Most of my readers do not smoke.
It is time, though, that people — particularly children — realise that the photos of black or brown smoker’s lungs are fake.
Most people reading this will have seen them starting in primary school, as I did in the late 1960s. They are designed to shock.
Frank Davis has the full story on these photographs in ‘The Black Lung Lie’.
Frank’s post covers a broad spectrum of commentary from medical professionals and includes photographs. A few excerpts follow, emphases mine.
From Kansas City to Tennessee to New York to the Netherlands to Germany, physicians agree that it is impossible to tell whether lungs belong to a smoker or non-smoker. As such, they can be safely transplanted into non-smokers. Whether the lungs ‘take’ is another question, but that is irrelevant to whether the donor was a smoker.
The exceptions to the lung condition and colour occur in cases of emphysema and black lung — coal miner’s — disease.
Frank writes:
The lie hinges on first asserting that smoking causes emphysema (it may do, or it may not), and secondly asserting that emphysema turns lungs grey-black (it probably does), and then finally dropping the connecting middle term of ’emphysema’, and asserting that smoking turns lungs grey-black. Or it’s just calling emphysematous lungs ‘smokers’ lungs’.
A parallel false ascription might be found elsewhere. People who visit Delhi may get food poisoning from ingesting bacteria. The food poisoning may cause vomiting and so on. But if the ‘bacteria’ link is missed out, and the malady is just called ‘Delhi belly’ (as it often is), it may mislead people into believing that it’s visiting Delhi (or Indian restaurants) which is the root of the trouble – although in fact most visitors to Delhi (and Indian restaurants) don’t suffer such ill-effects, and there are lots of other places in the world other than Delhi where you can contract ‘Delhi belly’.
It’s a thoroughly dishonest and disreputable mis-attribution of a disease. It pins the disease on a particular social group: smokers. And it makes it their disease, and nobody else’s – even though not everyone who gets emphysema is a smoker, and not all smokers get emphysema. But at least we may now see why pathologists aren’t finding grey-black smokers’ lungs: they didn’t have emphysema.
However, there is more dishonesty. This involves the blackest of the photographs, the kind they use in schools and on cigarette packets. Frank provides a full explanation along with the marketing guff and photos.
In short:
So firstly they’re pig lungs. And secondly they’ve been preserved and stained realistically. And simulated internal and external tumours have been added. And all to demonstrate the effects of prolonged smoking! It beggars belief.
No doubt the students aren’t told any of this, and are led to believe that they’re looking at real human ‘smokers’ lungs’.
Too right. It was only a couple of years ago that my schoolchums and I had dinner together. I brought up the subject, as there were already rumours circulating of fake lung pictures.
These photos heavily influence people’s impressions of smoking.
Out of a party of four of us, two believed the photos were fake, one was undecided but still thought smoking was dangerous and the other was certain that the photos were real, otherwise schools would not allow the materials in class.
Amazingly, this fraud has been perpetrated on adults and — even worse — children for nearly 40 years. It continues today.
One of Frank’s readers added more information via a Washington Times article from 2011. This article covers the gamut of cigarette packet photos (emphases mine):
There is only one problem with the federal government’s great campaign of graphic images aimed at combating the deceit of tobacco companies and rescuing us from our stupid selves.
The images are fabricated.
“Some are photographs; some are illustrations,” a spokesman at the Department of Health and Human Services explained to me Tuesday when I called about the new pictures.
The dead man with the zipped-up chest? “It’s not a dead body,” the spokesman assured me. “It’s an actor. It’s supposed to be a cadaver after an autopsy.”
The man with the wispy smoke coming out of the hole in his throat? “That’s a Photoshopped illustration.”
The baby in an incubator is a creepy drawing …
The government unveiled the bogus pictures at a White House event staged to look like a press conference.
William Corr, a deputy secretary at HHS, lamented the formal setting, saying: “We should be having a party to celebrate!” He went on to testify how the new pictures “tell the truth.”
The only truth here is that people around the world are being lied to in the name of bogus ‘public health’.
As the Times journalist adds:
And you paid for them.
Churchmouse Campanologist 
4 comments
September 26, 2012 at 11:46 am
Jonathan Bagley
I’d read about this before I went to the plasticised bodies exhibition which was doing the rounds a few years ago. Controversial at the time, but very interesting. Can’t recall the name of the man responsible. he was very anti smoking and the exhibition included what he maintained were smokers’ lungs. For whatever reason, there seem to be wildly differing opinions. I’d be surprised if he faked the lungs, so what’s going on here?
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September 26, 2012 at 12:17 pm
churchmouse
Hello, Jonathan — yes, I remember — the German or Austrian guy. Well, he might have obtained lungs or a body from someone with a) emphysema or, if they (lungs) were black, b) someone who had coal miner’s disease.
If transplant surgeons tell us there isn’t any difference (outside of lungs from someone who had emphysema or coal miner’s disease), then, there isn’t.
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September 27, 2012 at 1:48 pm
nisakiman
Today, even those conducting autopsies admit that looking at lungs alone is not a way to tell if the deceased smoked. Wray Kephart used to work in hospitals, performing autopsies (usually on the behalf of insurance companies). Kephart claims to have done around 1560 autopsies, and he says it is normally impossible to tell whether the deceased was a smoker or not from autopsy. This was confirmed by Dr Jan Zeldenrust, a Dutch pathologist for the Government of Holland from 1951 – 1984. In a television interview in the 1980’s he stated that, translated from Dutch, “I could never see on a pair of lungs if they belonged to a smoker or non-smoker. I can see clearly the difference between sick and healthy lungs. The only black lungs I’ve seen are from peat-workers and coal miners, never from smokers”.
http://www.smokescreens.org/chapter1.htm
Kephart insists, however, that it is normally impossible to tell, from autopsy, whether the deceased was or was not a smoker. Upon resection, the lungs are always clear, unless the deceased lived in a large city where there was significant industrial pollution. In that event, carbon deposits may be found, but these are unrelated to smoking. So the “brown lungs” myth is exactly that: a myth.
http://www.lcolby.com/b-chap8.htm
It would seem that the difference is between healthy and diseased lungs, either of which can come from a smoker or a non-smoker. So yes, you can get blackened lungs from a deceased smoker. But you can also get identically blackened lungs from a non-smoker. Likewise you can get pink, healthy lungs from both groups.
So the chap who did the plasticised bodies exhibition wasn’t actually faking anything, just being disingenuous.
It’s what Tobacco Control do all the time – it’s their modus operandi. Don’t actually lie, just be economical with the truth. Although in their overconfidence they’ve latterly started straying into the realms of fabrication. It will be their undoing.
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September 27, 2012 at 2:43 pm
churchmouse
Thanks for the links and for elaborating further, nisakiman! Glad you stopped by.
Re the plasticised bodies doctor, he isn’t a very good advert for not smoking, is he? Quite eccentric in a weird way and very much into health, also in a weird way. I saw a television interview with him when the exhibition first came out. Seemed to grasp at this life as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered. Hence, I suppose, the exhibition of … corpses.
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