http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/1998Q4/ashes.html

Tobacco's Worst Enemy, or a Smoke Screen?

ACSH sides with big business in virtually every controversy involving
corporate interests versus public health, but there is one big
business that it relentlessly criticizes--the tobacco industry. ACSH
and Elizabeth Whelan have taken a consistent and outspoken stand
against the dangers of tobacco and have published hard-hitting
critiques of magazines that downplay tobacco's dangers in exchange for
advertising dollars.

Taking a strong stand on tobacco has helped ACSH cultivate a veneer of
credibility among public health professionals. In particular, it has
formed part of the bond between Whelan and former U.S. Surgeon General
C. Everett Koop (see related story in this issue).

Whelan is the author of books about tobacco, titled A Smoking Gun: How
the Tobacco Industry Gets Away With Murder and Cigarettes: What the
Warning Label Doesn't Tell You, along with numerous editorials and
magazine articles. She has testified as an expert witness for
plaintiffs suing the tobacco industry, and has even criticized her
fellow conservatives for what she calls their "blurred vision" about
tobacco.

When presidential candidate Bob Dole opined that smoking was not
addictive, for example, Whelan publicly begged to differ, as she has
on other occasions. "Conservative politicians, their spokesmen and
right-wing journalists almost uniformly condemned Clinton's 'war'
against teen-age smoking," she complained in 1995. "Conservative
pundits pounce on anti-smoking activists with gusto, questioning not
just our methods, but our priorities. . . . Republicans, posturing
themselves as friends of the tobacco industry, are doing themselves
and America's youth a great disservice. As a public health
professional and lifelong Republican I ask: Why?"

ACSH's argument on many public issues is built around the idea that
tobacco and other lifestyle-related health factors are more important
and deserve higher priority than "hypothetical, miniscule" risks from
pesticides and other pollution. The organization publishes a magazine,
Priorities, whose title and content regularly return to the notion
that "unscientific" health advocates fail to prioritize real health
risks while dwelling on risks that are "trivial at best, or, at worst,
nonexistent."

Whelan has even attempted to deflect criticism of her own
organization's funding by claiming that prominent environmental and
consumer groups are beholden to tobacco money. "My counterparts, why
aren't they quizzed as to funding?" she asked one reporter, claiming
that the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Center for
Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) receive "substantial funding
from the cigarette families, including R.J. Reynolds family
foundation. . . . Who knows where else they get their funding? They
don't publish their funding list on a regular basis."

When Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz investigated these
allegations, however, he found that the NRDC and CSPI both disclose
all of their funding sources except for individual membership
contributions. As for the claim that they take tobacco money, both
have received some funding from from the Mary Reynolds Babcock
Foundation, which is run by second- and third-generation heirs of
tobacco money who choose to give their money to liberal causes.

CSPI's Michael Jacobson acknowledges that the Babcock Foundation's
money originally came from tobacco profits. "It's been sanitized by
several generations," he says. "That's a very different situation from
getting money from the Monsanto Fund, which is an arm of the company."

For his part, Jacobson expresses measured skepticism about the motives
behind Whelan's anti-tobacco activism. "I think that ACSH took up the
smoking issue to deflect the criticism that it always defends
industry," he says. "Whelan often says things like 'X causes fewer
deaths than tobacco, so it's not worth worrying about'--and, of
course, everything causes fewer deaths than tobacco."

At the same time, Jacobson is careful to give credit where credit is
due. "Fig leaf though it may be, ACSH deserves credit for its work on
smoking," he says, "and journalists give extra credit to ACSH because
they know it's a right-wing group and right-wing groups aren't
expected to attack industry."

Of course, if CSPI's several-degrees-of-separation links to the
tobacco industry are worth mentioning, it seems only fair to note that
Whelan serves on the advisory council of Consumer Alert, another front
group for industry whose funders include Philip Morris, Coors and the
Beer Institute along with Monsanto, the Chemical Manufacturers
Association, Chevron, Exxon, American Cyanamid and a host of other
usual corporate suspects.

