Trust Us, We're Experts PA

by Sheldon Rampton

  Other consultants were writing books, one on environmental tobacco smoke and health, another “exposing the vagaries of medical truisms, including those relating to tobacco” as “a clever and entertaining way of suggesting that medical ‘certainties’ are frequently without genuine scientific basis.” Other hired experts had publications pending in leading medical journals. “One of our consultants is awaiting the publication by a leading French medical journal of a major paper” that “very helpfully attacks the reliability of the evidence regarding ETS and lung cancer.” Another had published a scientific paper showing that keeping pet birds was a bigger cancer risk than secondhand smoke. Yet another was an editor at the Lancet and “is continuing to publish numerous reviews, editorials and comments on ETS and other issues.” In Scandinavia, a Philip Morris consultant was available to conduct research showing “how popular conceptions of health risks are often actually misconceptions, when compared to expert scientific evaluations.”25

  Straining at Gnats and Swallowing Camels

  Organizations such as the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, and the American Cancer Society estimate that direct smoking kills about 400,000 people per year in the United States—or, if you use the World Health Organization’s estimate, about 3 million people per year worldwide. In 1986, U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop released an analysis concluding that secondhand smoke was a significant health threat to nonsmokers, and a host of other studies by individual researchers and prominent health organizations have reached similar conclusions. The most common and serious consequences are asthma, emphysema, and heart disease. Estimates of the number of ETS-related deaths in the U.S. from heart disease alone have ranged from 37,000 to 62,000 per year. Children’s lungs are still developing, and they are therefore considered especially sensitive to environmental tobacco smoke. According to one estimate by the state of California, ETS causes 2,700 cases per year of sudden infant death syndrome in the United States.

  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s risk assessment of environmental tobacco smoke was published in 1993. It estimated that secondhand smoke causes some 150,000 to 300,000 cases per year of lower respiratory tract infections such as bronchitis and pneumonia in children up to 18 months of age, resulting in 7,500 to 15,000 hospitalizations, plus somewhere between 400,000 and a million cases of asthma. The EPA also decided, for the first time, that secondhand smoke should be classified as a “Class A carcinogen”—a government classificatory term which means that ETS is not merely suspected but known to cause lung cancer. The impact of secondhand smoke is small compared to the effect of direct smoking, but EPA estimated that some 3,000 lung cancer deaths per year among nonsmokers should be attributed to secondhand smoke.

  Tobacco’s defenders realized that challenging the entire body of evidence in EPA’s risk assessment would be impossible. Its conclusion that secondhand smoke causes respiratory effects in children was widely shared and virtually undisputed. Its conclusion regarding the link between secondhand smoke and cancer was based on several different types of evidence, most of which are hard to dispute. First and most obviously, secondhand smoke contains essentially all of the same cancer-causing and toxic agents that people inhale when they smoke directly. Second, tests of humans exposed to secondhand smoke show that their bodies absorb and metabolize significant amounts of these toxins. Third, exposure to secondhand smoke has been shown to cause cancer in laboratory test animals, which suggests strongly that it does the same thing to humans. Fourth, EPA reviewed analyses of some 30 epidemiological studies from eight different countries and found that women who never smoked themselves but were exposed to their husband’s smoke have a higher rate of lung cancer than women married to nonsmokers.

  Taken together, these pieces of evidence make it difficult to avoid the conclusion that secondhand smoke causes lung cancer. However, EPA’s estimate of the number of deaths was based solely on epidemiology, a branch of medical science that uses statistical analysis to study the distribution of disease in human populations. Epidemiology uses statistical correlations to draw conclusions about what causes disease, but it is a notoriously inexact science. In order to estimate someone’s lifetime exposure to secondhand smoke, researchers must rely on that person’s memories from years past, which may not be entirely accurate. Moreover, surveys cannot take into account all of the possible confounding factors that may bias a study’s outcome. Were the people surveyed exposed to other lung carcinogens, such as asbestos or radon? Did they inhale more second-hand smoke than they remember, or maybe less? Owing to these and other uncertainties, the EPA’s estimate of 3,000 deaths per year from ETS-related cancer is only a rough guess. It may be too high, or it may be too low. The tobacco industry’s propagandists seized on this sliver of uncertainty. There is no particular logical reason, from a scientific or policy perspective, why anyone should focus on lung cancer. After all, it represents only a fraction of the total number of deaths attributed to second-hand smoke, and there is no particular reason to prefer death from emphysema or heart disease over death from lung cancer. The lung cancer estimate, however, was the part of the EPA risk assessment that was most open to debate on methodological grounds. By focusing on it, the tobacco industry hoped to distract attention from the report’s irrefutable broader conclusions.

