Taming nicotine : big tobacco's quest to hide and harness addiction
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Nicotine remains America's deadliest drug. By compelling smokers to reach for cigarettes day after day, it causes 480,000 deaths per year in the United States alone. And yet, nicotine is peculiar drug. Smoking a cigarette for pleasure or to stave off withdrawal is, at the end of the day, an off-label use of a powerful natural insecticide. How did this toxic and seductive alkaloid become America's drug of choice? Taming Nicotine: Big Tobacco's Quest to Hide and Harness Addiction draws on millions of formerly secret tobacco industry documents to argue that cigarette makers played a crucial role in 20th century American drug policy and addiction research. These secret documents show that nicotine has led two mutually reinforcing lives: in the first, hidden away in industry laboratories, it was a molecular entity, whose addictiveness industry scientists sought to understand in order to hook new generations of smokers. But nicotine also has had a second, more public, life as a carefully manipulated cultural object. Deploying an army of consultants, cigarette makers claimed that nicotine should not be considered a drug, because it didn't produce intoxication, and that smoking was a free choice (rather than an addiction) because smokers aren't "junkies." In combination, these efforts produced an unprecedented public health crisis that was predicated on both selling nicotine while keeping its addictive power hidden. This remains an unfinished history: even today nicotine has not relinquished its dual nature between the botany of murder and the neurochemistry of desire.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Risi, Stephan |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Proctor, Robert, 1954- |
| Thesis advisor | Proctor, Robert, 1954- |
| Thesis advisor | El Ghaoui, Laurent |
| Thesis advisor | Mullaney, Thomas S. (Thomas Shawn) |
| Thesis advisor | Olivarius, Kathryn Meyer McAllister, 1989- |
| Degree committee member | El Ghaoui, Laurent |
| Degree committee member | Mullaney, Thomas S. (Thomas Shawn) |
| Degree committee member | Olivarius, Kathryn Meyer McAllister, 1989- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of History. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Stephan Risi. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of History. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Stephan Risi
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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