Unfortunately, and increasingly today, one can find examples of junk science that compromise the integrity of the field of science and, at the same time, create a scare environment where unnecessary regulations on industry in general, and on the consumer products industry in particular, are rammed through without respect to rhyme, reason, effect or cause.

—Michael A. Miles, former CEO of the Philip Morris tobacco company ¹

Given the prominent role that science plays in modern society, it is hardly surprising that debates should arise over its conclusions and methods. Some of the worst atrocities of the past century have been perpetrated in the name of science, including experiments with “scientific socialism,” the racist science of eugenics, and the polluting depredations of modern industry. Major corporations and petty hustlers alike use the mantle of science to market all kinds of potions and remedies, many of which have no demonstrable efficacy and some of which are harmful. The history of psychiatry and the other social sciences is also riddled with scientific-sounding explanations for human behavior, on the basis of which innocent people have been sterilized, lobotomized, drugged against their will, or imprisoned.

The concept of “junk science,” however, is a particular term coined by corporate attorneys, lobbyists, PR firms, and industry-funded think tanks. It has very little to do with the quality of the research in question. In the hotly contested terrain of regulatory and liability law, “junk science” is the term that corporate defenders apply to any research, no matter how rigorous, that justifies regulations to protect the environment and public health. The opposing term, “sound science,” is used in reference to any research, no matter how flawed, that can be used to challenge, defeat, or reverse environmental and public health protections.

“Junk science” first emerged in the courtroom as a disparaging term for the paid expert witnesses that attorneys hire to testify on behalf of their clients. In many cases, of course, an expert witness is unnecessary. If one person shoots another in front of witnesses, you don’t need a rocket scientist to know who is responsible. During the twentieth century, however, courts expanded the system of tort law under which personal-injury lawsuits are filed in order to cover cases in which proof of causation is somewhat more complicated. Many of these cases require a scientist’s testimony particularly when the injury in question comes from environmental or toxic causes—for example, cancer in army veterans subjected to radiation from atomic bomb tests; asbestos-related mesothelioma; Reyes Syndrome caused by taking aspirin; or the link between swine flu vaccinations and Guillain-Barré Syndrome. By expanding the system of tort law, courts made it possible for people injured through these sorts of causes to collect damages from the companies responsible. Of course, the fact that these cases could have their day in court does not mean that the plaintiffs are guaranteed victory. In one of the “toxic tort” cases that has been frequently cited as an example of junk science in action, Merrell Dow pharmaceuticals successfully defended itself in court against 1,200 plaintiffs who charged that its morning-sickness drug, Bendectin, caused birth defects.

The idea that junk science was running amok in the courtroom received wide attention in the late 1980s with the publication of Galileo’s Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom. Authored by engineer and attorney Peter Huber, Galileo’s Revenge argued that money-grubbing lawyers are using spurious science to collect huge, undeserved injury settlements from innocent companies. The title of Huber’s book reflects his contention that corporations today have become victims of Galileo’s mythic status as a symbol of scientific integrity. Galileo may have been right, Huber said, when he stood alone against the repressive force of established convention, but scientists today who propose similarly heretical theories are mostly opportunists whose opinions merely contaminate the legal system by enabling frivolous lawsuits to proceed. “Maverick scientists shunned by their reputable colleagues have been embraced by lawyers,” Huber wrote. “Almost any self-styled scientist, no matter how strange or iconoclastic his views, will be welcome to testify in court. . . . Junk science is impelled through our courts by a mix of opportunity and incentive. ‘Let-it-all-in’ legal theory creates the opportunity. The incentive is money.”²

Junk scientists, Huber said, can be recognized because they “do not use regular channels of communication, such as journals, for reporting scientific information, but rely instead on the mass media and word of mouth.”³ Yet Huber’s own book and his opinions about junk science reached the public through a massive publicity blitz, beginning with a 1986 forum on “the liability crisis” sponsored by the Manhattan Institute for Public Policy Research, where Huber holds the title of senior fellow. “Reporters from all the national papers and magazines were there and the event generated numerous news articles,” stated the institute’s internal report on the campaign. The forum then became the basis for a 24-page Manhattan Report that “was mailed to 25,000 carefully selected people in government, academia, business, media and the law. . . . We held two workshops, one in Washington, DC in June and one in New York in August. The first included thirty corporate government affairs officers while the second, a full-day seminar, brought together fifteen academic scholars from throughout the country. . . . With assistance from a number of our friends, we compiled a mailing list of over 400 journalists who have written about the liability crisis. . . . Our project director, Walter Olson, published numerous ‘op eds’ on the subject, including a major piece in the Wall Street Journal.”⁴

