SEEKING to expand the market for cigarettes in the 1920s, the American Tobacco Company solicited the aid of public relations mastermind Edward L. Bernays. He proposed to target women, who were still stigmatised for smoking, by organising a brigade of models to march across Manhattan showing their liberation by puffing on “torches of freedom”. We might be tempted to dismiss the campaign’s success as an instance of jazz-age naivety. But as bioethicist Carl Elliott shows in White Coat, Black Hat, Bernays’s strategy guides the tactics used by pharmaceutical firms today.
What is most impressive, and disturbing, about this book is…
