Podcast appearances and mentions of Allan M Brandt

Bli med inn i underlivets mest gufne avkrok når Dr. Brochmann åpner skrekk-kabinettet! Hvordan skal vi egentlig forholde oss til våre uønskede gjester?Dagens gjest er lege, forfatter og kjønnssykdommenes mesterdetektiv Ellen Støkken Dahl.Kilder:● Ellen Støkken Dahl. I seng med fienden. Pelikanen, 2022.● Szreter & Siena. “The Pox in Boswell's London.” Economic History Review, 2021.● Wright. “Venereal disease and the great.” Br J Vener Dis, 1971.● Cynthia Gorney. “The ‘Social Hygiene' Campaign That Sent Thousands of American Women to Jail.”New York Times, July 31, 2018.● Ada McVean. “The American Plan to Win World War I: Incarcerate Promiscuous Women.” McGill University, 17 Feb 2023.● Allan M. Brandt. Ch.26 Sexually Transmitted Diseases. In Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, Vol I. Routledge, 1993.● Nils Uddenberg. Medisinens Historie – Lidelse og helbredelse. Dreyer forlag, 2018.● Gruber et al. “History of Venereal Diseases from Antiquity to the Renaissance.” Acta Dermatovenerol Croat, 2015.

Allan M. Brandt is a professor of the history of science at Harvard and author of The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America. He discusses the tobacco industry's 20th-century campaign to make its addictive and deadly product somehow acceptable — and its 21st-century campaign to do it all again.* FULL TRANSCRIPT *GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I'm Bob Garfield with Episode 6: Crime of the Century.OLCZAK: The prime cause of harm generated by the smoking is an outcome of the combustion. Okay? When you burn the cigarette, when you burn the tobacco you release the thousands of the chemicals. Many of those chemicals, they are very bad for the human body. If you eliminate the combustion, you actually can achieve a very, very significant reduction in exposure to the toxicants.GARFIELD: In our last episode, we heard from Philip Morris International CEO Jacek Olczak as he boasted about Philip Morris's plan to convert half of its business to non-combustible tobacco products by the year 2025 — a strategy that impresses Wall Street and part of the public-health community, but to others is merely reminiscent of a century of Big Tobacco manipulation, cynicism and fatal lies. In that story we heard briefly from Allan Brandt, professor of the history of science at Harvard and author of The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America. This week, we return to the professor and the subject of the Cigarette Century, so deadly and corrupt.Allan, welcome to Bully Pulpit.BRANDT: Thanks so much for having me.GARFIELD: The tobacco industry has a long and dark history, going back at least to the early 50s when the evidence of smoking's dangers became an existential threat to cigarette sales. Can you tell me what the research was at that turning point?BRANDT: There'd been a lot of research going all the way back to the middle of the 19th century about the possible harms of smoking, but there wasn't fully substantiated knowledge, I would argue, til right around 1950. But then things changed quickly and radically because a group of early epidemiologists, both in England and the United States, began to study smokers and what happened to their health, and they began to study lung cancer patients and what their smoking behaviors had been. And they came up with incredibly robust and important findings that were published around 1950, '52 and three, more studies by 1954. And all of them reached one absolute conclusion, which was that smoking was actually a cause of lung cancer and likely other diseases that would be studied subsequently, especially heart disease, stroke and other cancers.GARFIELD: So of course, the industry said, oh my God, this is terrible news. We can see that we're merchants of death and we will henceforth get out of the cigarette business and into selling wintergreen candy. Right?BRANDT: That's not exactly what happened. Here you have a multi-million dollar industry confronted by scientific evidence that their product causes disease and death. And so the tobacco executives started to put their heads together and figure out, how do we respond to this? Do we say the science is bad? Do we just disregard it? Do we try to incriminate the scientist who produced this? And eventually what happens is that in December, 1953, the six major CEOs of the big tobacco companies get together at the Plaza Hotel in New York to consider the way forward because they knew that they were in a massive crisis in terms of their industry. And they called in probably the nation's most powerful and influential public relations executive, John Hill, to consult with them. And he listened to them for a while. And then he said, I don't think you understand how to do this. What you need to do is create uncertainty. Don't deny that these studies have appeared. Just say there's much more we need to learn. We need more science. And in a sense, one of the things that Hill told them is if you don't like the science that's coming out, begin to develop your own science. Find skeptics, find marginal scientific and medical people, give them grants and have them produce science that will serve the interest of your industry. What the tobacco industry really introduced in the early to mid 50s was the idea: How can we confuse science? How can we obscure what's coming out? How can we make people say, you know, there's a debate, we just don't know? A lot of physicians and scientists were coming out, 1952, 1953, saying we need to regulate cigarettes, we need to tell our patients to quit. A lot of doctors did quit and by the early 1960s, the industry's campaign — based on Hill's principles — really led to people saying we just don't have enough evidence yet.GARFIELD: Now, as you mentioned, 70 years ago the research showed the correlation between cigarette smoking and cancer based on health outcomes and behaviors for large study populations. But it wasn't laboratory science on a cellular level. So this opens some space for creating doubt, circumstantial evidence, blah, blah, blah. You have identified the industry's three pronged strategy.BRANDT: Yes. The three points were essentially that the evidence of the harms of smoking were inconclusive, that cancers had many causes and what we would really need is much more intensive research to resolve a publicly important question and that no one was more committed to the idea of learning more, investigating more completely and resolving this question. And then, of course, if we ever do find anything in cigarettes that might be harmful, we will take the lead in fixing our product and assuring the health of the public.GARFIELD: Yeah, like this Chesterfield commercial from the late fifties. The interviewer was a familiar face to the audience of the day: George Fenneman.GEORGE: As you watch, an electronic miracle is taking place as a stream of electrons creates this television picture. Here tonight is another electronic miracle, destined to affect your lives even more than television. This new electronic miracle, AccuRay, means that everything from auto tires to ice cream, battleship steel to cigarettes, can be made better and safer for you. Now meet Mr. Bert Chope, brilliant young president of Industrial Nucleonics. Well Bert, exactly what is AccuRay?CHOPE: Well, George, it is a device by which a stream of electrons passes through and analyzes the product while it is actually being made. They transferred what they see to this electronic brain, which adjusts the production machinery for errors down to millionths of an inch.GEORGE: Well, I always ask the question so many people ask me. How does AccuRay make Chesterfield a better cigarette than was ever possible before?CHOPE: Every cigarette made with AccuRay control contains a more precise measure of perfectly packed