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

by Naomi Oreskes

net revenues of $2.25 billion. Despite the mounting political pressure to control tobacco sales and discourage tobacco use, Reynolds’s directors reported records for sales, revenues, and earnings, and the continuation of its seventy-year record of uninterrupted dividends to its stockholders. “Tobacco,” they concluded, “remains a good business.”79 Protecting that business—against regulation, punitive taxes, FDA control, and, especially, lawsuits—became a growing concern.80 Although 125 lawsuits related to health impairment were filed against the tobacco industry between 1954 and 1979, only nine went to trial, and none were settled in favor of the plaintiffs.81 Still, industry lawyers were increasingly concerned, in part because their insistence that the debate was still open was contradicted not just by academic science, but by their own internal company documents. To cite just one example: in 1978, the minutes from a British American Tobacco Company research conference concluded that the tobacco-cancer link “has long ceased to be an area for scientific controversy.”82 (Brown and Williamson lawyers recommended the destruction or removal of documents that spoke to