5 Safety Measures That Caused Rampant Death And Destruction

Smoking used to be something people did, like sleeping or breathing or fightin' Germans. But then, in 1952, Reader's Digest published an article titled "Cancer By The Carton." The cigarette companies, unsurprisingly, freaked right the hell out. Different companies came up with different approaches to assure the public that their cigarette was the safest way to protractedly kill yourself. Some went the straight-up bullshit route -- like the infamous "More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette" marketing campaign -- but at least one company set out to actually make their cigarettes safer.

via University of Albany

Lorillard Tobacco introduced their Kent brand, a filtered cigarette in a time where filtering cigarettes was basically unconstitutional. Kent's patented Micronite filter was touted as the healthiest way to smoke, and smokers snapped that shit right up, burning their way through 13 billion Kents between 1952 and 1956. Unfortunately, all those billions of filters that America had so enthusiastically sucked on were made out of "Bolivian blue" asbestos -- a type of asbestos that hates your lungs with a passion even fiercer than the most unfiltered, untamed tobacco.

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For their four years spent selling their customers exponential cancer, Lorillard is still paying out millions in lawsuits. And today, Kent cigarettes are marketed as a "premium" brand, even though they now only come with regular, non-premium cancer.

Luckily, there was a simple solution: Child safety advocates told parents to put their kids in the backseat. And it worked! Problem solved! No more kids dying from airbags! Instead, they started dying from heat exposure. It seems the old adage "out of sight, out of mind" is much more terrifyingly literal than anyone realized. As parents booted their children to the back, they also started forgetting they were back there. It sounds utterly ridiculous, but having the child out of sight in the back seat made parents much more likely to park their car in a hot lot, roll up the windows, and just walk away whistlin' Dixie. Without their kids.

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In 1990, five U.S. children died in overheated cars. Then came the prevalence of airbags, and from the late '90s to the present, that number has spiked to more than 600. As for what, exactly, it says about us as a nation that we're apparently more likely to forget where we put our kids than where we put our cellphones, we'd honestly rather not think about it.

In an attempt to quell the flow of greenhouse gasses, the U.N. introduced the concept of carbon credits. Basically, they're like a stock that's awarded to companies for reducing or eliminating their contribution to air pollution. The more gasses you do away with, the more credits you get. It didn't take long for manufacturers in places like India and China to realize that, while they could receive one measly carbon credit by eliminating one ton of carbon dioxide, they could receive 11,000 of those valuable motherfuckers by destroying a ton of HFC-23, a waste gas given off when producing a common coolant.

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The reason HFC-23 is worth so many more credits is because it's 11,000 times worse for the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. So, of course, said manufacturers started pumping out said coolant by the buttload, just so they could destroy the waste gas and rake in all those extra carbon credits. Problem was, the coolant the manufacturers started cranking out like there's no tomorrow (possibly the most appropriate use of that term ever, by the way) was also tree-slappingly terrible for the environment. The increased availability of the harmful coolant in turn caused prices of the coolant to drop (thereby making it more difficult for the world to phase it out, because it's cheaper than the safer alternatives), but the manufacturers didn't have to worry about that because they were getting filthy friggin' rich from their brand-spankin'-new carbon credit side business.

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You know what they say: A bird in the hand is worth killing all of the birds in the future. And everything else.

Seems like a pretty harmless message of personal responsibility, but by outlawing everything down to the tiniest, most harmless of conflagrations, the U.S. Forest Service actually paved the way for the gigantic, swirling infernos from Hell that have recently plagued large swaths of the country.

You see, small, localized fires every few years are absolutely essential to a forest's ecosystem in the long-term. For millennia it was completely natural for, say, a lightning strike to spark a fire and burn off all the dense undergrowth, giving the mature trees welcome room to breathe. But then along came humans with their anthropomorphized bears, and suddenly all that undergrowth was allowed to spread unchecked. Follow that path for half a century or so, and suddenly you've arrived at the perfect conditions for the "megafires" that we've seen burning up our news reports over the past few years.

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Professor Thomas Swetnam of the University of Arizona has dubbed it The Smokey Bear effect. He's analyzed the growth rings of hundreds-year-old trees and found evidence of periodic fire-scarring right up until the early 20th century -- around the time the Forest Service started their Frankenstein-ian "FIRE BAD!" mantra. The timing directly correlates with the beginning of fires like the monstrous Wallow Fire in Arizona, which started with an abandoned campfire and "burned more than 40,000 acres in the first eight hours," Swetnam said. Maybe now people will finally learn that, even if they happen to be wearing cute hats, bears can never, ever be trusted.

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Also check out 5 Popular Safety Measures That Don't Make You Any Safer and The 5 Most Popular Safety Laws (That Don't Work).