tobaccos, so Chesterfield smokes smoother, without hotspots or a hard draw.GEORGE: That's why Chesterfield tastes better and is best for you. Bert, what's your cigarette?CHOPE: You see, I know what AccuRay can do.GARFIELD: “Better for you,” like Kent's micronite filter and Marlboro Lights were supposedly — but not actually — better for you. But apart from — excuse the expression “puffery” — they stacked the deck with putatively legitimate scientists.BRANDT: They found a group that was hostile to epidemiology, that was committed to the idea that cancers have to be genetic. They hired a lot of people who were highly sympathetic to eugenic notions of genetics and elitism. And then the other thing they did is they gave out a lot of money to scientists. So in my research, I found a young scientist — his grant from the government had run out and they were very good at identifying these folks who were not really fully succeeding and saying, well, we can give you a grant and here's what we want you to do. And then when they produced papers, they edited the papers, they turned them around. Whenever there was a paper that seemed to be hesitant about the connection between smoking and disease, they would make sure it appeared in the press. And they really said there are two sides to this story. The media, in a sense, supported the Hill principles because the media was very committed to the idea that every story has two sides.GARFIELD: The same kind of false balance in, let's say, climate coverage, where climate denialists are given, you know, equal time with global scientific consensus.BRANDT: What the climate science world is based on are the principles of what today are widely called the tobacco industry playbook. So you set up these, like, industry funded, so-called independent research agencies — you know, the Center for Indoor Air Research. And what it turns out is that they're funded by industry and they collect scientists and materials as if they were independent. And the tobacco industry worked very, very concertedly to produce this alternative. And one of the arguments I'm prepared to make is the tobacco industry invented disinformation at this scale.GARFIELD: You were talking about the the cult of false balance, which is a longstanding journalistic reflex. But there's something else, and that is that as a revenue source, tobacco advertising was one of the two or three largest sectors for television and newspapers and magazines. So while the harm of tobacco was reported, there were huge disincentives for the media into taking sides. Do you think that that disincentive was corrupting?BRANDT: I do. I think that one of the things that the tobacco industry also invented, in a sense, were these very powerful conflicts of interest and in the largesse of the companies and their deep pockets really corrupted a number of critical social institutions, to some degree journalism. But in many ways, I would emphasize how it corrupted our political processes. And today, we give a lot of attention to special interest lobbying and contributions to political campaigns that we understand have undermined our democratic processes, especially around issues of science. The first part of Hill's principles, and part of what became the tobacco industry playbook, was to invest in campaigns and invest in politicians and shape their views on legislation through these funds. So, the industry invented disinformation, but it also created the kind of special interest lobbying. So, I sort of go from tobacco. We could include guns. The beverage industry has done a lot of this. And, of course, most notably right now is that the big energy oil companies have utilized so many of these techniques that are familiar for me from investigating the history of tobacco.GARFIELD: When it came to influencing the public and manipulating behavior, it turns out that these were not inexperienced people. As you wrote in the previous half of the 20th century, the industry, quote, “took a product that had existed at the cultural periphery and remade it into one of the most popular, successful and widely used items of the early 20th century.” You know, it's hard to imagine that there was a time when cigarette smoking was relatively marginal. How did they engineer its path from marginal to ubiquitous?BRANDT: The rise of popular smoking is one of the most remarkable stories in the history of mass consumer culture. The industry, through some very brilliant marketing and thinking, was able to take a product — little used, on the margins of society; actually quite a stigmatized product, late 19th century — and absolutely turn it around. They were very aware of the power of mass media, and they focused on making it for youth and making it cool. They focused on making it sexy and they realized that they had a potential to manipulate the culture. There was sort of the notion that cigarettes and American culture didn't fit, that we emphasize productivity, individual responsibility, no idleness. A lot of our culture was hostile to pleasure. And they inverted this. There are many examples of people like Edward Bernays, who was a giant early 20th century thinker in advertising and public relations. And he hired women to march in the Easter Day parade smoking cigarettes because women, it had been thought, shouldn't smoke in public. There were a lot of issues about women taking up smoking, and he associated cigarettes with women's rights and suffrage. So there was a strategic approach to popularizing cigarettes that was incredibly effective. And of course, you have this added advantage with cigarettes that when you do get people to smoke, you also get them addicted. Bernays went to the Hollywood studios and asked them to portray characters that smoke and brought cigarettes into the movies in an intense way. It didn't just happen. It's just an unbelievable story. Almost no one smokes in 1900, especially not cigarettes, and by 1950, 1960, we're very close to a majority of all adults smoking. And the impact that that had on health and continues to have on health has just been devastating.GARFIELD: The Hollywood story is just extraordinary, because not only did the rise of motion pictures parallel the rise of tobacco usage in the world, actors were eager to embrace it because, as you mentioned, you know, it was sexy, but also, also — dude! — it gave them something to do with their hands.BRANDT: Absolutely, and it was like, this is a prop. I'm giving it to you. It's going to appeal to our consumers. They hired many major movie stars who smoked in their movies to then do advertisements for them.GARFIELD: From Ronald Reagan to Mary Tyler Moore to the rugged and macho John Wayne.JOHN WAYNE: Well, after you've been making a lot of strenuous scenes, you like to sit back and enjoy a cool, mild, good-tasting cigarette. And that's just what Camels are, mild and good-tasting pack after pack. I know, I've been smoking ‘em for 20 years. So why don't you try ‘em yourself. You'll see what I mean.GARFIELD: Frank Sinatra actually sang about his cigarette TV sponsor.FRANK SINATRA: Cheeeesterfield. You start with a Grade A tobacco, the best that you can get. It's the sound of big pleasure, the sound I'll be making for Chesterfield in this time spot every week. It'll be easy for me because Chesterfield is my brand. It has been for years.GARFIELD: And Winston brokered a truly historic celebrity deal — or, anyway, prehistoric.BARNEY RUBBLE: Winston packs rich tobaccos specially selected and specially processed for good flavor in filter smokin'.FRED FLINTSONE: Yeah, Barney, Winston tastes good, like a … cigarette should.GARFIELD: Yes, decades before before the cartoon Joe Camel outraged the public by targeting kids, R.J. Reynolds managed to co-opt the appeal of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble — neither of whom actually smoked Winstons, because