked smoking tobacco to heart disease and lung cancer. Four years later, these findings were confirmed by the British Doctors Study, leading many individuals to sue the companies responsible for the manufacturing and marketing of cigarettes. By 1994, more than 800 private claims were brought against multiple tobacco companies across America.

The Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement

Then, in 1998, the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement was entered into by the attorneys general of 46 states and the four largest U.S. tobacco companies. These big four comprised Philip Morris inc., R.J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson, and Lorillard. These 'original participating manufacturers' agreed to cease a range of tobacco marketing practices and pay $206bn over the first 25 years.

Tobacco companies continue to manufacture and profit from the sale of their deadly products despite knowing the devastating harm they can cause. Yes, consumers are now also aware, yet tobacco companies know that they deal in a highly addictive product that prays on the easily influenced. How they sleep at night is anyone's guess.

It beggars belief that a carcinogen as deadly as asbestos was added to a product that already caused cancer and was then touted as a health protectant. 

But that's exactly what Lorillard Tobacco did in 1952, introducing their Kent cigarettes with a 'Micronite' filter - a filter containing a particularly deadly form of asbestos - claiming that this innovative filter design would protect smokers from much of the harmful effects of inhaling tobacco.

Kent Cigarette micronite filters

Made by compressing an asbestos fiber called Crocidolite, Kent asbestos cigarette filters were marketed as a high-tech safety feature. Given asbestos' heat-resistant qualities, blissfully ignorant consumers trusted that this was the modern way to enjoy cigarettes more 'safely'.

Crocidolite asbestos - also known as blue asbestos given its blue tinge - is considered to be the most hazardous type of asbestos in the amphibole family.

Blue asbestos is composed of extremely fine, sharp fibers that are particularly easy to inhale. 

Crocidolita is so harmful that studies have found it to potentially be responsible for more disease and death than any other type of asbestos. Ironically, crocidolite has since been found to be much less heat resistant than other forms of asbestos, yet perhaps the most deadly. 

How devastatingly wrong Lorillard cigarettes had it, though the company has denied that its asbestos filters were dangerous.

By the time Lorillard changed their filter design in 1956, smokers had puffed through around 13 billion of their micronite-filtered cigarettes; In doing so, they were unknowingly adding the treacherous inhalation of asbestos microfibers to the already-harmful effects of tobacco itself. 

Many decades later, and Lorillard is still answering to this, with hundreds of cases filed against them, including a standout ruling in 2013, in which over $3.5m was awarded in damages to a former Kent smoker. The former consumer had been struck down with mesothelioma - a deadly form of asbestos-related cancer that tends to show up decades after initial exposure occurs.

Which is worse - asbestos or tobacco?

Many smokers who develop respiratory disease in later life attribute their condition to having smoked cigarettes. However, a large study* incorporating all research on asbestos and smoking found clear links between the two. The findings included:

  • that there is no way to conclusively say that asbestos is not to blame for a person developing lung cancer after being exposed to it
  • that asbestos filters harm the respiratory system in ways that interact with smoking to cause cancer
  • that smokers exposed to asbestos are at a much higher risk of developing lung cancer than other smokers

Furthermore, a study** published by Cancer Research found that any person smoking a pack of asbestos-filtered cigarettes per day would take in over 131 million crocidolite/asbestos fibers in the course of one year. 

Conclusion

Fortunately, asbestos is no longer used in the manufacturing of cigarettes. Additionally, the rate of smoking in America is declining (from 42.6% of adults in 1965 to 13.7% in 2018). Yet, tobacco manufacturers continue fighting to stay in the game, trading health issues of epidemic proportions for bewilderingly vast profits. 

For now, we can be grateful that their industry has been far more stringently governed, and that asbestos no longer features in their products. Only time will tell whether the tobacco industry's corrupt cousins over in the oil industry will be successfully held accountable for their gross public wrongdoing.

 

1 Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 years ago , Shannon Hall, Scientific American (October 26, 2015).
* Klebe, S., Leigh, J., Henderson, D.W. and Nurminen, M., 2020. Asbestos, smoking and lung cancer: an update. International journal of environmental research and public health 17(1), p.258.
** Vujovæ, M., Vukoviæ, J. and Beg-Zec, Z., 2003. Enfermedad pleural y pulmonar maligna y no maligna relacionada con el amianto: estudio de seguimiento de 10 años. Public Health, 44(5), pp.618-625.