“Distinguished authorities point out: That medical research of recent years indicates many possible causes of lung cancer. That there is no agreement among the authorities regarding what the cause is. That there is no proof that cigarette smoking is one of the causes.” The summarizing claim made in a 1954 advertisement now known as the “Frank Statement” (archive.tobacco.org). The Frank Statement is one example of many that shows the tobacco industry stretching the truth, utilizing shady scientific claims, and doing whatever they feel is necessary to justify their insistence that tobacco is not as dangerous as we know it to be.
While nobody can realistically compare the dangers of tobacco based products to the dangers of playing football (tobacco kills 1,300 people every day), recent findings detailing how the NFL has conducted itself with regard to the links between CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) and concussions provide eerie similarities between the NFL and tobacco.
From 1996 to 2001, the NFL conducted what they claimed to be a comprehensive study of all concussions that occurred in the NFL. According to an article published by the New York Times, that study actually omitted over 100 concussion cases, even some cases involving well-known players. This study has been cited numerous times by the NFL to contend that there is scientific evidence that concussions do not have a direct correlation with CTE. The new findings by the NY Times has brought questions to all of these claims. As it is eloquently stated in the article, “If somebody made a human error or somebody assumed the data was absolutely correct and didn’t question it, well, we screwed up. If we found it wasn’t accurate and still used it, that’s not a screw-up; that’s a lie” (Times).
Furthermore, the NFL has been strangely insistent that people they hired do the research. From the NY Times, “most of the dozen committee members were associated with N.F.L. teams, as a physician, neurosurgeon or athletic trainer, which meant they made decisions about player care and then studied whether those decisions were proper” (Times). Big tobacco companies, in an article published by UC Davis, were found to have funded scientific studies with the specific goal of “undermining evidence linking secondhand smoke to cardiovascular disease” (ucdmc.edu). The NFL ensuring that their staff works, and their payroll funds these studies is an impossible conflict of interest. If their true goal was to get to the truth, they would be open and willing to an independent source conducting these studies.
Nobody is ready to equate football to cigarettes. Cigarettes have been scientifically proven to drastically reduce life expectancy. The jury is still out on football and CTE being linked however, the trend that the NFL is taking should not be greeted with enthusiasm. CTE is a serious problem that exists in many football players today. Kids as young as high school students have been committing suicide as a result of brain damage that could potentially be linked to participation in football. Tobacco companies got away with false advertisements and shady science before the general public, and tobacco companies themselves, acknowledged the true dangers behind the drug. The concern is that the NFL is going down a similar path, rejecting the building evidence and ignoring what is becoming painfully obvious - that the life threatening disease of CTE, is becoming even more prevalent in the contact heavy NFL.
