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"Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition"

How many cigarettes are sold each year, worldwide? Believe it or not, six trillion. Our guest, who calls the cigarette "the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization," was the first-ever historian, several years ago, to testify in court against Big Tobacco. On this installment of our show, we speak by phone with Robert N. Proctor, Professor of the History of Science at Stanford University. His new book, just out from the University of California Press, is called "Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition." It's, quite obviously, a book that takes a stance --- a certain and unwavering point of view --- regarding its subject, but it's also, at more than 750 pages, very deeply researched and methodically articulated. Indeed, "Golden Holocaust" employs scores of formerly-secret tobacco-industry documents to carefully explain how the cigarette came to be the most widely-used drug on the planet. You can learn more about this vast and thorough work of scholarship here.

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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