they were animated characters from the Stone Age. The point being, though, that before anyone ever used the word “influencers,” Big Tobacco purchased endorsement from whomever conferred authority?BRANDT: Many sports figures, movie actors, famous people, doctors, and they helped create this sort of cult of influence and personality. GARFIELD: Doctors. DOCTORS.NARRATOR: Yes, folks, the pleasing mildness of a Camel is just as enjoyable to a doctor as it is to you or me. And according to this nationwide survey, more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.GARFIELD: So before 1952, when the epidemiology started piling up, these guys were wizards at social engineering. And so now it came time to turn those skills on the problem of debunking legitimate science. And hence the playbook you've described. Now, 1953 was 1953, but over time the epidemiological smoking guns were being validated by lab research, cancer in mice and eventually a more fundamental understanding of the effects of tar, nicotine and other chemicals at a cellular level. But controversy was the industry story and they were sticking with it. BRANDT: Yes, it worked for a very long time until it began to erode, because of the concerns that began to arise in the late 1950s, but especially the 1960s, about negligence and responsibility for the tobacco companies through torts and suits.GARFIELD: Product liability.BRANDT: Yes. And so the lawyers kind of took over the strategy by 1960, certainly by 1964. And they said we don't have any choice, because otherwise the liabilities to the industry and information that we know it's harmful would undo the financial structure of the universe of the industries. And there are many ironies about this. Like, you sort of think, well, labeling cigarettes was a public health benefit. And at first the industry opposed labeling, but then the lawyers shift. They say, well, we actually need a label to protect us from liability. So, you know, the first label said: caution, cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health. Actually, its biggest implication was that it protected the companies from liability.GARFIELD: And if anyone said, well, how, you know, how could you have not warned us? They said, well, we did warn you.BRANDT: The companies would say, well, you were aware that there was a label on the package, weren't you? And the litigant would say, yes, I was. And then they say, well, how can you hold our company responsible? And that's the way it went for a long time, really, until the 90s. And then a variety of forces began to direct very damning evidence to the companies. And one is it became very clear that the companies had maintained high levels of nicotine to keep smokers addicted.GARFIELD: But in April 1994, at Congressman Henry Waxman's House hearing on tobacco, under questioning from Congressman Ron Wyden, seven CEOs of major tobacco companies lied under oath — not only about augmenting the effect of nicotine in their products, but that nicotine was the drug that hooked smokers to begin with. The Surgeon General, the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization and others were unanimous, but …REP. WYDEN: Lemme begin my questioning on the matter of whether or not nicotine is addictive. Lemme ask you first — and I'd like to just go down the row — whether each of you believes that nicotine is not addictive. I heard virtually all of you touch on it and just, yes or no, do you believe nicotine is not addictive?CEO: I believe nicotine is not addictive, yes.REP. WYDEN: Mr. Johnston?CEO JOHNSTON: Congressman, cigarettes and nicotine clearly do not meet the classic definitions of addiction. There is no intoxication.REP. WYDEN: Alright, we'll take that as a no. And again, time is short. If you could just, I think of each of you believe nicotine is not addictive. We just would like to have this for the record.CEO: I don't believe that nicotine or our products are addictive.CEO: I believe nicotine is not addictive.CEO: I believe that nicotine is not addictive.CEO: I believe that nicotine is not addictive.CEO: I, too, believe that nicotine is not addictive.REP. WYDEN: Dr. Campbell, I assume that you're aware that your testimony, and you've said in your testimony that nicotine is not addictive, is contradicted by an overwhelming number of authorities and associations. For example, in 1988 the surgeon general of the United States wrote an entire report on this topic. The surgeon general, of course, is the chief health advisor to our government. I assume you have reviewed that report.DOCTOR: Yes, I have sir.BRANDT: So that was one thing. The industry fought this tooth and nail, but the evidence really was rising all the time, that smokers could create risks for nonsmokers, especially indoors. And if Americans have a view that it's up to me and I'll take my risks, they're very sensitive to the idea of risks being imposed on them by others. And the change in indoor smoking bans, workplace smoking bans, getting smoking off of airplanes, all these things, I think, undermined the notion that this is a good and healthy product. And these were all elements of the decline of tobacco in the United States. The one other issue that I really wanted to raise here, though, is that the industry had always been focused on getting young smokers. They had to go get younger smokers if they were going to — the word they use — replace the smokers who were dying and the creation of the tobacco market was in the youth market. And often the youth market is an illegal market. For many years, you couldn't buy cigarettes til you were 16 or 18. The number kept going up. So in the 90s, and a lot of people remember this, you know, there was the famous Joe Camel comic book campaign.GARFIELD: Joe Camel was a cartoon.BRANDT: Yes, a cartoon character. Totally cool. Flying jets, getting women, hanging out in clubs. And a lot of the information from the development of that campaign is now fortunately in the archives because R.J. Reynolds was sued.BERNSTEIN: The commission's complaint alleges that this campaign was used to promote an addictive and dangerous product to children and adolescents under the age of 18, and that this practice is illegal.GARFIELD: That was Jodie Bernstein, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, in May of 1997.BRANDT: And so I think these things together, you know, the idea that secondhand smoke was harmful to others, that the companies had manipulated cigarettes to be more highly addictive at a time that they said we're trying to protect the public, the appeal to kids. These are the things that led to the kind of crisis of the industry that in some ways it remains in and is looking for strategies to emerge from.GARFIELD: We discussed how the surgeon general warning actually turned out to have the ironic effect of creating legal impunity for the industry. But these smoking guns you're describing, like the marketing to kids, like the documentary evidence that they had added nicotine to tobacco and the science on second hand smoke, they ultimately would give power to litigation that was able to do what legislatures and regulators could not do. And that was to hold the industry accountable.BRANDT: Yes, there was a shift in litigation strategy, in the 90s, from smokers who had been harmed being the plaintiffs, to a very innovative strategy where the state said, well, we pay all these monies to take care of people who your companies have caused to be ill, and you need to compensate our states for the health care expenses that we have had associated with smokers. And it was in the many billions of dollars. And so this states' litigation, brought by attorneys general, turned out to be in many ways quite successful and resulted in what's called the master settlement agreement at the end of the 90s that agreed to pay the states 246 billion