We have been subsidizing non-smokers all these years, not imposing health costs on the states, AND THE TOBACCO INDUSTRY KNOWS IT. But they have let the anti-smokers get away with this Big Lie for over 10 years, never bringing a single libel suit, nor demanding action from their vaunted stooges in Congress.

They let the Centres for Disease Control concoct methodologically fraudulent smoking cost claims, and they let the media repeatedly disseminate these lies to the public. They let the Office of Technology Assessment do the same, permitted OTA staff members to get away with false testimony to Congress, and ignored the Congressional Research Service Report exposing them.

They let each Surgeon General report commit perjury to Congress as well. And, contrary to superficial appearances, the tobacco industry didn't even make a half-hearted attempt to fight those Medicaid lawsuits.

Instead of challenging the methodology of the anti-smokers' phony smoking cost claims, their Florida lawyers ludicrously sought to drag an endless stream of Medicaid recipients into court and inquisition them for fraud. When the judge didn't allow this, they whined that it destroyed their defense.

Why didn't they depose former OTA project director Karl Kronebusch, who has freely admitted to the methodological subterfuges of the anti-smokers' OTA report, which apply to their SAMMEC as well? Why didn't they depose Jane Gravelle of the CRS?

Instead of using our side's overwhelming statistical evidence to demolish the anti-smokers' claims, they whined that it was unfair for the anti-smokers to be allowed to use statistical evidence. They tried to duck the smoking cost issue with off-target, irrelevant arguments that "cigarettes are a legal product," and that the Florida prison system once produced cigarettes. And, they implicitly conceded this Big Lie to the anti-smokers by attempting to shift the supposed "blame" for the phony health costs onto "individual smokers' responsibility for choosing to smoke," and whined when these bogus defenses were taken away from them.

EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE TOBACCO INDUSTRY APPROACHES IS NOT JUST UNNECESSARY, BUT HARMFUL AND COUNTERPRODUCTIVE TO AN EFFECTIVE AND JUST DEFENSE.

Yet having been stripped of their worthless, junk arguments, the tobacco lawyers refused to do their homework and come up with good ones. They just whined some more about avoiding negative headlines that might affect Congressional approval of their sellout settlement deal as they meekly surrendered.

Now we see the truth taking shape like an evil spectre before our eyes: Namely, that the tobacco lawyers and the tobacco executives are either abjectly incompetent, or else expecting a payoff from the anti-smokers, probably with our own tax dollars, to put up nothing but a sham resistance, while secretly committing industrial suicide.

Perhaps the real tobacco deal was secretly consummated years ago. Between tax breaks and price increases, the tobacco companies will pay absolutely nothing for their crooked settlement. We smokers will be forced to pay instead. But this is probably just part of their secret deal, to help their anti-smoker friends eliminate smoking. And the evidence for conspiracy between the tobacco industry and the anti-smokers does not end with economics.

A few years ago, the Centres for Disease Control, for reasons they never explained, stealthily removed ulcers and stomach cancer from their SAMMEC list of so-called smoking-attributable diseases. It was because it became clear to gastroenterologists that they had falsely blamed smoking for illnesses caused by the bacteria Helicobacter pylori. Yet the tobacco industry has never said boo about it.

Now, H pylori has been implicated as a cause of cardiovascular disease as well. Another bacteria, Chlamydia pneumoniae, has also been implicated. This casts *** ALL *** of the studies upon which the anti-smokers have based their claim that smoking causes cardiovascular disease into doubt. Because those studies did not consider these important risk factors, they were falsely biased against smoking just as the ulcer and stomach cancer studies were.

The tobacco industry has again said nothing. And, their research on heart disease consists of little more than quibbling about whether risk factors other than HP and CP were adequately controlled for, and an epidemiologic study showing that socioeconomically similar smokers and non-smokers from the same county had similar rates of heart disease.

The latter would have been interesting and provocative about 20 years ago. But in light of current knowledge about HP and CP, it is either shocking ignorance or concealment to fail to mention these.

