The anti-smokers pawn off their pseudo-science as real science. Their Big Lie that "cigarette smoking accounts for approximately 500,000 preventable deaths" is a good example of this, and it ought to be challenged head on.

The majority of those pretended deaths are from cardiovascular disease. But the anti-smoking establishment has been stonewalling and/or misleading the public about the implications of recent research indicting Helicobacter pylori and Chlamydia pneumoniae infection as causes of heart disease. They have falsely blamed smoking for heart disease actually caused by these bacteria.

The mechanism by which this was done is clearest for Helicobacter pylori. The lower socioeconomic groups are more likely to be infected, and infection virtually always occurs in very early childhood, before people become smokers.

Smokers are more likely to be from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and hence are more likely to be infected. By the same means, the anti-smokers inflated the numbers of supposed "smoking-related" deaths with 50,000 passive smokers, who, like the smokers they are exposed to, are more likely to be from a lower socioeconomic background than non-exposed non-smokers.

The anti-smokers are not entitled to keep pretending that their claim that "smoking causes heart disease" is written in stone, just because it's vital to their anti-smoking efforts and they've repeated it over and over again and expended enormous resources to brainwash the public. Nor are they entitled to cling to one-sided explanations, such as the one recently expounded that "it's possible that smoking contributes to the risk of multiple attacks by chlamydia" ("Bacterial infection produces blockage that can hurt heart." The Washington Times 1996 Sun Dec 22, p D8), when it's clear that smoking didn't "contribute to the risk" of H pylori infection many years before taking up smoking.

In fact, the highest rates of C pneumoniae infection are among primary school-age children too young to be smokers. Also, CP reportedly "caused plaque...to develop in the blood vessels of rabbits that had no other risk factors for the plaque."

This is in contrast to the work by Glantz and his ilk, purporting to link cigarette smoke to atherosclerosis, where experimental animals were fed high-cholesterol diets. They must instead determine how much of their so-called "smoking risk" is actually attributable to these new risk factors, as with their old discredited claim that smoking causes ulcers and stomach cancer.

Smoking was falsely blamed for ulcers and stomach cancer actually caused by Helicobacter pylori infection. Smoking supposedly caused from two to five times greater risk of these diseases, and the anti-smokers concocted theories that smoking increased stomach acid to cause ulcers, and produced supposed "evidence" of this, and invoked carcinogens in cigarette smoke for stomach cancer. But ulcers and stomach cancer were recently ever-so-quietly removed from the Centers for Disease Control's list of so-called "smoking attributable" diseases. They didn't wish to publicly discuss the reasons.

Previous heart disease studies can be presumed confounded by their failure to consider Helicobacter pylori and Chlamydia pneumoniae, so the anti-smokers' might as well bulldoze their much boasted-about "mountain of evidence" implicating smoking into the nearest landfill. They are no longer entitled to beat us over the head with it.

They can retire their stock lines that "smoking is the leading preventable cause of death," and that "smoking is the leading cause of premature death," also, because the number of deaths which ought now be attributed to infection, among both smokers and non smokers, exceeds the remainder blamed on smoking. They should not permitted to continue to under-count infection-related deaths by including only those due to acute illness such as pneumonia, salmonella, etc. And, the "proven contribution of smoking to cervical malignancies" they speak of so confidentially has now been proven to be an artifact of their own methodological carelessness. Researchers found that "when HPV [human papillomavirus] positive women were examined, thus removing those with potential undetected HPV, the odd ratios of cervical cancer... were consistently and statistically not different from 1" for cigarette smoking.

This false association was due to residual confounding with a known high-risk pathogen.

The anti-smokers trotted out their ever-handy speculations of causation by carcinogens in cigarette smoke, without perceiving any similar need to explain why the odds ratios for low education typically exceeded those for smoking. And then they compounded their offense by blaming passive smoking for cervical cancer in non-smokers as well. Again, they exploited the socioeconomic similarity between smokers and passive smokers.

Infection of the amniotic membranes is the leading cause of the perinatal conditions the anti-smokers blame on smoking, such as preterm birth, premature rupture of the membranes, stillbirth, and neonatal pneumonia. However, without placental pathological examinations, 90 percent of these cases are missed. The studies implicating smoking invariably failed to do such examinations.

Because these infections are more prevalent among the lower classes, the anti-smokers once again merely exploited socioeconomic similarities and differences between smokers, passive smokers, and non-smokers. Rates of preterm birth actually increased while smoking rates declined.

The role of chorioamnionitis has been known since the late 1950s. This is the same time the anti-smokers began to implicate maternal smoking. They nurtured the anti-smoking angle, and neglected science. Their zeal to lynch smoking, and concomitant complacency about disease, is responsible for retarding progress toward solving the problem.

Conscientious epidemiologists have long warned that even odds ratios of two to five could be the result of confounding, and not real risks. The media and their anti-smoking demagogues have ignored this warning, and rushed to fling every purported "new smoking risk" in our faces, heedless of even the clear likelihood of socioeconomic confounding in SIDS, diabetes, and other disease. This demonstrated confounding of supposedly unchallengeable evidence proves that smoking deserves a presumption of innocence, and it is epidemiologic malpractice to treat it as they are accustomed to doing.

