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July 25, 2007
– Regulation
Redux: Still a bad prescription for smoker’s health
- There’s a great deal wrong with the latest moves in
the US to have cigarettes
regulated by the FDA, as a recent analysis by John Luik in the Tobacco Reporter
demonstrates. As he traces the history of the efforts to obtain government
regulation of tobacco by health authorities, and how such efforts seem designed
around a sort of “prohibition by stealth” strategy rather than any honest agenda
to reduce harm for the consumer, Luik pulls up some intriguing bits of
information form the tobacco wars.
Films - 'One of the “nice”
things about the advocacy of the anti-tobacco lobby is how consistently silly,
not to say nonsensical, its claims are. Unencumbered with the responsibilities
of reputable research and rigorous analysis of whether their purported solutions
really work, the anti-tobacco zealots are able to continue on year after year
re-cycling to a lazy media their same sound-bite claims as the novel product of
serious thinking on the hard problem of preventing smoking.'
Separating trans fat from fiction - It’s clear that the trans fat
prohibitionists haven’t at all established their case that trans fat is
dangerous. So why the ban? Is it then merely a politically opportunistic
response to public pressure? Not at all. Most people apparently don’t give a
damn. So if neither public health concerns nor political pressures provide a
reason for the ban movement, why is there a ban movement? The next couple of
items may yield some clues.
Four big, fat myths
- "Obesity worse than drinking or smoking". "Obesity is a greater threat than
weapons of mass destruction". "Obesity is the most serious threat to the future
health of our nation". These are just a few examples of how "health advocate"
doctors (or so they call them) shoot their mouths with the well-tested alarmist
tactics used for smoking and for the passive smoke fraud. Even here these people
are conning the public, of course - but governments respond to their
misrepresentation of evidence far more than they respond to the truth. A
government that forbids, taxes and surveys in the name of health is a
"responsible" one.
Here is an example of the results: "Big Brother has an
ambition: to become Big Nanny. The Government wants to introduce a £224 million
'Children's Index', a massive database of every child in the country, charting
progress from birth to adulthood and flagging up 'concerns' about each child's
development. Two 'flags' on a child's record would trigger an official
investigation into his or her family." This essay by John Luik and Patrick
Basham, published by The Telegraph take us through this journey of thorough fact
analysis and considerations on what may be destined to dwarf smoking as the
greatest social fraud ever conceived. Yet - as it has happened for smoking - the
truth is ignored when the fraud is drummed endlessly into the head of people
with state propaganda and with the collaboration of prostituted medical figures.
To stop health authorities' corruption and power one first and essential step is
needed: people have to stop believing them.
Judge Kessler’s
new history of the tobacco wars -
Perhaps the
strangest thing about Judge Kessler’s recent decision in the US
Department of Justice’s case against the tobacco industry, and there
is, as we shall see, an awfully lot that is strange about it, has
been the reaction of investment analysts, a considerable portion of
the media and many in the public health and anti-tobacco communities
who have characterized the Kessler verdict as a victory for Big
Tobacco.
French fries and cancer -
While
french fries are the object of California's health cartel's ire,
John Luik writes an informative piece regarding the "science" that
found a link between girls who eat them and breast cancer later in
life. This is a must read for those who wish to understand how
epidemiology and statistics are perverted to produce a politically
desirable result.
Surgeon Dictator -
While
normal people enjoyed the last month of summer indulging in
vacations, time spent with friends and family, the fat police have
been toiling in the vineyards of paternalistic regulation policy.
John Luik examines one proposal that
would require restaurants to cut their servings by one half to
two-thirds. He not only makes mincemeat of the supposed
"obesity epidemic" that would justify such a bizarre —
not to say wildly illegal —
policy but points out how restaurants,
as well as all other business, respond to consumer demand not
the reverse.
A Precautionary Tale
-
John
Luik no longer has hope that the corrupt and ineffective World
Health Organization can reform itself. The organization's
embrace of the inherently flawed concept, known as the precautionary
principle, dooms it to veer ever nearer to a cultish mindset that is
incapable of coping with the multitude of variables that constantly
flow through every aspect of human health. Its adherence to
special interest pet peeves and agendas renders it incapable of
fulfilling the mission the world set it up to perform.