Guilty Associations
In fact, ACSH has numerous ties, through its board of directors and
advisory board, to many of the right-wing, tobacco-funded
organizations whose "blurred vision" Whelan criticizes. Its advisory
board includes representatives of the Hudson Institute, the Progress &
Freedom Foundation and the Cato Institute, all of which receive
funding from the tobacco industry and oppose efforts to regulate
tobacco. Priorities magazine also features numerous articles from
people affiliated with these and other pro-tobacco think-tanks,
including the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Capital
Research Center (which has published two recent books denying that
smoking causes cancer).

ACSH also has numerous links to The Advancement of Sound Science
Coalition (TASSC), a "corporate-supported watchdog coalition that
advocates the use of sound sciences in public policy." Like ACSH,
TASSC attacks what it calls "junk science" as it defends bovine growth
hormone, genetically engineered foodstuffs, dioxin, electromagnetic
fields and endocrine disrupting chemicals. Like ACSH, it is supported
by the chemical, oil, dairy, timber, paper, mining, manufacturing and
agribusiness industries.

Unlike ACSH, however, TASSC takes money directly from Philip Morris,
and it has openly defended the tobacco industry. In August 1997, for
example, TASSC executive director Steven Milloy was one of the paid
speakers at a cushy little propaganda session for foreign reporters
hosted in Miami. The tobacco industry flew in reporters from countries
including Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Peru and paid for their hotel
rooms and expensive meals while they sat through presentations that
ridiculed "lawsuit-driven societies like the United States" for using
"unsound science" to raise questions about "infinitesimal, if not
hypothetical, risks" related to inhaling a "whiff" of tobacco smoke.

Milloy likewise dismissed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's
1993 study linking secondhand smoke to cancer as "a joke," and when
the British Medical Journal published its own study with similar
results in 1997, he scoffed that "it remains a joke today." After the
New England Journal of Medicine published a Harvard University study
linking secondhand smoke to heart disease, he labeled the study an
"abuse of statistics" and a case of "epidemiologists trying to pass
off junk science as Nobel prize work."

Milloy's rhetoric appears to be the basis for a story, titled "Smoke
Rings," which appeared in the June 16, 1997 issue of William Buckley,
Jr.'s conservative National Review. Whelan, who describes herself as
"a longtime National Review fan," was so "disappointed" in the article
that she wrote a letter to the editor warning that "NR should be wary
of relying on a source that considers the New England Journal of
Medicine a purveyor of junk science. In labeling the Harvard study
'junk science,' you may be inadvertently junking all science."

Yet ACSH executive director Michael Fox is a member of TASSC's
advisory board, as are ACSH chairman A. Alan Moghissi and board
members Victor Herbert and F.J. Francis. Another 46 members of the
ACSH advisory board also serve on the advisory board of TASSC. If
TASSC is in the business of "junking all science," why are so many
ACSH supporters willing to lend their name to it?

Secondhand Sophistry
ACSH does more than merely associate with the tobacco industry's
defenders. It has endorsed and helped disseminate some of their
arguments.

Jacob Sullum, for example, is one of the most vociferous defenders of
the tobacco industry in print today. As editor of Reason magazine, a
libertarian magazine published by the Reason Foundation, Sullum adopts
a "Clinton defense" regarding the industry's long history of deceiving
the public over tobacco's dangers. "Yes, the industry's position on
the hazards of smoking has been disingenuous and irresponsible. But
does it amount to fraud?" he asks. "What industry spokesmen said was
not, by and large, literally false. Indeed, they carefully phrased
their statements to avoid direct denial of tobacco's hazards. . . .
The tobacco companies didn't fool anyone who didn't want to be
fooled."

Although Sullum admits that "smoking is bad for you in the sense that
it raises the risk of certain diseases and tends to shorten your
life," he says smoking might "also be good for you, in the sense that
it provides pleasure, relieves stress, or offers some other benefit. .
. . The refusal to acknowledge the benefits of smoking--to admit the
possibility that anyone could rationally choose to smoke--illustrates
the arrogance of insisting, 'You shouldn't smoke because it's bad for
you.'"

Sullum is one of the few inhabitants of planet earth who defended Bob
Dole's ill-fated claim that tobacco is non-addictive. He accuses other
journalists of serious errors, exaggerations, and a bias against the
tobacco industry. In discussions of the secondhand smoke issue, he
"also accuses the EPA of corrupting science and cites many of the
tobacco industry's arguments that so far have persuaded virtually no
one in medicine and public health who are not recipients of tobacco
industry money," observed Andrew Skolnick, an editor at the Journal of
the American Medical Association.

