What's Your Poison? It is only in the last few years that the world has learned of the American sugar industry’s successful battle to suppress the science linking excessive sugar consumption with heart disease. In a tactic borrowed from the tobacco industry, scientists working for the sugar barons heaped doubt upon the emerging evidence and diverted scientific attention towards saturated fats as the primary cause of heart disease.
CONSPIRACY THEORIES have long fascinated me: ever since I
laid eyes on a document known as “The Gemstone File” nearly 40 years ago. If I
quote just the first few sentences from the cover-page, you’ll understand why I
found it so hard to put down:
Tell me what it is, dear editors, before I get into it.
My dear, it’s heavy.
What is its history?
It’s an anonymous manifestation
mailed from Tucson, Arizona, to a fanatical friend of The Fanatic, who insisted
it should be published for the good of the North Indies – that radiated land
improperly referred to by trivialists as America.
What does it mean?
It’s mean. It names
names, and pushes punches right back where they came from.
On whose behalf?
God and the Revolution
… If this planet’s a corporation, it’s a corpse.
In the age of the Internet this sort of pitch is commonplace:
the staple fare of wild-eyed conspiracists the world around. Back in the late
1970s, however, when practically every form of written communication was carried
on the surface of pulped trees, a document like “The Gemstone File” rapidly
acquired semi-mystical status. It was passed from hand-to-hand; photocopied to
the point of illegibility; puzzled over and debated through long nights of
drug-fuelled paranoia.
The very best kind of undergraduate fun!
Whoever wrote “The Gemstone File” was right about one thing
though: if this planet is a corporation, then it is a corpse. But even in the
fevered brain of The Fanatic and his fanatical friends, it is unlikely that
fantasy ever outstripped the true extent of corporate mendacity.
It is only in the last few years, for example, that the
world has learned about the American sugar industry’s successful battle to
suppress the science linking excessive sugar consumption with heart disease. In
a tactic borrowed from the tobacco industry, scientists working for the sugar
barons heaped doubt upon the emerging evidence and diverted scientific
attention towards saturated fats as the primary cause of heart disease.
For nearly four decades the deadly impact of sugar on the
health of people all over the world was downplayed. Not only was sugar’s major
contribution to heart disease minimised, but its crucial role in fuelling the
West’s burgeoning levels of obesity was also deliberately obscured. The
inevitable outcome of a sugar-laden diet – a global epidemic of Type 2 Diabetes
– looks set to burden the health services of the world for many years to come.
Calculating the harm done by the American sugar industry is
difficult. But the number of people who, since the 1960s, have had their lives
cut short by heart attacks, strokes, and the deadly consequences of undiagnosed
and untreated Type 2 Diabetes, must run into the tens-of-millions.
It is difficult to comprehend the psychological make-up of people
who, in the name of selling tobacco and sugar, were willing to suppress and/or
denigrate the scientific evidence pointing to these substances catastrophic
effects on public health. That they entered into genuine conspiracies to thwart
all attempts to mitigate the harm caused by their products is indisputable – as
is the conclusion that they have the blood of millions on their hands. And yet,
somehow, they still manage to carve their Thanksgiving Turkey and ruffle the
curls of their grandchildren. Death on an obscene scale is simply written-off
by these corporate killers as the cost of doing business.
And it’s still going on. The tried and true tactic of
denying and/or debunking “inconvenient” scientific evidence was adopted with undeniable
success by the oil industry as it became increasingly clear that anthropogenic
global warming was fossil-fuelled. Once again the hired scientific guns of the
big corporations were dispatched to undermine every effort to reduce carbon
emissions. That a majority of Americans are now convinced that man-made
climate-change is a “hoax” bears testimony to the efficacy of the tobacco and
sugar barons’ ‘big lies’. That a planet rendered incapable of sustaining human
civilisation might be the ultimate outcome of their public relations exercise did
not slow them down.
The author/s of “The Gemstone File” devoted considerable
creative energy to inventing a world ruled by individuals utterly consumed by
greed, lust and ambition. Paradoxically, their villains are too charismatic,
too grandiloquent, to be believably evil. True evil is nearly always the work
of ordinary, or, to use Hannah Arendt’s superbly chosen adjective, “banal”, human-beings
whose lack of empathy and atrophied imaginations make them the ideal carriers
of the corporate disease.
How else could so many of them work so diligently for
corporations that have piled up so many corpses.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Sunday, 18 September 2016.