dollars to compensate them for the costs that they had had.GARFIELD: Again in 1997, this was Mississippi attorney general Mike Moore taking a victory lap before the assembled Washington press.MOORE: We wanted this industry to have to change the way they do business, and we have done that. We wanted the industry to stop marketing to their products to our kids, and we have come up with a comprehensive plan that will do that. We wanted to do something that would punish this industry for their past misconduct, and we have done that. And we wanted to make sure  that every single person, not only in America but this entire world, knows the truth about what the tobacco industry has done to the people of this world over the last 50 years, and we are satisfied that we have done that.GARFIELD: At approximately the same time as the master settlement was put into force — and this quarter of a trillion dollars penalty to the industry seemed to be a huge turning point, and tobacco usage has plummeted worldwide since then, so I guess it was a turning point — but it happened at the same time that Francis Fukuyama published his book The End of History, which was predicting essentially that liberal democracy had taken hold the world over and that authoritarianism and the forces of reaction were just going to fade into oblivion. That turned out to be prematurely burying ultraconservative politics. And, equally it seems to me that the master agreement prematurely buried the notion that the tobacco industry was on the skids, on the way to oblivion. It did not play out that way.BRANDT: It didn't at all. And we have a notion here in the United States and many countries in Western Europe that we've seen this dramatic decline in smoking. It's no longer a favored cultural behavior. Many, many thousands, millions of people have quit smoking or died from smoking. But the industry had a long term strategy that said, smoking is on decline in wealthy, highly educated societies. So where can we effectively market cigarettes now?GARFIELD: So let's talk about that, because the industry now says: Yes, cigarettes cause cancer, heart disease, hypertension, emphysema and a host of other conditions. And it is our strategy to reduce our revenues associated with combustible cigarettes by 50 percent. And the elephant in the room is the other 50 percent of their revenues. So, on the one hand, they're acknowledging that they are selling a lethal product. And on the other hand, they're saying, and we will continue to do so to the tune of billions and billions of dollars and hundreds of millions of lives. One scarcely knows where to begin, but where does?BRANDT: And this is one of the most diabolical aspects of the changes in the United States and other similar countries — during the 80s and 90s and the early 2000s — is that going all the way back to the 1950s and 60s when the threats to tobacco began to arise, the companies were looking at markets in China, East Asia, Africa, Latin America. So most people think that — and these are the projections of the World Health Organization — that 100 million people died in the 20th century as a result of smoking and that in this century, one billion people will die, 10 times as many, because of the explosion of combustible cigarettes around the world. So I look at the move to e-cigarettes and vaping, as kind of the latest strategy that's really part of this wider history that I've been examining. We need to be very skeptical of these companies that claim that they've crossed over to legitimate health oriented products because they've made these claims since the 1950s. They told Americans, you know if you're worried about smoking, smoke filter cigarettes and that was the beginning of Marlboro. You know, you had a cowboy smoking a safe cigarette, which turned out not to be the case. So I'm very skeptical and worried about the current situation with vaping, e-cigarettes, other nicotine related products, and the idea that we're just a responsible company trying to mitigate the harms that our principal product has produced for over a century. Many of my colleagues, who have advocated with me for tobacco control, thought, well maybe this is the answer. There would be a harm reduction product that would vastly reduce the health impacts of combustible tobacco and lead to a radical change in the epidemiology of tobacco related deaths in the 21st century. They believe that we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.GARFIELD: Not an uncompelling argument.BRANDT: But what they also realized is people don't start using nicotine products as adults. So, we created a remarkable human-made health crisis through the aggressive introduction of e-cigarettes and vaping without any scientific evidence that they actually served harm reduction, or only minimal and often industry sponsored evidence that they could do that. And so, the history of Juul and vaping as a company is very informative. Juul always claimed, all we want to do is produce a safe product for people who want to switch from tobacco to a vape. But, it now appears that was a big lie because the Juul executives and the company had to understand how much of their market was in underage use of the product. And they addicted thousands and thousands of this generation of young people to nicotine, many of whom are bearing those consequences now, some of whom switch to combustible tobacco. So, it's made me very skeptical of an industry that says: we learned our lesson and we have great products.GARFIELD: Now, I don't ask these questions for no reason. This is 2021, and the same industry that has so corrupted science and research for most of a century is now claiming that it's smoke-free strategy of noncombustible cigarettes is just following the science, that they are asking us to cleave to the science in making decisions personally and as a society. And, you know, how do you feel about that?BRANDT: Well, I just think this is consistent with the strategies that they invented and utilized for a very long time, and as you probably know, just in the last month it was reported that a journal, the American Journal of Health and Behavior, published a entire issue on harm reduction and Juul vaping. It became clear and it was widely reported in the press that the issue of this journal was completely paid for by Juul and the work was done in Juul labs. And so, they return to this strategy of, we can produce the science. And it has muddied the waters and diluted the authority that science really needs to have positive public health impacts. And we really need science. And science has to speak with expertise and authority and validity and clear and aggressive peer review. And we need to know the difference between something that you know is a fact and something that obscures facts. It's a challenge to the planet right now when we think about climate change and its regulation and the intense capital that's involved.GARFIELD: The scorpion stings the frog to death and says, it is my nature.BRANDT: Yes, and in these instances, profits and more profits obscured the consequences. And, we see that honestly with Purdue Pharma. We see it at Juul. We see it in many of the major energy companies. And these strategies of, we can control this space, has really been incredibly harmful to all of our human health.GARFIELD: I already asked this question in a different way, but I'm gonna offer this one up as well. Just putting aside the unknown effect of noncombustibles, even if it achieves its smoke-free goal, half of Philip Morris's revenue will still come from cigarettes people set fire to and inhale, which means millions and millions more deaths around the world. The estimate I saw was six to seven million souls per year around the world, which is a Holocaust per year. If Philip Morris is suddenly so enlightened, by what moral calculus