May 14, 1997
The HillSmoking Out the Anti-Tobacco Crusaders
David A. Keene
Is it me or is the "scientific evidence" bandied about these days in support of various political and policy proposals getting less and less trustworthy? Science has, of course, always been used by politicians, but I get the distinct impression that the sorts of appeals to pseudo-science that were once the almost exclusive domain of anti-democratic crackpots are being used more and more to get people to accept politics that they would otherwise reject. Consider the crusade against tobacco. There is no more politically correct cause in this country today than the effort to restrict or even ban, smoking. Hollywood, the president, Congress, the American Medical Association and just about everyone in establishment America is on the bandwagon. We are told that smoking is bad for our health and that anyone who smokes anywhere near us is endangering us and must therefore be stopped. The evidence that smoking is as unhealthy or even more unhealthy than, say, eating beef every day, is pretty convincing, but the evidence that the average person is in danger if someone with a cigarette in hand is encountered on the sidewalk or in a restaurant has proven a good bit harder to demonstrate. This, however, hasn't slowed down the abolitionists They've come up with government and privately funded studies that they argue should simply end the debate, while they cavalierly dismiss anyone who questions the results of such studies as ignorant or unwilling to accept the truth. Because, you see, in the sacred cause of achieving admirable or at least politically correct objectives the skeptics can be ignored, ridiculed or dismissed as in the pay of evildoers. And evidence can justifiably be read in ways that support the worthy ends. Indeed, in pursuing such ends, scientifically questionable studies are regularly portrayed by an ideologically sensitive press as convincing or beyond dispute while identical evidence marshaled by those with less politically correct views is treated far more skeptically or dismissed almost out of band as flawed or inconclusive. This, for example, is what happened when studies revealed a connection between abortions and certain types of cancer of statistically exactly the same magnitude as that between second hand smoke and other kinds of cancer. In other cases, where there is no evidence to be tortured and adapted to the cause, it is apparently acceptable to simply fabricate what is needed so long as it furthers the cause. Thus, when abolitionists discovered tat restaurateurs and bar owners fearful of losing business were resisting local efforts to ban smoking in their establishments, the state of California made a politically correct grant to Dr. Stanton Glantz, one of the high priests of the abolitionist cause, who quickly produced a study purporting to show against all logic that smoking bans either had no impact or actually increased the business of establishments in areas where the bans were being rigorously implemented. The study was published in the American Journal of Public Health and copies study were quickly sent to city and town councils and county boards throughout the country to discredit the arguments of restaurant owners looking to these bodies for protection and to assure those concerned that such bans might cost them their livelihood that they were simply misguided or perhaps victims of another insidious wave of tobacco industry propaganda. It's hard to say just how many local smoking bans have been passed because of the Glantz study, but it has been cited in virtually every debate over such bans since its publication. It was, after all, publicly funded, conducted by a well-known academic, and published in a respected journal. It has, in fact, been treated as the final word on the subject. The only problem is that Dr. Glantz based the study on faulty data and then managed to misinterpret and manipulate the evidence he produced from that data. The results were, in a word, poppycock. Dishonest? You bet, but effective until a very politically incorrect group, the National Smokers Alliance (of which I happen to be a member) commissioned Dr. Michael K. Evans, a well known and highly respected economist at Northwestern University, to take a look at it. He was shocked by what he found, concluding basically that Glantz's's conclusions were garbage and suggested that the good doctor had to have known that he was producing propaganda rather than science. Dr. Glantz undoubtedly did know. What's more interesting is why those who reviewed his article prior to publication in a respected journal didn't catch on or why the grant-makers who lavished tax money on him to produce his study couldn't tell a scientific study from a propaganda tract. The answer is that they probably didn't look very closely. Dr. Glantz, after all, was working the right side of the street and everyone knows that you can get away with a lot so long as your cause is just and your heart pure.
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