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By David Egilman
Jack Kevorkian was tried several times for second degree murder for assisting at suicide. He was finally convicted of second degree murder for one such “assist.” The state never asserted that the person who was killed was uninformed or had not participated in the decision to hire Kevorkian to assist in their own death. Patients knew of the risk they were taking when they contacted Dr. Kevorkian to help them kill themselves.
By Liz Borkowski
An article in the latest issue of OMB Watch’s Watcher newsletter reports on U.S. Chamber of Commerce efforts to get EPA to make changes to its chemical databases. The short story is that the Chamber asked the EPA to correct what it claimed was “inconsistent and erroneous” information about chemicals in the agency’s databases, and EPA rejected the claim, explaining that there were “valid and specific reasons” why databases might contain differing information for the same chemicals. (See the article for the complete story.)
The important thing about this story is that the Chamber made its request in the form of a Data Quality Act challenge. The DQA (officially the Information Quality Act, or IQA) has what sounds like a reasonable goal: “ensuring and maximizing the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information” disseminated by federal agencies. Its history to date, however, shows it to be a tool for hindering agencies’ work to protect public health and the environment.
Four Nigerian states are suing British American Tobacco and Philip Morris to recover costs of treating smoking-related diseases. The plaintiffs charge that the companies aimed to recruit more smokers by targeting minors, using sponsorship of concerts and sporting events and free cigarette giveaways. Tosin Sulaiman in The Times (UK) reports:
Over the past few years, millions of formlerly secret internal documents from the tobacco industry have been made public and helped public health advocates learn how Big Tobacco deceived lawmakers and the public about smoking’s health risks.
Wading through all these documents is time-consuming, so the Center for Media and Democracy has launched a TobaccoWiki that will allow people interested in the subject to share their findings online. (A Wiki is basically a tool for online collaboration; see Wikipedia’s explanation to learn more about it.) Here’s their explanation of the project:
By David Michaels
Chris Cillizza of WashingtonPost.com’s The Fix blog reports that former U.S. Senator Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) is “growing more and more serious about a run for president” - in fact, he’s chosen a “campaign manager in waiting.”
Tom Collamore, a former vice president of public affairs at Altria, has been leading the behind-the scenes organization efforts for a Thompson presidential candidacy and will be intimately involved when (not if) the former senator decides to announce a bid.
Altria is the parent company of Philip Morris (PM), which was behind many of the tobacco industry’s creative methods for staving off and weakening government regulation of tobacco products. How much did Collamore participate in these activities?
Collamore joined Philip Morris in 1992, Cillizza reports. At that time, the tobacco industry was concerned about moves to ban smoking in public places based on the health risks associated with secondhand smoke, or environmental tobacco smoke (ETS). Tobacco’s number one enemy was the EPA, which had conducted a risk assessment that concluded that ETS was causing disease and death among non-smokers. Big Tobacco realized that as long as the harm from tobacco was limited to smokers, the cigarette makers could avoid regulation by claiming that smoking (and related illness) was just a personal choice issue. But once it became clear that smoking kills non-smokers too, all bets were off.
A 2004 article in Preventive Medicine by Monique Muggli, Richard Hurt, and Lee Becker uncovered Philip Morris’s work to “derail the [EPA’s] risk assessment on environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) by recruiting a network of journalists to generate news articles supporting the industry’s position and pushing its public relations message regarding the ETS issue.” Collamore was apparently involved in this effort: Read the rest of this entry »
Today, the Institute of Medicine released its report Ending the Tobacco Problem: A Blueprint for the Nation. In a public briefing Richard J. Bonnie, Chair of the IOM Committee on Reducing Tobacco Use, explained that “ending the tobacco problem” means reducing tobacco use “so substantially that it is no longer a significant public health problem.”
In the U.S., tobacco use claims an estimated 440,000 lives and rings up an estimated $89 billion in health care costs every year. Worldwide, it’s responsible for five million deaths each year, making it the second major cause of death.
The reduction in U.S. smoking – tobacco use has declined by more than 50% since 1964 – is a major public health achievement, but Bonnie noted that there are still 45 million smokers and that smoking initiation rates in young adults appear to be rising. To preserve and enhance gains already made, the committee recommends strengthening existing tobacco control measures “such as excise tax increases, indoor smoking restrictions, comprehensive state-based programs, media-based prevention campaigns, school-based programs, and cessation therapies and services.” To truly end the tobacco problem, though, Bonnie explained that stronger tools are needed:
by Liz Borkowski
Via the Center for Media and Democracy, I’ve just learned about an article from the journal Tobacco Control that provides insight into yet another instructive facet of the Tobacco Wars: Philip Morris’s plan to combat the declining social acceptability of smoking. The article authors – P.A. McDaniel, E.A. Smith, and R.E. Malone – examined documents made public through litigation against the tobacco industry for details on the industry’s “Project Sunshine” plan, which was launched in 1996 to combat the declining social acceptability of smoking. In particular, they focused on the company’s “Fair Play” strategy, which was designed to limit the effectiveness of the tobacco control movement.
Since other tactics honed by the tobacco industry (e.g., manufacturing uncertainty, slamming opponents’ science as “junk”) have been adopted so successfully by other industries fighting regulation, this strategy is probably already in wide use by other industries fighting attempts to regulate or reduce use of their products. In fact, now that I’ve read this article, I can easily imagine the playbook that would look something like this:
by Liz Borkowski
Since November of 2006, all cigarette packages and advertising in Chile have been required to devote half of their space to hard-hitting anti-tobacco messages. In addition to a “These cigarettes are killing you” warning, this includes a haunting photo of Miguel García Martín, a 72-year-old Chilean who lost his larynx to cancer after smoking for 20 years:
By David Michaels
The Bush Administration is manufacturing uncertainty about global warming, even as its allies in the carbon producing industries are abandoning it.
Last week, the Washington Post’s Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin reported that “top executives at many of the nation’s largest energy companies have accepted the scientific consensus about climate change and see federal regulation to cut greenhouse gas emissions as inevitable.” John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Co, said
We have to deal with greenhouse gases. From Shell’s point of view, the debate is over. When 90-plus percent of the world’s leading figures believe that greenhouse gases have impacted the climate of the Earth, who is Shell to say, ‘Let’s debate the science’?”
Yet on Wednesday, in front of the US Supreme Court, the Bush Administration said “Let’s debate the science.”