can it continue to kill millions of human beings with their products?BRANDT: It's been a question for the industry since the middle of the 20th century. They have a product that's highly addictive and incredibly harmful and it's incredibly profitable. It involves a lot of powerful people losing a lot of money and they just can't give it up. That's a gigantic problem in relationship to capitalism and health.GARFIELD: We talked about the playbook, how the strategy forged in January, 1953, in the Plaza Hotel has not only dictated Big Tobacco's moves, but also those of the gun lobby and the fossil fuels industry. I don't know, Big Sugar.BRANDT: Yes.GARFIELD: And other industries that cause direct harm to the people who legally use their products. And those initiatives, in those other industries, have us on the brink of planetary destruction. I mean, I don't think I'm hyperventilating here. The techniques that we have described have created and fostered so many existential harms that one wonders what chance have we? Can we make the case that we're discussing crimes against humanity here and the tobacco industry is accountable not only for the deaths from its products, but from the toll of these other industries who embraced tobacco's game plan?BRANDT: Well, I think these are massive crimes and I'm not without hope, but I do think the kinds of crises that we're becoming more aware of have the potential to motivate changes in our politics, our policy, our regulation. So, the combination that we've seen this year of Covid-19, of radical changes in the climate that are changing our weather and threatening health in that way, have to be taken seriously, immediately. I think it's going to take changes in our political strategies and orientations to do that. But the revelations of how these companies behave is an important element to that and understanding what they're doing, how they're doing it, exposing the playbook when it's being used so successfully, is a critical element to building the will to really take this on.GARFIELD: Allan, with a little bit of trepidation, I'd like to one more time revisit the infamous Plaza Hotel conference and offer a historical analogy. In early 1942, the Nazi High Command held a secret conference in a villa in the Berlin suburb, Wannsee, to forge the Final Solution for the so-called Jewish question, namely the destruction of the Jews in Europe. So that was fateful in the worst way. Now, the meeting you're describing, that took place not quite 12 years later, has the tobacco industry convened at the Plaza to forge a strategy for the so-called, these were their words, tobacco question — in this case, by destroying scientific consensus through disinformation and doubt. Now, I'll get flak for this, along Godwin's Law lines, because the Holocaust claimed six million Jewish lives. But in the balance of the 20th century, tobacco claimed on the order of 350 million human lives, which I guess until the advent of the climate crisis, may have been history's most lethal crime against humanity. What took place at this conference?BRANDT: Well, I think what Hill was able to do was to appeal to a kind of psychological rationalization on people who had spent their whole careers in this tobacco industry culture. They said, well, we've always had a controversial product. There have always been people against us. They'd convinced themselves, I think at least at first, that there really was some ambiguity and that there really was some uncertainty. But rather than that being marginal to the way we understand science, Hill's strategy gave it a bullhorn, and so when Congress would have hearings about are cigarettes harmful or not, there was always a kind of notion, the tobacco control people and the epidemiologists will come in and then the industry scientists will come in. And I think publicly we were quite naive about how that worked, and now we can look back and see into it that this is the origins of industrial disinformation, misuse of science at the tremendous costs of public health and global health that you just mentioned.GARFIELD: So, going back to my analogy, that grim analogy, is it overheated? Is it unhelpful? Is it irresponsible?BRANDT: I wouldn't say it's unhelpful, but I do think that it's probably good to look at this kind of industrial impact on death and disease in a slightly different context than the Holocaust and Nazi decision making. They both do reflect a fundamental disregard for human life and a series of psychological rationalizations that are sold to the public and are based in fundamental misconceptions about what we know and how we know it. But as you say, it's a politically fraught analogy. The notion of these people were evil and they did something horrendous, it sometimes can obstruct our ability to see the mechanisms of work at how industries have exploited public health for incredible financial gain and greed.GARFIELD: Allan, thank you very much.BRANDT: It's really been great to talk to you.GARFIELD: Allan Brandt is professor of the history of science at Harvard and author of The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America.(THEME MUSIC)GARFIELD: All right, we're done here. Now then, Bully Pulpit is produced by Mike Vuolo and Matthew Schwartz. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Bully Pulpit is a production of Booksmart Studios. I'm Bob Garfield. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

The 174-year-old tobacco company spent much of its life blowing a cloud of deceit around the deadly effects of its signature product. Now eager for a do-over, PMI's highly advertised “Unsmoke the World” initiative seems strangely noble, until you start asking questions.* FULL TRANSCRIPT *TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in.BOB GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I'm Bob Garfield. This is episode five: Where There's No Smoke, There's Fire.It's been a hot and violent and infectious and altogether unsettling summer, in the midst of which — in the New York Times and all over the internet — emerged this: Philip-Morris International CEO Yatzick Olczak in an ad campaign speaking about the dangers of cigarettes.OLCZAK: The science exists today and there is no time to spare to solve the problem of smoking.The problem of smoking? From the maker of Marlboro's? There's an attention getter. A bona fide Merchant of Death vowing to phase out cigarettes in favor of so-called smoke-free products, like his company's non-combustible IQOS.TUTORIAL: Say hello to new IQOS heat control technology. Using it couldn't be easier. Remove the IQOS holder from the pocket charger, insert the tobacco stick tobacco side down in the holder and up to the silver line. Turn on, and when the LED turns solid green you can start to experience the true taste of real tobacco by heating, not burning it.The goal, Philip Morris says, is for smoke-free products to represent half of the company's revenue within four years. “Unsmoke the world,” is the slogan.OLCZAK: The prime cause of harm generated by the smoking is an outcome of the combustion. Okay? When you burn the cigarette, when you burn the tobacco you release the thousands of the chemicals. Many of those chemicals, they are very bad for the human body.Olczak says this as if it's a fresh revelation, but it's still jarring to hear Phillip Morris, of all institutions, speak of smoking as a scourge. And to bet the corporate future on a gizmo that aims to obsolete its core product. Listen to the man's frustration that there are skeptics who are not immediately accepting IQOS as a triumph of science and technology.OLCZAK: I do recognize that there is still a group of people who don't believe us. That's fine. So, it's perfectly okay to disagree with us, but it is not perfectly okay to deprive yourself from the ability to have a dialogue with us, to listen, to