Tobacco scandal

last updated 8 January 2015

Hamburg

The tobacco industry paid four top German scientists to produce research downplaying the dangers of cigarette smoking, Hamburg’s Der Spiegel reported this week. Jürgen von Troschke of Freiburg University—who often compared discrimination against smokers to Nazi persecution of Jews—allegedly took nearly a half-million dollars from the German Association of Cigarette Manufacturers for a report concluding that cigarettes were not addictive. “It is particularly reprehensible that, of all people, health experts should have allowed themselves to have been bought,” said Martina Pötschke-Langer of the World Health Organization. The studies were done in the 1980s and early ’90s. The scientists denied that money influenced their research.