Reply #22: I guess it stems from that tobacco lawsuit

[gratuitous]

You know wading through hundreds of thousands of pages of tobacco industry documents, and reading these exact same words penned by industry doctors and researchers, but kept hushed up because it wasn't in Big Tobacco's interest to disclose them to the general public. So the research was conducted with attorney oversight so it was all subject to attorney-client privilege, or overseas at institutes like INBIFO in West Germany so it was beyond the subpoena reach of American courts.

Or maybe it was interviewing a couple of hundred smokers in various stages of dying (or their survivors) in the screening search for another plaintiff to try to financially hurt Big Tobacco and its murderous product and secure some medical care for their victims. Because once the djinn was out of the bottle (so to speak), articles like this seemed to crop up in tobacco industry apologies for its product. Tobacco companies knew full well how to manipulate not only nicotine levels and research, but they very carefully studied smokers, and one of the incontrovertible proofs they found was that people addicted to nicotine would grasp at any straw to justify continued smoking, rather than face the fact that they were killing themselves.

And since it came from Dartmouth in 1999, yes, I'm going to go way out on a limb and think that it was indeed meant to keep smokers smoking because it looks, as I said, exactly like the sort of work product put out by the CTR in the 60s and the TI in the 70s and the 80s.