have a conversation, to read our science. We know that our vision is right, because of the impact PMI has on the society to solve the problem of smoking and the faster we recognize this whole thing and start working on a strategy, the better we all together will be.Oh, OK, now he's playing more to type — informing us that it is unacceptable to ignore Big Tobacco on the question of reducing tobacco's harm. Oh, is it now? Those of us of a certain age can vaguely remember — whaddayacallit? —  the 20th century, during the entirety of which Big Tobacco denied, for example, any link to cancer.REP. WAXMAN: In a deposition last year, you were asked whether cigarette smoking causes cancer. Your answer was, quote, “I don't believe so.” Do you stand by that answer today?TISCH: I do, sir.REP. WAXMAN: Do you understand how isolated you are in that belief from the entire scientific community?TISCH: I do, sir.That was from a 1994 hearing of the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, in which Congressman Henry Waxman famously confronted Lorillard CEO Andrew Tisch and six other tobacco bosses. But “isolated” wasn't the half of it. For decades, the industry denied links to heart and lung disease, denied the addictiveness of nicotine, denied chemically augmenting nicotine's effects, denied marketing to children — all the while actively undercutting scientific findings, actively producing junk science, falsely claiming filtered and so-called “light” cigarettes were safer and propping up a variety of sciency-sounding front groups — such as the Council for Tobacco Research — that seemed all distinguished and s**t but existed only to obscure the deadly truth about smoking. Which is why, by the way, when Philip Morris noisily pledged $80 million to help underwrite The Foundation for a Smoke Free World, both the World Health Organization and the UN General Assembly cited conflict of interest in telling Big Tobacco to butt out.Nonetheless, the promise of getting the deadly smoke out of smoking has captured many an imagination, including Wall Street's, which has rewarded Phillip Morris and other tobacco makers with bigger share prices and rosy outlooks from stock pickers. Because, the thinking goes, while it's counterintuitive to steer into a skid, that's the way to regain traction.PUNDIT: This is all kind of part of Philip Morris's general rebranding away from smoking products and cigarettes. And they're really seeing the writing on the wall here as cigarette sales in higher income countries continue to dwindle and they're coming under increasing pressure from many governments to curtail their cigarette sales. It's really become in their best interest to kind of make this general shift away from cigarettes and nicotine.That's from Britain's I24 business news. Lo and behold, analysts from Chase, Stiffel Nicklaus, UBS, JP Morgan, Morningstar Research and stock-predictor engine Trefis, have rated Philip Morris International a buy. At about 100 bucks a share, it's price has grown more than 40% in the past 10 months.Of course, while stock prices are historically a highly reliable measure of public sentiment, one thing the free market is notoriously free of is conscience. As a universe, investors are concerned with ongoing earnings growth and nothing else, which is why, as the planet burns to a cinder, Exxon Mobil's share price has doubled in the past year. What's surprising about the smoke-free strategy is that it also has been embraced by a significant cohort of the public health community. This is an excerpt of a video from Public Health England, in which doctors Lion Shahab and Rosemary Leonard show a dramatic experiment comparing the output of burning tobacco versus the nearly pristine vapor from smokeless cigarettes.SHAHAB: My research shows that e-cigarettes are significantly less harmful than cigarettes. A big reason why is the tar, which you can see here, which is not produced by e-cigarettes but produced by cigarettes. The impact of using e-cigarettes in the long-term is very similar to using licensed nicotine products such as nicotine patches or nicotine gum, as you can see here when you compare the control jar with the vapor jar.LEONARD: So, this experiment shows that every cigarette you smoke causes tar to enter your body and it's the tar that contains the poisonous chemicals that spread through the bloodstream.SHAHAB: Which are linked to diseases such as heart disease, stroke and cancer.That's one view. There is also an opposite one, as voiced by Dr. Vinayak Prasad, head of the World Health Organization's tobacco control division.PRASAD: Switching from cigarettes to e-cigarettes is not quitting, number one. Number two, we don't see the smokers switch to e-cigarettes 100 percent. The dual use is again very harmful. What we are also seeing is that more and more younger people are taking to e-cigarettes and then later progressing to tobacco.As for Philip Morris, he told the UK's Bureau of Investigative Journalism, quote:If they really want to be a part of the solution, they should go tobacco-free, not smoke-free. If they are genuine about a tobacco-free society, they will readily embrace anything to reduce the demand for all forms of tobacco products.Anything else, he says, is a “criminal act and a human rights violation.”In other words, within the tobacco-control universe, a schism — a polarizing debate hinging on the lesser of two evils. Ruth E. Malone is a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, and editor of the journal Tobacco Control.MALONE: We are adding all these new additional products and we are still sorting out what the overall public health impact of that is going to be. So is the impact going to be that, as some people say, it definitely is helpful for them in getting off cigarettes, but others revert back to smoking cigarettes and you just have a larger market of people using tobacco and nicotine products rather than actually reducing the damage from those products.The Public Health England tar experiment would seem to be a vivid and maybe even mic-drop argument for society gratefully accepting smoke-free technology. But to Malone, the whole schism-framing may itself be problematic. She worries that viewing the debate on stark, binary terms obscures a less obvious and highly dangerous element of Big Tobacco's strategy — namely, as Philip Morris's Olzcak insisted — claiming that its expertise has earned the industry a role in governmental decisions about tobacco regulations, treaties and laws. She posed a rhetorical question if ever there was one.MALONE: Should an industry that produces the single most deadly consumer product in history be involved in regulatory decisions about what to do about it and other products that are potentially supplanting or replacing or adding on to the damages caused by cigarettes?So, never mind “lesser of two evils.” How about “the fox guarding the henhouse.”MALONE: Part of the problem now is that, as they do periodically with some frequency, some tobacco companies are engaged in a big makeover, a part of which is aimed at undermining the tobacco control movement on a global level. We have to think not just about the United States, but also what's happening globally, where countries are trying to implement the world's first public health treaty, which is the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the WHO  treaty. And one of the provisions of that treaty is Article 5.3, and this is getting a little into the weeds, but basically it says don't let the tobacco companies interfere with your public health policies. They should not have a seat at the table because they have a conflict of interest. That seems pretty fundamental. And that is a real motivation right now for the tobacco companies, is to get back to the table where they can influence policies and prevent policies that might hurt their bottom line.Clearly, til now, the industry has engineered near impunity throughout the developing world. In 2020, the aforementioned Bureau of Investigative Journalism published an expose titled The ‘Unsmoke' screen: the truth behind PMI's cigarette-free future, a piece that looked beyond Phililp Morris's do-gooder narrative for evidence of the same old same old. For example, quote:Since it announced its aim to stop selling cigarettes, it has acquired a new cigarette company, launched a new brand, and added enticing new flavours such as Splash Mega Purple and Fusion Summer. It has also launched legal action against anti-smoking policies in countries like the Philippines, and has carried on advertising cigarettes in countries that permit it.COMMERCIAL: Wanna stand tall? Be true, be bold, be strong, be brave, be daring, be free, be heard, be inspired? You can say yes, or say no. Just never say maybe. Never say maybe. Be Marlboro.That's a Marlboro commercial aired in Indonesia, a country of 271 million people.  