Tobacco companies deliberately suppressed their own addictive-product research to evade legal liability

Evidence

When research in one of Philip Morris’s laboratories verified that nicotine is addictive, lawyers in a tobacco-law firm warned the company that such findings are “undesirable and dangerous” because they provide fodder for lawsuits: “This kind of research is a major tool of our adversaries on the addiction issue. The irony is that the industry-sponsored research is honing that tool” (Meier, 1998c). To avoid learning about the health effects of their product, the company closed the laboratory. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1691

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The corporate structure of ignorance here — paying for research you intentionally refuse to learn from, closing labs so as not to ‘know’ — is a profound model of institutionalized bad faith that resists easy summary.
• XREF: connects to: Tobacco firms funded quality research to distract from smoking’s causal role — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 631; Tobacco executives publicly claimed no proof existed while privately knowing otherwise — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False…, 323; The tobacco industry invented science denial as public-relations strategy — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 63 (+1 more)