  Professor Gary Huber (no relation to Peter Huber) was one of the industry-funded scientists who responded to the call. Huber had built a career for himself as a contrarian scientist who regularly disputed the growing body of scientific evidence about tobacco’s deadly effects. Over the years, he received more than $7 million in tobacco industry research funding, and although his reputation as a “tobacco whore” cost him the respect of friends and academic colleagues, in industry circles he was something of a star, hobnobbing with top executives, fishing with senior attorneys, and participating in legal strategy sessions.26 He worked first at Harvard until the university took away his laboratory. A stint at the University of Kentucky’s pro-industry tobacco and health research institute ended when he was fired for alleged mismanagement, but he always landed on his feet, thanks to the tobacco money that followed him wherever he went.27 After Kentucky, he landed at the University of Texas, where he ran a nutritional health center while simultaneously offering secret consulting services to Shook, Hardy and Bacon, a national law firm that represented both Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds. During his time in Texas, industry lawyers paid him $1.7 million to collect and critique published scientific studies linking smoking to emphysema, asthma, and bronchitis. The tobacco attorneys went to extraordinary lengths to keep its payments to Huber a secret, routing the money through an outside account that bore a Greek code name to keep it off hospital books and make it difficult for an outsider to find.28

  The purpose of the secrecy, apparently, was to preserve a veneer of third party independence so that Huber could appear credible when he spoke out publicly in defense of cigarettes. By the late 1980s, he had become one of the most vocal and visible scientific critics of studies probing the hazards of environmental tobacco smoke. In 1991, he authored an article for Consumers Research magazine, a Consumer Reports look-alike that is partially funded by the tobacco industry. The scientific studies linking secondhand smoke to cancer, he wrote, were “shoddy and poorly conceived.” His article was repeatedly quoted by the tobacco industry’s network of columnists and by opinion magazines opposed to government regulation of smoking. Michael Fumento (a graduate of the partly tobacco-funded National Journalism Center) wrote a piece for Investor’s Business Daily that quoted Huber and several other tobacco-friendly researchers, calling them “scientists and policy analysts who say they couldn’t care less about tobacco company profits” but “say the data the EPA cites do not bear out its conclusions.” Huber’s arguments were also repeated by Jacob Sullum, editor of the libertarian magazine Reason (which receives funding from Philip Morris), in an article that was then picked up by Forbes Media Critic magazine. Philip Morris and R. J. Re
ynolds liked the Sullum piece 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 Sullum $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. The ads appeared under the headline “If We Said It, You Might Not Believe It.” The result, noted Consumer Reports magazine (no relation to Consumers Research), was that “Huber’s argument has undoubtedly now been seen by millions more people than ever read the original EPA report, let alone any of the hundreds of scientific articles on the subject in medical journals.”