Furthermore, according to the BIJ story, quote: “Some pupils in Indonesia can see PMI's cigarette advertising mere steps from their schools' gates. Young people attending festivals in Buenos Aires are offered PMI cigarettes in promotions with beer. Children visiting corner shops in Mexico can see Marlboro's ‘fusion' cigarettes next to sweets.”BRANDT: We need to be very skeptical of these companies that claim that they've crossed over to legitimate health oriented products because they've made these claims, you know, since the 1950s.Allan M. Brandt is a professor of the history of science at Harvard and author of The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America. In 2012, for the American Journal of Public Health, he wrote Inventing Conflicts of Interest: A History of Tobacco Industry Tactics.BRANDT: They told Americans, you know, if you're worried about smoking, smoke filter cigarettes and that was the beginning of Marlboro. You know, you had a cowboy smoking a safe cigarette, which turned out not to be the case. So I'm very skeptical and worried about the current situation with vaping, e-cigarettes, other nicotine related products, and the idea that we're just a responsible company trying to mitigate the harms that our principal product has produced for over a century.And as you probably know, just in the last month, it was reported that the American Journal of Health and Behavior published a entire issue on harm reduction and Juul vaping. And it turns out we're not quite as naive as we used to be. It became clear and it was widely reported in the press that the issue of this journal was completely paid for by Juul and the work was done in Juul labs. They return to this strategy of: we can produce the science. And it has muddied the waters and diluted the authority that science really needs to have positive public health impacts. And we really need science. And science has to speak with expertise and authority and validity and clear and aggressive peer review. And we need to know the difference between something that is a fact and something that obscures facts.GILCHRIST: There's no doubt that misinformation and conflicting information is confusing adults who smoke.That was Moira Gilchrist, who holds a PhD in pharmaceutical sciences, back in June. She was not speaking of Big Tobacco's century of disinformation and its toll. In a video about Philip Morris's smoke-free initiative, she was addressing current conflict about smoke-free.GILCHRIST: One day they hear good things about smoke-free alternatives and the next they hear scare stories, and as a scientist I find that really, really upsetting. Because the science is very clear.It's a corporate video. Gilchrist is PMI's Vice President for Strategic & Scientific Communications, whom I spoke to this week. I asked her if she was struck at all by the irony of her complaint, what with Philip Morris's own sorry history of obfuscation and all.GILCHRIST: Well, look, I think I'm not going to speak to, you know, the past history of any company or an industry. What I'm focused on is today and what we know today, and we've made a real deliberate effort to make all of the science publicly available so that people don't have to trust us. They don't have to take our word for it. They can look at what the data says. And we've gone really, really strongly to ensure that we're using open science principles, sharing not just our own conclusions, but also the source data on which we've based those conclusions, so people can feel cynical and feel skeptical. That's fine, but they cannot ignore the data. And that's all I ask, is that independent scientists look at what we've done and look at it with an open mind in order that we can get the facts straight and make sure that adult smokers have the right information to make the right decisions.GARFIELD: We've heard from scientists who do embrace the benefits of a smoke free world, and we have heard a great deal of skepticism about Philip Morris's motives. We've heard both those things. One accusation, though, is that you are creating, excuse the expression, a smokescreen for influencing governmental tobacco control authorities around the world. Indeed, Olczak said that very thing, that authorities cannot not listen to your science.GILCHRIST: So that, again, we've made the science openly available. We've submitted it to regulatory authorities like the US FDA, who spent three and a half years poring through more than a million pages of evidence in order to make a decision to authorize our product. And so this is what we're asking governments to do, because governments can play a really important role in ensuring that adults who smoke have the right information, ensuring that they have access to these products that are a better choice than continuing to smoke. So I think that's what we're asking governments to do. And many of them are doing so. And I think that's really encouraging for the more than a billion smokers all around the world.GARFIELD: I just want to make sure that we agree on some basic facts. Philip Morris does now buy by legal agreement and in its public statements acknowledge that, that smoking burning tobacco does cause cancer, does cause heart disease, does cause emphysema and and so on.GILCHRIST: We have been clear about that for many, many years, and in fact, before I joined the company. We've been very clear that cigarette smoking is extremely unwise because of the diseases that it causes and premature death that it causes. And that's why we set on this path of creating alternatives so that people who don't quit can have another choice that they can go to. The best thing they can do is to quit because these products are not risk free. But if they're not going to quit, they should really consider switching to a smoke-free alternative.GARFIELD: So I believe the follow up question, and this is not a question you've not heard before, is why the f**k is Philip Morris still selling combustible cigarettes anywhere? Something like 800 billion coffin nails a year are being sold and consumed worldwide. Why not just shut that part of the business down today?GILCHRIST: So Bob the key word is transformation. This cannot happen overnight. By 2025, we want to be a majority smoke-free company. So I think we're making tremendous progress. We still have a long way to go. And that's why we're calling on governments to help, because regulation can really help to encourage adults who don't quit to switch to better alternatives.GARFIELD: Who says that the solution is transformation and not cessation? Along this path that you've described, there are, according to the World Health Organization, eight million people a year around the world who will die of smoking related illnesses. Why transform instead of just stop?GILCHRIST: So here's the thing. If we, Philip Morris International, chose