Huber’s own scholarship, moreover, is open to the same charges of “data dredging, wishful thinking, truculent dogmatism, and, now and again, outright fraud” that he attributes to junk science. In the American University Law Review, Kenneth Chesebro has pointed to numerous factual distortions in the legal case studies that Huber cites. Huber is also the source for a widely cited statistic which claims that liability lawsuits cost the American economy $300 billion per year. When University of Wisconsin law professor Marc Galanter examined that claim, however, he discovered that its sole basis in fact was a “single sentence spoken by corporate executive Robert Malott in a 1986 roundtable discussion of corporate liability.” Malott had estimated that liability lawsuits cost corporations $80 billion per year—a number that Galanter notes is “far higher than the estimates in careful and systematic studies of these costs. Huber then multiplied Malott’s surmise by 3.5, rounded it up to $300 billion, and called that the ‘indirect cost’ of the tort system.”⁵

A court of law is not a laboratory, and good science does not prevail there any more often than justice itself does. Bad verdicts, like bad science, have been with us for a long time. For Huber, however, only certain offenses seemed to deserve the label “junk science.” Although he made a few offhand references to smoking as “our most routine form of suicide,” his anecdotal examples of junk science in action never mentioned the tobacco industry’s hired use of scientific guns to defend itself in court. “Due in large part to the scientific testimony,” boasted an R. J. Reynolds executive in a 1981 speech, “no plaintiff has ever collected a penny from any tobacco company in lawsuits claiming that smoking causes lung cancer or cardiovascular illness—even though 117 such cases have been brought since 1954.”⁶ This boast was still valid when Galileo’s Revenge hit bookstore shelves, yet Huber never used the term “junk science” in reference to tobacco science—deference which may possibly reflect the fact that Huber’s employer, the Manhattan Institute, is a conservative think tank that is significantly supported by tobacco money, along with other industries that have their own vested interests in limiting lawsuit-related corporate liability.⁷

By the 1990s, in fact, the tobacco industry itself was using the term “junk science” to assail its critics. Its behind-the-scenes sponsorship of organizations purporting to defend sound science constitutes one of the great underreported stories of the past decade. The Lancet, England’s leading medical journal, published an account of this story for the first time on April 8, 2000. Written by University of California-San Francisco researchers Stanton Glantz and Elisa Ong, the Lancet story examined never-before-published internal documents from Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds and discovered a covert campaign that was prodigiously expensive, international in scope, and capable of reaching even into the editorial offices of the Lancet itself.

The article by Glantz and Ong focused on the tobacco industry’s activities in Europe, but that is only part of the tale. In the United States as well, the tobacco industry has successfully manipulated the rhetoric of “junk science.” Even former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, one of tobacco’s most outspoken critics, has been unwittingly drafted into the campaign, his words twisted to make him sound like an industry ally.

Alar Mists

The concept of “junk science” broadened to arenas outside the courtroom in 1989 when pro-industry groups used the term to attack what has come to be known as “the great Alar scare.” Alar was a chemical, first marketed in 1968, that apple growers sprayed on trees to make their apples ripen longer before falling off. In use, however, Alar breaks down to a by-product called “unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine,” or UDMH. The first study showing that UDMH can cause cancer was published in 1973. Further studies published in 1977 and 1978 confirmed that Alar and UDMH caused tumors in laboratory animals. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency opened an investigation of Alar’s hazards in 1980, but shelved the investigation after a closed meeting with Alar’s manufacturer, the Uniroyal Chemical Company. In 1984, the EPA reopened its investigation, concluding in 1985 that both Alar and UDMH were “probable human carcinogens.” Under pressure from the manufacturer, however, the EPA allowed Alar to stay on the market. Its use continued, even after tests by the National Food Processors Association and Gerber Baby Foods repeatedly detected Alar in samples of applesauce and apple juice, including formulations for infants.

By 1989, the states of Massachusetts and New York had banned the chemical, and the American Academy of Pediatrics was urging a similar ban at the federal level. “Risk estimates based on the best available information at this time raise serious concern about the safety of continued, long-term exposure,” stated an EPA letter to apple growers which estimated that 50 out of every million adults who ate apples on a regular basis would get cancer from long-term exposure to Alar—in other words, 50 times the human health hazard considered “acceptable” by EPA standards. The danger to children, the letter warned, was even greater. Aside from these urgings, however, federal agencies failed to take regulatory action.

