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Comment by ren_engineer | Hacker News Reader

there was plenty of research available that smoking was bad as early as the 1920s, it just got silenced. Mainly because Germany was one of the countries that led the movement. Plus billions of dollars working to stop anybody trying to end the money printing from the tobacco industry

>In 1930s Germany, scientific research for the first time revealed a connection between lung cancer and smoking, so the use of cigarettes and smoking was strongly discouraged by a heavy government sponsored anti-smoking campaign

>After the Second World War, the German research was effectively silenced due to perceived associations with Nazism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_control

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>After the Second World War, the German research was effectively silenced due to perceived associations with Nazism

That's really interesting. I dug a little more into it[0]. Apparently the underlying reasoning was that the Nazis associated smoking with "degenerates" and damage to "bodily purity." So when the research hit the US, people must have associated anti-smoking with those Nazi ideas. I wonder if tobacco companies latched onto this momentum to keep their public image healthy?

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tobacco_movement_in_Nazi_...

That tradition hasn't died out yet. There are a ton of common sense things done in many European countries that aren't implemented in the US because of apparent links to "communism."

It is different, because USA was never communist country. And those who argue by "it is like communistm" typically have only very superficial understanding of history of Comunism and of culture it had. Or none at all often.

Could you give some examples? I am from a post communist country and am interested in what could be percieved as communist in the US. My guesses are publi transport and universal health care on the top 2 spots.

Universal health care is probably the best example. Another example is universal maternal leave.

Any sort of employee protection, paid vacation, maternity leave or sick time. Public transit as well.

Depends how deep into the south you go. It fares from clear ones, like government run anything, to extremes like mixing races, homosexuality, and anything the CDC says right now.

Basically Fox news uses "Communism" as a synonym for "things I don't like"

When did Big Tobacco start using all of the additives to up the addictive level of the things? Does that correlate to the timing of when they started using the "physician approved" nonsense?

I don't have a citation, just a hunch this coincided with the chemical revolution of the 1950's. I strongly suspect though smoking may have been correlated with poor health before then, that there probably were not 400K Americans dying of smoking-related illnesses every year until after the chemical revolution and the cigarette industry intentionally taking advantage of addiction by standardizing on precise and elevated nicotine-dosing as well as the infusion of 300 some carcinogens. So Big Tobacco loses a big case in the 1990's, must pay billions of dollars for intentionally making their product extremely addicting, but this punishment is lifted in the early 2000's without full payment. But, astoundingly, the Big Tobacco case and settlement overlooked a major detail (that the intentional addition of 300+ carcinogens, for the purposes of increasing addiction, were, in fact, extremely deadly, and that the industrialized process of creating deadly cigarettes isn't at all necessary for producing and selling tobacco products), which allowed Big Tobacco to continue creating a far more deadly and far more addicting product than tobacco, and thus, inexplicably actually, go on killing 400K Americans annually, and however many more worldwide. It really is the craziest thing.

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