Middle aged fatties prone to dementia -
In addition to reiterating the
limitations of epidemiological studies John Luik exposes the
questionable methodology of this study which preposterously links
obesity in middle age with old age dementia. In addition he
explains why this example of junk science caused such consternation
both in the United States and abroad. The media's scientific
illiteracy is only part of the problem.
Nightmare of incrementalism -
Last year we reported on the so-called
tobacco buyout that ended the agricultural subsidies for that crop.
Since tobacco was involved the simple relief bill for farmers turned into a
smorgasbord of special-interest bottom feeding that included the Holy Grail
of Food and Drug Administration control over tobacco products. When
the ravenous oinks ended smokers were stuck with the $10-billion cost of
bailing out the farmers but the FDA regulation component was excised.
This year the usual suspects have reintroduced a bill that will give the FDA
the power over tobacco that the tobacco control industry has so long sought.
John Luik wrote extensively about last year's shenanigans, making the
complex understandable. With anti-tobacco special interests again
hoping to grasp the club to bludgeon smokers it's appropriate to present
this informative piece to our readers.
Whoppers and the End of an Epidemic -
Apart from
this huge downward revision in the numbers of people supposedly dying from
fat, there are several things in this study which signal the end of any
legitimate linkage between obesity and premature death. First, for the
merely overweight with BMI's from 25-30 there is no excess mortality. In
fact, being overweight was "associated with a slight reduction in mortality
relative to the normal weight category." Being overweight not only does not
lead to premature death, something that dozens of other studies from around
the world have been saying for the last 30 years, but it also carries less
risk from premature death than being "normal" weight. In other words the
overweight=early death "fact" proclaimed by the public health community
is simply not true.
They Don't Embarrass Easily - A few
years ago The New York Times ran a cartoon that showed two Washington DC
policy experts having a conversation. "In Washington the search for truth is
a creative process. First, you create a premise. Next you create a statistic
to back it up. Then you create an audience by repeating it over and over
again, until the media pick it up. That's when you know that you've done
it." "Done what?" "Created a fact!" Just add Atlanta -- the home of the
Centers for Disease Control -- to Washington and you have a pretty good idea
of how obesity science and policy are made these days.
Only the Plump Die Young? - Some people
don't know when to quit. You would think that after the debacle over the
grossly inflated estimates of so-called obesity-related deaths from the US
Center for Disease Control that the fat police would have the decency to
just shut up. But the scary junk science stories about killer fat just keep
coming. The latest is an alarmist study in the New England Journal of
Medicine titled "Children's Life Expectancy Being Cut Short by Obesity." The
study, by a team led by Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois, makes
the astonishing and quite unsupported claim that for the first time since at
least 1900 children born in the United States today will live shorter lives
than their parents due to obesity-caused mortality. The study's only
problems are...
Beyond the myopia of prevention: the promise of harm
reduction
-
Ever since the publication of the US National Academy of
Sciences Institute of Medicine’s 2001 report Clearing the Smoke: Assessing
the Science Basis for Tobacco Harm Reduction, much of the tobacco control
community, particularly in the US, has engaged in a campaign to discredit
harm reduction- the provision of lower risk tobacco products to smokers
unable or unwilling to stop smoking- and insure that it does not find it way
onto the tobacco control policy agenda. ...
It's the movies, stupid -
Thanks to
visiting US academic Stanton Glantz we at last know why young people smoke.
In Toronto last week to tell the Ontario Film Review Board that movies
containing smoking should receive the 18 A rating (that would prevent anyone
under 18 from seeing them unless accompanied by an adult), Glantz told the
Post’s James Cowan that seeing on screen smoking is the main reason why
teens start smoking. No wonder the Post ran the Glantz story on the front
page. Since almost everything about youth smoking, but especially what
initiates it, is an immensely complicated and controversial issue, it is
nice to know that this difficult issue finally has a neat and
straightforward solution: just prevent kids from seeing films with people
smoking and they will not smoke...