On February 26, 1989, the public at large heard about Alar’s dangers when CBS-TV’s 60 Minutes aired an exposé titled “A is for Apple,” which became the opening salvo in a carefully planned publicity campaign developed for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The NRDC is one of the handful of environmental groups that can afford to hire a public relations company, and it chose the firm of Fenton Communications, which developed and helped distribute public service announcements featuring actress Meryl Streep, who warned that Alar had been detected in apple juice bottled for children. An NRDC report, issued at the time of the 60 Minutes broadcast, stressed that the cumulative risks to children were higher than those to adults, because children consume far more apple products per pound of body weight. The NRDC report itself focused on inconsistencies in government regulatory policies and the need for better policies to protect children. Nowhere did it suggest that eating a single apple or drinking a single glass of juice posed a significant risk. Nevertheless, the prominence of 60 Minutes and Streep’s movie-star status helped produce a dramatic public reaction, as some mothers poured apple juice down sink drains and school lunchrooms removed apples from their menus.

The apple industry, its back to the wall, hastily abandoned its use of Alar, and the market for apples quickly rebounded. Within five years, in fact, growers’ profits were 50 percent higher than they had been at the time of the 60 Minutes broadcast.⁸ Apple growers in Washington State filed a libel lawsuit against CBS, NRDC, and Fenton Communications, claiming that the “scare” had cost them $100 million and sent orchards into bankruptcy, but their case was eventually dismissed. The judge who presided over the lawsuit pointed to failures in the federal government’s food-safety policies and noted that “governmental methodology fails to take into consideration the distinct hazards faced by preschoolers. The government is in grievous error when allowable exposures are calculated . . . without regard for the age at which exposure occurs.”⁹ Notwithstanding years of industry efforts to disprove the merits of NRDC’s warning, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1993 confirmed the central message of the Alar case, which is that infants and young children need greater protection from pesticides. The NAS called for an overhaul of regulatory procedures specifically to protect kids, finding that federal calculations for allowable levels of chemicals do not account for increased childhood consumption of fruit, for children’s lower body weight, or for their heightened sensitivity to toxic exposures. “NRDC was absolutely on the right track when it excoriated the regulatory agencies for having allowed a toxic material to stay on the market for 25 years,” stated Dr. Philip Landrigan, who chaired the NAS study committee. Subsequent reports by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer and the National Toxicology Program of the U.S. Public Health Service also concurred that Alar is carcinogenic.

In and of itself, the Alar saga is only one fairly minor skirmish in a decades-long struggle between industry and environmental groups. For industry’s defenders, however, the “great Alar scare” has acquired an almost mythic status, thanks to a massive and still-continuing industry propaganda campaign that has successfully transformed Alar into a symbol of junk science and journalistic irresponsibility. The counterattack was led by Elizabeth Whelan, president of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), a self-proclaimed defender of sound science whose funding comes largely from the chemical, food, and pharmaceutical industries.

“It was the great Alar scare of 1989 that boosted Whelan into the media stratosphere,” notes Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz.¹⁰ ACSH and Whelan were fixtures on the anti-environmental scene long before the Alar issue emerged, downplaying risks from DDT, dioxin, asbestos, and a host of other polluting chemicals, but Whelan’s prominent role in the Alar counterpublicity campaign helped make ACSH a common source for journalists seeking expert commentary on public health issues. “Television producers like Whelan because she’s colorful and succinct,” Kurtz says, “skewering her adversaries with such phrases as ‘toxic terrorists’ and referring to their research as ‘voodoo statistics.’ Newspaper reporters often dial her number because she is an easily accessible spokesperson for the ‘other’ side of many controversies.”¹¹

Between 1990 and 1995, ACSH held at least three press briefings on Alar at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. In its version, Alar was a beneficial and safe chemical that had been forced off the market by a deliberate scare campaign. Other groups affiliated with the chemical and food industries joined in reinforcing this interpretation of the Alar controversy. The apple industry paid the Hill & Knowlton PR firm more than $1 million to produce and distribute advertisements claiming that children would have to eat “a boxcar load” of apples daily to be at risk. Hill & Knowlton widely circulated a statement by former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop proclaiming that apples were safe and that the scare was overblown. Porter/Novelli, a leading agribusiness PR firm, helped an industry group called the “Center for Produce Quality” distribute more than 20,000 “resource kits” to food retailers that scoffed at the scientific data presented on 60 Minutes.¹² Industry-funded think tanks such as the Cato Institute, Heartland Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute hammered home the argument that the “Alar scare” was an irrational episode of public hysteria produced by unscrupulous manipulators of media sensationalism.