  Huber’s vigilance on behalf of tobacco companies did not end there. In May 1993, he was intrigued to receive a letter from Garrey Carruthers, a former professor of agricultural economics and ex-governor of the state of New Mexico. “Dear Dr. Huber,” the letter began, “I am creating a coalition of scientists, academicians, former public officials and representatives from business and industry, concerned about the advancement of sound science. The name of this coalition is The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), and its goal is to advance the principles of science used to formulate sound public policy.” The letter asked Huber to lend his name to the coalition and to join Carruthers in “educating the public as to what constitutes the appropriate use of science in public policy.”29

  Huber looked over TASSC’s materials and noticed that environmental tobacco smoke was included in its lengthy list of examples of “junk science.” He drafted a letter to Anthony Andrade, one of his attorney handlers at Shook, Hardy and Bacon. “Dear Mr. Andrade,” he wrote. “For your interest, I am enclosing some materials from a new group apparently dedicated to establishing sound science in public policy. . . . I call this to your attention because some of their membership has already identified environmental tobacco smoke as an issue where unsound science prevails, as you can see from the enclosed ‘member survey’ form. I am pursuing this matter and will keep you informed.”30

  If not for the tobacco industry’s concerns about secrecy, they might have written back, telling Huber not to bother, because they were already on top of the matter. Philip Morris wasn’t just working hand-in-hand with TASSC on the issue of environmental tobacco smoke. Actually, Philip Morris had created TASSC.

  The Whitecoats Are Coming

  One of the forerunners of TASSC at Philip Morris was a 1988 “Proposal for the Whitecoat Project,” named after the white laboratory coats that scientists sometimes wear. The project had four goals: “Resist and roll back smoking restrictions. Restore smoker confidence. Reverse scientific and popular misconception that ETS is harmful. Restore social acceptability of smoking.” To achieve these goals, the plan was to first “generate a body of scientific and technical knowledge” through research “undertaken by whitecoats, contract laboratories and commercial organizations”; then “disseminate and exploit such knowledge through specific communication programs.” Covington & Burling, PM’s law firm, would function as the executive arm of the Whitecoat Project, acting as a “legal buffer . . . the interface with the operating units (whitecoats, laboratories, etc.).”31

  The effort to create a scientific defense for secondhand smoke was only one component in the tobacco industry’s multimillion-dollar PR campaign. To defeat cigarette excise taxes, a Philip Morris strategy document outlined plans for “Co-op efforts with third party tax organizations”—libertarian anti-taxation think tanks, such as Americans for Tax Reform, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Citizens for Tax Justice, and the Tax Foundation.32 Other third party allies included the National Journalism Center, the Heartland Institute, the Claremont Institute, and National Empowerment Television, a conservative TV network. In one memo to Philip Morris CEO Michael A. Miles, company vice president Craig L. Fuller noted that he was “working with many third party allies to develop position papers, op-eds and letters to the editor detailing how tobacco is already one of the most heavily regulated products in the marketplace, and derailing arguments against proposed bans on tobacco advertising.”33

  Through the Burson-Marsteller PR firm, Philip Morris also created the “National Smoker’s Alliance,” a supposedly independent organization of individual smokers which claimed that bans on smoking in public places infringed on basic American freedoms. The NSA was a “grassroots” version of the third party technique, designed to create the impression of a citizen groundswell against smoking restrictions. Burson-Marsteller spent millions of dollars of tobacco industry money to get the NSA up and running—buying full-page newspaper ads, hiring paid canvassers and tele-marketers, setting up a toll-free 800 number, and publishing newsletters and other folksy “grassroots” materials to mobilize the puffing masses. NSA’s stated mission was to “empower” smokers to reclaim their rights—although, behind closed doors, industry executives fretted that they didn’t want this rhetoric to go too far. They were well aware of opinion polls showing that 70 percent of all adult smokers wish they could kick the habit. “The issue of ‘empowerment of smokers’ was viewed as somewhat dangerous,” stated a tobacco strategy document. “We don’t want to ‘empower’ them to the point that they’ll quit.”34