Eat crow - All of this suggests
that this is not merely some storm in the statistical teacup but a major
credibility issue for the entire war on fat. The only basis for the massive
interventions into the nation’s stomachs being proposed by the government
and the public health community is that we are all getting excessively fat
and our fat is killing us. But between the doubts about the CDC numbers, the
evidence that most of us gain about a pound a year (most of it during the
holidays according to the New England Journal of Medicine) and the huge
literature that fails to find a link between overweight and premature
mortality, the rationale for the war on fact looks like it is dissolving
under a weight of junk science...
Binge drinking, advertising bans and higher duties-
the wrong prescription -
There is an
unfortunate tendency in contemporary public policy debates to attempt to
solve long-standing and multi-dimensional problems with simple solutions
that resemble political slogans or sound-bites more than serious attempts to
deal with complicated issues. Whilst this tendency is found across the
policy spectrum it is particularly obvious in policy debates that involve
advertising and health. Michael Prowse exhibits this tendency all too
clearly in his completely unsubstantiated claim that the answer to the UK’s
‘binge drinking’ problem is to ‘ban alcohol advertising and sharply raise
taxes on products aimed at the young’ (18/19 October, 2003)
The
perils of denormalization -
One of the
more disturbing contemporary trends in tobacco control is the increasing use by
both anti-smoking activists and governments of “denormalization” campaigns
against the industry. As used by the tobacco control movement, denormalization
is as a made-up word that functions as noun and verb to describe both a state
in which the tobacco industry and smoking are perceived to be non-normal,
aberrant, and deviant and a series of activities designed to achieve this
end...
The real light and mild scam -
For the last few
years one of the major strategies of the anti-tobacco activists and their
opportunistic friends in the plaintiff’s bar has been to attack the description
of tobacco products as “light” and “mild”. The activists have claimed that such
descriptors are inherently misleading in that they convince smokers that using
these cigarettes is less risky than other cigarettes. For the activists’ legal
colleagues the use of light and mild constitutes a novel but massive commercial
fraud which the experts in tobacco litigation have been quick to convert into
the only thing that really counts in the American tobacco war- multi-billion
dollar judgments. But the public
policy battles and the courtroom claims about light and mild, have often
distracted attention away from the larger issue of...
Canadian content at WHO -
Like many of his fellow citizens Toronto Mayor Mel
Lastman didn’t know a lot about WHO until the last few days, when its nature
and powers became quite undeniably real and frightening. But this bit of
national ignorance, however understandable, is completely unjustified for
Canadians, of all people, ought to know what WHO is like. This is because
for over the last thirty years we - or at least the people we trust our
health care system to - have provided the intellectual foundations for WHO’s
approach not only to SARS in Toronto but much else. And call if whatever you
want - the boomerang effect, things bite back, or reaping what you sow - the
WHO we have helped to create has now come back to haunt us...
Sheela Basrur,
junk science and phantom risks -
You would
have thought that between SARS and the looming return of West Nile that
Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health would have a fairly full plate. But the
good doctor appears to never let real health risks get in the way of the
important work of her unit- using junk science to stamp out phantom risks.
So last Monday while the numbers of SARS deaths continued to grow Dr. Basrur
and the Board of Health ran an eight hour meeting devoted to the hugely
important health risk of, yes, Designated Smoking Rooms (DSR’s are fully
enclosed and separately ventilated spaces where smoking in bars and
restaurants is permitted.)
The dark side of tobacco taxes -
Neither Finance Minister Greg Sorbora nor Health Minister
George Smitherman appear to get it. Both Ontario ministers, along with
Premier McGuinty and his Manitoba counterpart believe the orthodox fiction
pushed by Canada’s anti-tobacco activists that raising tobacco taxes is an
innocuous, cost-free policy measure that improves public health. Yet the
evidence clearly shows that both of these claims, that higher tobacco taxes
improve public health and that they are a cost-free policy measure are
untrue...
Junk
science redux -
It used to
be that the only junk that Canadians had to deal with regularly was the kind
that dropped into their mail boxes. Now however, there is not a week that
goes by without a new piece of junk science appearing in the press. For
instance over the last couple of months the Post and the other national
newspaper have averaged two-three junk science stories a week, including
stories about herbicides and childhood cancers, alcohol and breast cancer,
new nutritional guidelines from the WHO and global warming. Despite last
year’s musing by FP Editor Terry Corcoran that the FP’s crusade against junk
science might be running out of targets, this year has produced an enormous
number of new cases. Clearly the epidemic has not run its course...