to stop selling cigarettes altogether, that would not solve the problem of smoking because most adult smokers would simply switch to our competitors' product and there would be absolutely no impact on public health. So the approach that we've taken is to encourage those people who don't quit to instead switch. And in this way, we can reduce the number of people who are smoking combustible cigarettes and at the same time still make a profit for us as a business. So I think transformation is the way that we can have not just a long term future for the company, but also make a positive impact on public health.GARFIELD: Til now, we've been speaking of science and technology and business. I want to ask you about just fundamental morality. If I, for example, choose not to go into a Walmart with an AR-15 and shoot up the place, gun violence in America will not disappear. But I myself won't be a murderer. I will have not contributed to gun deaths. Isn't that reason enough for me to stand down?GILCHRIST: Look, again, we made a very deliberate decision that the best and quickest way we can get to a smoke free future is by developing, scientifically assessing and commercializing products that are a better choice than continuing to smoke. And if we were to stop selling cigarettes tomorrow, unilaterally, it would not have an impact on public health.GARFIELD: Perhaps I'm naive, but what I'm actually asking about now is a better outcome for the corporate conscience. Is it not better if you are not participating in what has been called the Golden Holocaust?GILCHRIST: So, look, I joined the company to do exactly what we're doing, and that's to provide better outcomes for each individual adult smoker and also better outcomes for our company as well. And I think that's what we're doing.Gilchrist chose not to address the question of conscience further, but rather just reiterated the smoke-free strategy. So I asked Tobacco Control's Ruth Malone approximately the same question.MALONE: I'm old enough to remember one time when a juice company had some salmonella — some contamination of their products — they pulled all their products off the market until they could be, in fact, made safe and they instituted new procedures to make them that way. The tobacco companies have repeatedly said they would do that if it was ever found that their products were unsafe. But in fact, they have never done that. I just think it's time to call their bluff on all this and say, you know, don't just talk about this. If you're really serious about this, then change the nature of your corporation. Become a B corporation. Be working on behalf of the public good. Get rid of the combustibles altogether. Quit selling them.GARFIELD: Yeah, yeah, when pigs fly.MALONE: Yeah, I'm afraid so.GARFIELD: I just wonder if you were in a lake and you were drowning, and the chairman of Philip Morris came running to you and threw you a rope. What would you do?MALONE: I don't know if there's anything at the other end of that rope, so I'd look and see if anybody else had a life preserver. And I'd probably swim. I'd try to swim.All right, we're done here. Next week, Part 2: Crime Against Humanity.Before I sign off though, let me repeat what I said a week ago. If you enjoy a Booksmart Studios show, please please please share it with your world. That's what those little buttons are for, and we depend on our listeners to get the word out. Also, if you become a paying subscriber to Booksmart Studios you'll get extended interviews, additional content, access to the hosts and — in my case — continued access to my weekly column, which is for the moment free to sample. At last count, there were 94 fucktillion podcasts out there, but nothing quite like what Booksmart is up to. Please help us make an impact.Now then, Bully Pulpit is produced by Mike Vuolo and Matthew Schwartz. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Bully Pulpit is a production of Booksmart Studios. I'm Bob Garfield. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

From 2009: Allan M. Brandt, author of "The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America."

Eric Rubin is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal. Lindsey Baden is a Deputy Editor of the Journal. Allan M. Brandt is the Amalie Moses Kass Professor of the History of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Stephen Morrissey, the interviewer, is the Executive Managing Editor of the Journal. E.J. Rubin and Others. Audio Interview: What Earlier Epidemics Teach Us about Covid-19. N Engl J Med 2021;384:e55.

É o quê??? Já ouviu falar? Sabe quando o Darcy Ribeiro disse que a crise da educação no Brasil não é crise; é projeto? Pois é, a agnotologia é o estudo das políticas de produção da ignorância. Ignorância como produto, como projeto, e não como mera consequência casual de falta de investimentos. Tá parecendo mais familiar a coisa, talvez? Mas temos certeza de que você não sabia que isso tinha nome. Agora que você sabe o básico, vem entender melhor, com o jornalista Thiago Medaglia. Ficha técnica Hosts: Leticia Dáquer e Thiago Corrêa Convidado: Thiago Medaglia  Edição: Leticia Dáquer Capa: Leticia Dáquer  Data da gravação: 05/11/2020 Data da publicação: 18/11/2020 Músicas: Tim Minchin - If You Open Your Mind Too Much Your Brain Will Fall Out Living Colour - Ignorance is Bliss Thiago Ramil - Mitocôndria Links relacionados ao episódio Definição do termo na Wikipedia Perfil do Thiago Medaglia no MIT The man who studies the spread of ignorance (BBC, 06/01/2016) Livro: The Poison Squad (Deborah Blum) Livro: The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (Allan M. Brandt) Livro: Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (Ethan Zuckerman) Rede social criada por Ethan Zuckerman: Gobo Site TRASE de rastreamento da origem de commodities A Balada do Pistoleiro Thiago Medaglia Livro: Merchants of Doubt (Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway) Documentário: O Mercado da Dúvida Livro: The Cigarette Century (Allan Brandt) Filme: Honeyland (2019)   Leticia Dáquer Episódio do podcast Gastropod: Shared plates - how eating together makes us human   Thiago Corrêa Episódio da série Cosmos: The Clean Room   Jabás Thiago Medaglia Twitter: @thiagomedaglia Ambiental Media    Leticia Dáquer Twitter: @pacamanca Blog: www.pacamanca.com   Thiago Corrêa Twitter: @thiago_czz Parceria com Veste Esquerda: use o código de desconto PISTOLA10 pra ter 10% de desconto na sua compra de camisetas maneiríssimas esquerdopatas   Parceria com Editora Boitempo: compre livros por esse link aqui pra gente ganhar uns trocados de comissão :)   Esse podcast é produzido pelo Estopim Podcasts. Precisa de ajuda pra fazer o seu podcast? Chega mais, que a gente te ajuda.   #MULHERESPODCASTERS Mulheres Podcasters é uma ação de iniciativa do Programa Ponto G, desenvolvida para divulgar o trabalho de mulheres na mídia podcast e mostrar para todo ouvinte que sempre existiram mulheres na comunidade de podcasts Brasil. O Pistolando apoia essa iniciativa.  Apoie você também: compartilhe este programa com a hashtag #mulherespodcasters e nos ajude a promover a igualdade de gênero dentro da podosfera.   Links do Pistolando www.pistolando.com contato@pistolando.com Twitter: @PistolandoPod Instagram: @PistolandoPod APOIE O PISTOLANDO   Descrição da capa: A capa é uma ilustração mostrando quatro pessoas de calça, sapatos e paletó pretos andando em diferentes direções sobre um fundo claro e chão branco. Cada uma das pessoas está com a cabeça enfiada numa caixa de papelão que chega até a cintura; nem os braços, nem a cabeça das pessoas estão visíveis. Acima, em preto, em fonte sem serifa, o número e o título do episódio. A logo do Pistolando, preta, está “estampada” na caixa da pessoa mais à direita da ilustração. A logo do Estopim, também em preto, está no canto inferior esquerdo.