Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

Chapter Five states that “[b]y the mid-1980s, nearly every American knew that smoking caused cancer, but still tobacco industry executives successfully promoted and sustained doubt” (136). In 1986, a new Surgeon General’s report concluded that secondhand smoke could be dangerous to nonsmokers, and so the EPA worked to limit indoor smoking. Fred Singer worked with the Tobacco Institute to challenge secondhand smoke’s health risks, claiming that the EPA was conducting so-called bad science.

“A Brief History of Secondhand Smoke”

In the same way that “the tobacco industry knew that smoking could cause cancer before the rest of us did, they knew that secondhand smoke could cause cancer, too. In fact, they knew it well before more independent scientists did” (137).

In the 1970s, industry-hired researchers learned that secondhand smoke was more toxic than firsthand smoke, and so they created different filters to make smoke less visible. Many states moved directly against tobacco, and most of them to limit active smoking, although some legislatures also targeted indoor smoking as well. In 1980, a study emerged that showed people who regularly inhaled secondhand smoke had the same decreased lung capacity as light smokers themselves. Although harshly criticized—as it was difficult to tell how much passive smoke secondhand smokers had been exposed to—most of the critics were unveiled as being connected to the tobacco industry. A second study in Tokyo addressed this scientific anomaly, showing that the wives of long-term smokers often died from lung cancer.

The tobacco industry hired consultants to attack the study and its researchers’ reputations. They convinced the media to present the issue as a debate and hired scientists to conduct a contradictory study, even while tobacco executives privately acknowledged the truth of the Tokyo study. Other scientists got onboard with the Tokyo study findings, and people began to push for public smoking regulation. Congress worked to control cigarette advertising and prevent sales to minors, eventually leading to the 1986 Surgeon General’s report. Many studies by government agencies soon came to the same conclusion: “Smoking was not just a matter of personal preference; it was a serious risk to bystanders, like driving drunk or shouting fire in a crowded theater” (139).

The tobacco industry was worried it would not survive if people smoked less. They paid actors to smoke in movies, and the Center for Tobacco Research created special projects through a law firm to ensure attorney-client privilege. They made legal arguments that preventing smoking in the workplace was a form of discrimination. They created sick-building syndrome, to suggest that buildings caused secondhand smoke health complaints. They battled the excise taxes, and they recruited more scientists using Project Whitecoat, which enlisted European scientists to refute mainstream scientific claims of secondhand smoke’s health risks. Above all else, the industry believed that maintaining the controversy was crucial to tobacco’s success.

In a tactical misstep, the tobacco industry promoted the use of the phrase environmental tobacco smoke in place of passive or secondhand smoking because they thought it sounded less threatening. However, this meant that tobacco regulation fell under EPA purview, and in 1992 the EPA released a study linking lung cancer deaths as well as pneumonia, bronchitis, and asthma in children and infants to secondhand smoke—although they failed to link sudden infant death syndrome, other childhood respiratory infections, and adult cardiovascular disease to it—leading secondhand smoke to be classified as a class A carcinogen. The EPA also had a problem finding an unaffected population for comparison, and so studies went to the same spousal exposure method from the Tokyo study. Although limitations existed, it was widely accepted that the findings of these studies linking secondhand smoke to myriad health complications were correct and reasonable: “lots of smoke produced lots of cancer; less smoke produced less cancer” (142), with effects witnessed in various people (with various lifestyles, diets, etc.) in studies across several countries.

Fred Seitz began working for the tobacco industry in 1979 and continued his work in the 80s and 90s. Seitz “suggested that the best way to fight such a heavy weight of evidence was to challenge the weight-of-evidence approach” (142) by only looking to studies with the best evidence. The tobacco industry was not impressed and turned to Fred Singer, who advocated that any science harmful to the tobacco industry be labeled as bad or junk science, creating the Science and Environment Policy Project. Singer claimed that the EPA could not rule out other factors, rigging the numbers to allow for greater government regulation. Singer knew that this was untrue, but it aligned with his goal of stopping or delaying secondhand smoke regulation. The tobacco industry distributed a handbook for fact-fighters, Bad Science: A Resource Book, which listed sound bite messages on how the EPA had manipulated science to fulfill its expensive political agenda, as well as a list of scientists available to comment on any issue. But the handbook contained no primary sources or annotations, just assertions presented as facts from experts paid by the industry. However, it successfully reminded readers of science’s fallibility. The media capitalized on these instances of scientific error and malfeasance.