  Owing to the publicity associated with Burson-Marsteller’s role in setting up the NSA, Philip Morris executives felt that it was best to select some other PR firm to handle the launch of TASSC. They settled on APCO Associates, a subsidiary of the international advertising and PR firm of GCI/Grey Associates, which agreed to “organize coalition efforts to provide information with respect to the ETS issues to the media and to public officials” in exchange for a monthly retainer of $37,500 plus expenses. 35 The purpose of TASSC, as described in a memo from APCO’s Tom Hockaday and Neal Cohen, was to “link the tobacco issue with other more ‘politically correct’ products”—in other words, to make the case that efforts to regulate tobacco were based on the same “junk science” as efforts to regulate Alar, food additives, automobile emissions, and other industrial products that had not yet achieved tobacco’s pariah status. “The credibility of EPA is defeatable, but not on the basis of ETS alone,” stated a Philip Morris strategy document. “It must be part of a larger mosaic that concentrates all of the EPA’s enemies against it at one time.”36

  Originally dubbed the “Restoring Integrity to Science Coalition,” the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition was later renamed to resemble the venerable American Association for the Advancement of Science. After APCO’s planners realized that the resulting acronym was not terribly flattering—ASSC, or worse, the ASS Coalition—they began putting a capitalized “the” at the beginning of the name, and TASSC was born, a “national coalition intended to educate the media, public officials and the public about the dangers of ‘junk science.’ ”37

  In September 1993, APCO president Margery Kraus sent a memo to Philip Morris communications director Vic Han, updating him on plans. “We look forward to the successful launching of TASSC this fall,” she stated. “We believe the groundwork we conduct to complete the launch will enable TASSC to expand and assist Philip Morris in its efforts with issues in targeted states in 1994.” APCO’s work would focus on expanding TASSC’s membership, finding outside money to help conceal the role of Philip Morris as its primary funder, compiling a litany of “additional examples of unsound science,” and “coordinating and directing outreach to the scientific and academic communities.” APCO would also direct and manage Garrey Carruthers, who had been hired as TASSC’s public spokesman. “This includes developing and maintaining his schedule, prioritizing his time and energies, and briefing Carruthers and other appropriate TASSC representatives,” Kraus wrote. She outlined a “comprehensive media relations strategy” designed to “maximize the use of TASSC and its members into Philip Morris’s issues in targeted states. . . . This includes using TASSC as a tool in targeted legislative battles.” Plann
ed activities included publishing a monthly newsletter, issuing frequent news releases, drafting “boilerplate” speeches and op-ed pieces to be used by TASSC representatives, and placing articles in various trade publications to help recruit members from the agriculture, chemical, biotechnology, and food additive industries. In addition to APCO’s monthly fee, $5,000 per month was budgeted “to compensate Garrey Carruthers.”38

  Considerable effort was expended to conceal the fact that TASSC was created and funded almost entirely by Philip Morris. APCO recommended that TASSC should first be introduced to the public through a “decentralized launch outside the large markets of Washington, DC and New York” in order to “avoid cynical reporters from major media.” In smaller markets, APCO reasoned, there would be “less reviewing/challenging of TASSC messages.” Also, a decentralized launch would “limit potential for counterattack. The opponents of TASSC tend to concentrate their efforts in top markets while skipping the secondary markets. This approach sends TASSC’s message initially into these more receptive markets—and enables us to build upon early successes.”39

  The plan included a barnstorming media tour of cities in these secondary markets by Garrey Carruthers. “APCO will arrange on-the-ground visits with three to four reporters in each city. These interviews, using TASSC’s trained spokespeople, third-party allies (e.g., authors of books on unsound science), members of the TASSC Science Board, and/or Governor Carruthers, will be scheduled for a one to two day media tour in each city.” To set up the interviews, APCO used a list of sympathetic reporters provided by John Boltz, a manager of media affairs at Philip Morris. “We thought it best to remove any possible link to PM, thus Boltz is not making the calls,” noted Philip Morris public affairs director Jack Lenzi. “With regard to media inquiries to PM about TASSC, I am putting together some Q and A. We will not deny being a corporate member/sponsor, will not specify dollars, and will refer them to the TASSC ‘800-’ number, being manned by David Sheon (APCO).”40 Other plans, developed later, included creation of a TASSC Internet page that could be used to “broadly distribute published studies/papers favorable to smoking/ETS debate” and “release PM authored papers . . . on ETS science and bad science/bad public policy.”41