Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

by Naomi Oreskes

Mrak was pulling a rhetorical switcheroo because it wasn’t environmentalists who argued everything was harmful; it was the tobacco industry. The industry insisted that everything from crossing the street to riding a bicycle was harmful, so tobacco should be viewed as just one of the routine risks that people accept by living life. The menace of daily life, some industry apologists called it.105 Life is dangerous. So is tobacco. Get used to it. So the tobacco industry argued. But there’s a world of difference between risks we choose to accept in exchange for rewards we want—like driving a car, drinking alcohol, or having unprotected sex—and having those risks imposed upon us against our will. There’s also a world of difference between the idea that evolution has equipped humans with some immunity to natural hazards and the idea that we somehow have immunity to something we’d never been exposed to in two million years of evolution. The secondhand smoke debate was crucial precisely because the risk wasn’t a choice and it wasn’t natural. It was a man-made risk that was being imposed without consent.