We also know that, for forty years, the anti-smokers have deliberately performed defective studies, which lack pathological examinations of the placenta, in order to falsely blame smoking for perinatal illness which is really caused by chorioamnionitis. And the tobacco industry has let them get away with it. Research funded by the tobacco industry merely repeats the anti-smokers' fatal methodological flaw. And, both they and the anti-smokers refuse to discuss this crucial methodology issue.

The anti-smokers' claim that smoking causes cervical cancer has been demonstrated to be merely the product of confounding by undetected infection by the high-risk human papillomavirus, the result of deficient analysis.

The same way they've pawned off these bogus health risks with methodologically defective studies, the anti-smokers falsely pretend that their studies of smoking and childhood asthma, which lack the crucial risk factor of exposure to cockroaches, are conclusive. The study by Rosenstreich et al., which established the importance of this risk factor, made no mention of smoking effects as published, although the author told the media that "The only thing that really stood out was that the children who had a lot of cockroach exposure in their bedrooms seemed to be a lot sicker."

This can be taken as deliberate concealment of results harmful to the anti-smoking movement by the New England Journal of Medicine. There is no trace or mention of any of this evidence refuting the anti-smokers in the tobacco industry's public comments on the recent California EPA report. Nor did the tobacco industry express any reservations about funding the anti-smokers' health lies in the tobacco settlement.

A few years ago, I issued a challenge on the Internet to any anti-smoker, or anyone else, to cite anything that the tobacco industry has ever said, anywhere, about Helicobacter pylori. Nobody ever came up with a single thing. I now repeat that challenge, and expand it to include Chlamydia pneumoniae, chorioamnionitis, confounding by human papillomavirus, and also cockroaches as a cause of asthma. And I expect the same result.

Furthermore, I dare the media to ask the president of RJR, Steven Goldstone, and the other tobacco executives, especially their toady from Liggett, Bennett LeBow, "What about Helicobacter pylori, etc.?" And, ask the same question of their big shot law firms who have been masterminding this debacle: Arnold & Porter in Denver, CO; Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, and also Covington & Burling, in Washington DC; Shook, Hardy & Bacon in Kansas City, MO; Davis & Gilbert of New York City; and others. What do they know about Helicobacter pylori, and when did they know it?

Best of all, put the question to those tobacco industry researchers, Maxwell Layard and Maurice Le Vois, of why they have failed to mention Helicobacter pylori or Chlamydia pneumoniae.

This looks like a conspiracy to voluntarily shut down the tobacco industry, while putting on a public charade of pretending to do their best to defend themselves. They have not done so, and we know it, because we have sent this information to the tobacco companies and to their lawyers, to make sure that they have it. And they have ignored it.

INVESTORS, TAKE NOTE! This shows a systematic pattern of behaviour by the tobacco executives and their attorneys of refusing to take appropriate action to protect their industry's interests. These are solid grounds for investors to take legal action to remove these saboteurs.

For all these years, instead of putting an end to the anti-smokers' crimes, the tobacco industry's friends in Congress have just let us assume that they were on our side because they voted for smaller cigarette tax increases than the anti-smokers wanted, and the like. Now, as the tobacco industry lobbies them to sell us out by approving their cynical settlement with the anti-smokers, they promise to toss tobacco growers a few handfuls of spare change to placate them, while ignoring smokers altogether.

This must change. The tobacco industry may have lots of dollars, but we smokers have lots of votes. And we know what's going on. We now know that the tobacco industry's actions have been completely against the rights and interests of 50 million smokers. So, Congress must not merely reject that crooked proposed settlement they are lobbying for so hard.

There must be a full-scale investigation of the anti-smoking movement, including their corruption of the EPA and their numerous economic, scientific, and legal frauds. They must be forced to take back their lies, and to give back everything they stole from us, including their payoffs to Mississippi and Florida, and pay damages to us to boot.

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