The anti-smokers have also resorted to selectively publicizing studies purporting to show a smoking risk, where the weight of the evidence shows that no such risk exists, for numerous conditions, including various birth defects, breast cancer, multiple myeloma, and radon-induced lung cancer; and also to selectively reporting subgroup analyses, which is disreputable epidemiology. The anti-smokers' claim that nicotine is addicting is founded on deceit.

It is simply a ploy for outlawing tobacco. They are concealing the fact that they changed the definition solely to make nicotine fit, and they spread lies that the tobacco industry "concealed data" to distract attention from their actions.

The 1964 Surgeon General report only deemed nicotine "habituating," and deliberately distinguished it, along with caffeine, from truly addicting drugs. The anti-smokers removed the key requirements in the 1964 definition for euphoriant effects and objective (not just subjective and anecdotal) withdrawal symptoms, which made the definition so broad that even coffee could be proclaimed "as addicting as heroin and cocaine." Then, the anti-smokers pretend that their "addiction science" justifies persecuting nicotine (but not caffeine), when science does not justify such arbitrary distinctions.

The Centres for Disease Control and Office of Technology Assessment have deliberately used fraudulent methodology in their smoking cost estimates to spread the libel that smokers are an economic burden to society. The media have knowingly helped spread this libel, and deliberately concealed the truth, in order to get cigarette tax increases under this false pretence, and to incite malicious Medicaid lawsuits against the tobacco industry.

The anti-smokers lied about secondhand smoke causing lung cancer in non-smokers as well.

Indoor Air Quality director Robert Axelrad admitted to the EPA Inspector General that the crucial chapters of the report on ETS were written via illegal pass-through contracts to his own hand-picked cony, Kenneth G Brown. It was he who fudged the confidence intervals, and used spousal smoking studies to justify workplace smoking bans and hysteria about parental smoking, although studies on workplace and childhood exposure showed no risk.

The number of "non-smoker deaths" is also inflated by counting ex-smokers, and by extrapolating down to a hypothetical "zero ETS level" that falsely assumed a baseline of zero cotinine in non-ETS-exposed non-smokers.

It did not take into account that common foods such as potatoes and tomatoes naturally contain nicotine, and are eaten in amounts that would result in cotinine levels equivalent to daylong exposure to secondhand smoke.

The EPA's own scientists were against declaring ETS a human carcinogen, but the media lied to us that there was "no scientific dissent." And, when Rep Tom Bliley exposed the corruption, the media hushed it up.

The anti-smokers pretend that smoking bans are necessary to protect asthmatics, yet asthma deaths have tripled since the anti-smoking movement began. They made public heros out of people who hyperventilate themselves and then accuse innocent smokers of harming them, just as those suggestible types did during the witch hunts.

In contrast to their enthusiasm for seizing upon any excuse to rack up a few more deaths to blame on smoking, the Centres for Disease Control has been completely derelict in its duties regarding illness and death which could be attributed to non-smoking. Non-smokers are at greater risk of Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson s disease, ulcerative colitis, and several other conditions.

These could together account for 95,000 excess new cases per year of these diseases (about 73,000 due to AD), and over 1.3 million excess prevalence cases. Nor has the CDC bothered to estimate the excess costs due to these illnesses (probably around $20 billion), although they are of crucial importance in calculation of Medicaid and Social Security costs.

And then, hypocrites condemn cigarette advertising for what amounts to no more than daring to express positive feelings toward smoking. They believe they are entitled to ban these expressions for no other reason than that they believe their desire to eradicate tobacco use is more important than other peoples' Constitutional rights.

"Saving the children" is their ostensible justification. But they have coked themselves up with lies about what they're "saving the children" from. Those children have a far more fundamental right to truthful information, which they are not getting from the anti-smokers, and the same goes for adult consumers as well.

Despite the anti-smokers' abundant miseducation of the public, abuse and humiliation of smokers, and legally-enforced smoking bans, they have made relatively little headway toward their "Tobacco-Free America." The people would seem to be unwilling. It is doubtful that the anti-smoking movement could even exist at all without this massive resort to lies, fraud, deceit, and corruption. These have been primarily paid for with our own tax dollars, no less, while the anti-smokers harangue us about the supposedly invincible strength of the tobacco lobby and its seemingly magical powers to "deceive" people.

Anti-smoking conspirators in government agencies, as well as the American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, and American Lung Association have grievously violated the rights of all Americans. There must be a complete Congressional investigation of what these goons have been doing to our country. If the anti-smoking movement cannot survive without relying upon lawless, corrupt and anti-social means, it should not be permitted to survive.

Their tax funding should be cut off, the movement outlawed, and its ringleaders prosecuted.

And, the media's role as active accomplices, instead of watchdogs exposing their wrongdoing, must not be overlooked. These are the real conspirators and racketeers.

Courtesy of Carol Thompson 08/23/93
Smokers' Rights Action Group
P.O. Box 259575
Madison, WI 53725-9575
Phone: 608-249-4568