In 1972, Claude Teague, the Director of Corporate Research at R.J. Reynolds, argued that the tobacco industry should think of itself as being "a specialized, highly ritualized segment of the pharmaceutical industry." Reynolds, he claimed, was ultimately in the business of selling a drug: nicotine. What had prompted this remarkable statement?
In the 1960s, behavioral pharmacology revolutionized addiction research. Rats and monkeys, researchers showed, would press levers hundreds of times to obtain doses of drugs like heroin and cocaine. These experiments constituted a direct attack on the Freudian-inspired post-war consensus that drug use was a uniquely human fault, a maladaptive attempt to cope with an underlying personality disorder. But if animals self-administered drugs, who could argue that they did so because of their upbringing or social milieu? Behavioral pharmacology reoriented the study of addiction from psychological to biological explanations and helped to destigmatize drug use.
But, as I show in my paper, it also effected a complete reorientation in the self-understanding of cigarette makers from tobacco manufacturers to nicotine merchants. Monkeys, new studies soon showed, would readily self-administer nicotine, showing that smoking was ultimately not about taste but about the nicotine. The discovery that smokers, as one industry scientist put it, were "equivalent to monkeys pressing levers" set off a race to experiment with new tobacco strains and additives to make smoking more addictive. But behaviorism and its vocabulary of stimuli and reinforcers ultimately also provided the motivation to develop new fraudulent low-tar "light" and "ultralight" cigarettes.