Fat
chance: some cautions about the war on fat -
Ever since the Lancet last
year called for sin taxes on ‘junk food’ and prohibitions on food marketing
and advertising to children it was clear that Britian’s health establishment
paternalists were planning a massive new war on fat. It is now impossible to
pick up a newspaper or turn on the television without encountering a new
claim about the damage done by fat, the causes of obesity or what to do
about it. Perhaps the most obvious sign that government intends to get
involved is to be found in this week’s hearings by the Commons Health Select
Committee at which representatives of the food industry including McDonald’s
Cadbury Schweppes and PepsiCo will be asked to explain their role in the
rise of obesity...
The
origins of the junk science epidemic -
The
anti-tobacco movement likes to call the tobacco industry the “disease
vector” of the tobacco epidemic. While that claim is certainly disputable,
what is indisputable is that the anti-tobacco movement and their allies in
the public health community are the disease vector of the junk science
epidemic that threatens to overwhelm sound public policy, not only in
tobacco but in a wide range of health issues...
Ten wasted years -
The Health Minister's decision to slash funds
for Ottawa's multi-year, half-a-billion-dollar anti-smoking campaign is one
of the few positive things to come out of last week's annual National
Non-Smoking Week. The move signals that perhaps the government finally
realizes how much of its tobacco control strategy over the last decade has
been driven by the unevidenced rhetoric of the anti-smoking movement...
Smokescreen: 'passive smoking' and public policy -
The Health Effects of
Passive Smoking, the Draft Report of the NHMRC Working Party represents a
careful and sophisticated development of the principles of two Canadians,
Professor John Last, a distinguished epidemiologist, and Marc Lalonde, a
distinguished former minister of National Health and Welfare. Professor
Last's principles are taken from his plenary address to the International
Epidemiological Association, while those of minister Lalonde's are taken
from a 1974 document, ' A New Perspective for the Health of Canadians'...
A response to:
"Towards healthier communities in Nove Scotia: a Discussion Paper"
-
"There is no compelling evidence to support our claim, the authors all but
admit, but it is important, in the interests of health promotion that the
public be made to think that there is scientific evidence of harm."
The
'Smee Report' as a contribution to the tobacco advertising debate
- Almost two-and-a-half
years after the release of the Smee Report and despite the fact that the UK
government has declined to use the Report's conclusions as the basis of
public policy with respect to tobacco advertising, the Smee Report continues
to be cited around the world both as a comprehensive analysis of the
evidence about tobacco advertising and as a definitive judgement about the
necessity for bans of such advertising...
Pandora's Box: the dangers of politically corrupted science
for democratic public policy
- The assumptions about
the nature of persons and the legitimate role of the State (of necessity
unargued for) which structure our argument are those of an unreconstructed
liberal individualist, namely, that the individuals who make up democratic
society are the best judges of the shape they wish their lives to take, and
consequently they should be accorded the maximum liberty, compatible with
similar liberty for everyone else, to think, believe, and live as they
choose. This means that the State's role is at least fourfold: first, to
prevent or minimize harms by one individual to another individual...
'I can't help myself': addiction as ideology
- In one sense it is
perhaps curious that a symposium on addiction should include a paper by a
philosopher. Addiction, as we are constantly told, is, after all, a medical,
indeed a scientific issue for which the tools of the philosopher might seem
ill-suited or out of place. But to allow that addiction is a medical
problem, a disease to use the vocabulary favoured by some, is to concede
precisely the point which is at issue, namely, what should we mean when we
use the word `addiction', or more importantly, do we mean anything at all
when we use the word... |
John
Luik was educated on a Rhodes Scholarship at the University of Oxford
where he obtained degrees in philosophy and Politics (BA,MA,D Phil.).
He has taught philosophy and politics at several universities, been a
Senior Associate of the Niagara Institute with responsibility for its
work in public policy and its Values and Organizational Development programmes, and worked as a consultant for a number of governmental
institutions, professional organizations and corporations. 