“This was the Bad Science strategy in a nutshell: plant complaints in op-ed pieces, in letters to the editor, and in articles in mainstream journals to whom you’d supplied the ‘facts,’ and then quote them as if they really were facts” (147). Many of these quotes came from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think-tank dedicated to limiting government regulations: “The goal wasn’t to correct scientific mistakes and place regulation on better footing. It was to undermine regulation by challenging the scientific foundation on which it was built. It was to pretend that you wanted sound science when really you wanted no science at all—or at least no science that got in your way” (148).

“Blaming the Messenger: The Industry Attack on the EPA”

Former Chief of Staff for HW Bush, Craig Fuller, was responsible for paying Federal Focus, Inc., a group run by James Tozzi, who suggested that FF could channel money to Seitz’s George Marshall Institute for more research on secondhand smoke. They also used the media, targeting “particular journalists of a ‘revisionist ilk,’ whom they considered susceptible to the suggestion that environmentalism had run amok” (149). They decided to attack both the EPA as a corrupted bureaucracy which overspent taxpayer money and science itself, focusing “on ‘receptive’ secondary markets, rather than in conventionally attractive cities for PR like New York and Washington, ‘to avoid cynical reporters from major media,’ who might be inclined to dig” (150-151).

Scientific advisors included Fred Singer, Fred Seitz, and Michael Fumento:

Still, despite their managing to place their views in so many media outlets—and even finding a voice through [Gina] Kolata at the New York Times—TASSC [The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition] faced an uphill battle, as the American people were increasingly turning against smoking, and industry attacks over arcane scientific issues like confidence limits got scant traction (152).

In the mid-1990s, they joined forces with the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, whose alleged goal is to promote democracy.

Peer review is important to science: “The idea is simple: no scientific claim can be considered legitimate until it has undergone critical scrutiny by other experts” (154). Although usually only three reviewers (and one review) are required, the EPA report was reviewed twice by a panel of nine experts and nine consultants, all of whom concurred that ETS (Environmental Tobacco Smoke) should be classified as a Class A carcinogen, although many believed that the report’s conclusions were not strong enough. There was no doubt in the reviewers’ minds that direct inhalation of tobacco smoke caused lung cancer, and ETS strongly resembled direct inhalation; ergo, it made sense that ETS caused lung cancer as well. The panel believed that the report should be more critical of the potential harm ETS posed to children, and so the report was revised, although not to the extent desired by the panel. The EPA followed its own guidelines in the report as well as normal scientific practice, making it all but bulletproof. However:

Singer and Jeffries had misrepresented the peer review process, claiming that the report had been widely criticized in the scientific community, ignoring that the report had not only been unanimously endorsed by the independent experts, but that those experts had encouraged the EPA to make it stronger (158).

The EPA focused their counter to the criticisms advanced by the tobacco industry on the deleterious effects ETS was shown to have on children: “’Having a choice to take a risk for themselves should not permit smokers to impose a risk on others”’ (160), they decisively stated.

Singer also tried to counter the EPA report via the idea of a dose threshold, insisting—based on the advising of a medic from the 1500s—that “the dose makes the poison” (160): i.e., only after a certain dose marker is hit does the substance become toxic. This logic was also used in radiation studies: “By the 1970s, the threshold concept was being used by all sorts of people to defend all sorts of hazardous materials” (161). However, the important distinction between ETS and other risks was that manmade ETS was being imposed on other people without their consent. Again, most of the debate actually involved the belief that government regulation led to socialism.

“Using Tobacco to Defend Free Enterprise”

British organization FOREST (Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco) was created by the British Tobacco Advisory Council, similar to the tobacco industry’s efforts in the United States. The claims they made were similar to Singer’s belief that science had been taken over in order to promote a political agenda, likening antismoking scientists both to communists and Nazis. They believed that a defense of smoking was equivalent to a defense of freedom, similar to what the American tobacco industry argued: “Somehow, somewhere, defending America against the Soviet threat had transmogrified into defending the tobacco industry against the US Environmental Protection Agency” (164).

Russell Seitz also joined in, as an affiliate of the Olin Institute, which promoted free market ideas. Seitz “argued that rather than trying to control smoking, the government should fund research into making a safe cigarette” (165), including how to safely deliver addictive, and in some cases, toxic, nicotine to people. Mostly, Seitz argued for the liberty to smoke. However, “all freedoms have their limits, and none more obviously than the freedom to kill other people….Secondhand smoke was an indirect danger that killed people” (166).

So really, the debate on secondhand smoke was a debate about capitalism: “If you believed in capitalism, you had to attack science, because science revealed the hazards that capitalism had brought in its wake” (167).