Sullum defends his reliance on tobacco-funded researchers by arguing
that scientists who "have qualms about the case against secondhand
smoke" and "have the courage to speak up are apt to be sought out by
tobacco companies as consultants and to attract research grants from
them. If such funding is grounds for doubt, so is money from private
organizations, such as the American Cancer Society, and government
agencies, such as the California Department of Health, that are
committed to achieving 'a smoke-free society.' "

The tobacco industry itself likes Sullum's work so much that in May
1994 the R.J. Reynolds company bought reprint rights to an editorial
he had written for the Wall Street Journal. A few months later, Philip
Morris paid him $5,000 for the right to reprint one of his articles as
a five-day series of full-page ads in newspapers throughout the
country, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles
Times, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, Boston Globe, and Baltimore Sun.
"We felt that this report was particularly objective," explained
Philip Morris vice president Ellen Merlo.

Elizabeth Whelan is also aware of Sullum's track record as a tobacco
defender. Shortly after his articles on secondhand smoke appeared, she
complained that "Wall Street Journal, Reason, Forbes and National
Review all recently carried essentially the same article by the same
author--Jacob Sullum--who defies the now nearly unanimous view of
scientists that [secondhand smoke] can be harmful."

Given his record and reputation, it is perplexing, to say the least,
that ACSH chose to feature another of Sullum's essays, titled "What
the Doctor Orders," as the cover story for a 1996 issue of Priorities.

In "What the Doctor Orders," Sullum waxes nostalgic for the health
care standards and priorities of the 19th century. In addition to
attacking efforts to curb smoking, he also criticizes motorcycle
helmet and seatbelt laws, as well as public health measures aimed at
alcohol and drug abuse, obesity, violence and handguns, as examples of
the "fundamentally collectivist . . . aims of the public health
movement."

In an accompanying letter, Whelan and ACSH Director of Public Health
William London describe Sullum's essay as "the most important critique
of governmental public health activities we have seen," which "should
be assigned reading in every school of public health." The same issue
of Priorities offers commentaries on the Sullum article from eight
other writers, who mingle similar fawning words of praise with
occasional faint criticisms. To finish off this "symposium," Sullum
concludes with a final response in which he throws in an attack on
Medicaid and Medicare for good measure.

In his "symposium" in Priorities, Jacob Sullum argues that government
efforts to promote public health are a threat to basic human freedoms.


Foggy Thinking and Poisoned Waters
What binds ACSH to a thinker like Sullum is their common roots in a
far-right, "free market" ideology that overrides even ACSH's awareness
of tobacco's murderous effects. These ideological underpinnings
explain why Whelan blames the rest of the anti-tobacco movement for
the failure of other conservatives to join them.

"Discussions of tobacco and health policies are dominated almost
exclusively by well-meaning social engineers and safety alarmists
whose expansive agenda all but guarantees that many on the right
reflexively gravitate to the opposite camp," she argues. "In this way,
liberal anti-smoking enthusiasts have poisoned the waters for the
political right."

The same ideology also sometimes places Whelan at loggerheads with the
opinions and strategies of the rest of the anti-tobacco movement. She
is one of the few, for example, who opposes the mandatory "surgeon
general's warning" that appears on cigarette packages. In her view,
the label "merely pre-empts the responsibility the industry would
normally have for the consequences caused by their products."

Similar conservative sentiments against government mandates led ACSH
and the pro-tobacco Competitive Enterprise Institute to join forces in
May 1998 in a bizarre appeal for Congress to prove its "sincerity" by
offering a tax rebate to adult smokers. Legislation then pending would
have raised tobacco taxes (and thereby prices) in order to deter
underage smoking. "If these taxes are truly aimed at reducing underage
smoking, then Congress should give rebates of the tax to adult
smokers," argued Whelan and CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman in a joint
news release. "By rebating the revenues collected from adult smokers,"
they reasoned, "Congress could unequivocally demonstrate the purity of
its motives--or it could drop the matter entirely."

Left unanswered was the question of how vendors were supposed to
rebate the tax to adults without also rebating it to minors--who,
after all, do not buy their cigarettes directly, since sale of tobacco
products to minors is already prohibited.