Since 1989, this revisionist version of the Alar story has been repeated over and over again, distorting events and omitting facts to transform the story into a morality tale about the dangers of environmental fearmongering, government regulatory excess, and media irresponsibility. By 1991, an opinion poll by the Center for Produce Quality found that 68 percent of U.S. consumers believed the Alar crisis was overblown. This ACSH view of Alar has been picked up and repeated uncritically by countless pundits and journalists, many of whom are genuinely unaware of its ideologically driven distortions. A search of the NEXIS news database for the decade following the 60 Minutes broadcast turned up nearly 5,000 references to the Alar affair. All but a handful treated the affair as a case of Chicken Little environmentalism, with headlines such as “Enviros Accused of Inciting Paranoia,” “The Century of Science Scares,” “Coalition Fights Restrictions of Food Police,” “The 60 Minutes Health Hoax,” and “Pseudoscientific Hooey the Scare Tactic of Choice Nowadays.” Among journalists, the word Alar has become a near-universal shorthand for an irrational health scare stemming from junk science.

Tobacco Science Meets Junk Science

For big tobacco, the industry campaign against “junk science” presented an interesting opportunity—a chance to reposition itself as something other than a pariah in the scientific community.

Just as every action in the physical world begets an equal and opposite reaction, every risk to public health seems to beget an equal and opposite effort at denial from the industry whose products are implicated. The tobacco industry, which U.S. Surgeons General have cited since the 1960s as “the greatest cause of illness, disability and premature deaths in this country,”¹³ helped invent the strategy of using scientists as third-party advocates, and if Oscars were given for such campaigns, tobacco would certainly win a lifetime achievement award. Prior to the 1950s, tobacco companies routinely advertised tobacco’s alleged health “benefits” with testimonials from doctors and celebrities. When the first scientific studies documenting tobacco’s role in cancer and other fatal illnesses began to appear, the industry was thrown into a panic. A 1953 report by Dr. Ernst L. Wynder heralded to the scientific community a definitive link between cigarette smoking and cancer, creating what internal memos from the industry-funded Tobacco Institute refer to as the “1954 emergency.” Fighting for its economic life, the tobacco industry launched what must be considered the costliest, longest-running, and most successful PR crisis-management campaign in history. In the words of the industry itself, the campaign was aimed at “promoting cigarettes and protecting them from these and other attacks,” by “creating doubt about the health charge without actually denying it, and advocating the public’s right to smoke, without actually urging them to take up the practice.”¹⁴

For help, the tobacco industry turned in the 1950s to what was then the world’s largest PR firm, Hill & Knowlton, which designed a brilliant and expensive campaign that was later described as follows in a 1993 lawsuit, State of Mississippi vs. the Tobacco Cartel:

As a result of these efforts, the Tobacco Institute Research Committee (TIRC), an entity later known as The Council for Tobacco Research (CTR), was formed.

The Tobacco Industry Research Committee immediately ran a full-page promotion in more than 400 newspapers aimed at an estimated 43 million Americans . . . entitled “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers.” . . . In this advertisement, the participating tobacco companies recognized their “special responsibility” to the public, and promised to learn the facts about smoking and health. The participating tobacco companies promised to sponsor independent research. . . . The participating tobacco companies also promised to cooperate closely with public health officials. . . .

After thus beginning to lull the public into a false sense of security concerning smoking and health, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee continued to act as a front for tobacco industry interests. Despite the initial public statements and posturing, and the repeated assertions that they were committed to full disclosure and vitally concerned, the TIRC did not make the public health a primary concern. . . . In fact, there was a coordinated, industry-wide strategy designed actively to mislead and confuse the public about the true dangers associated with smoking cigarettes. Rather than work for the good of the public health as it had promised, and sponsor independent research, the tobacco companies and consultants, acting through the tobacco trade association, refuted, undermined, and neutralized information coming from the scientific and medical community.¹⁵

To improve its credibility, the TIRC used the third party technique, hiring Dr. Clarence Little in June of 1954 to serve as its director. Previously, Little had served as managing director of the American Society for the Control of Cancer, the forerunner to today’s American Cancer Society. ¹⁶ He promised that if research did discover a direct relationship between smoking and cancer, “the next job tackled will be to determine how to eliminate the danger from tobacco.” This pretense of honest concern from a respected figure worked its expected magic. Opinion research by Hill & Knowlton showed that only 9 percent of newspapers expressing opinions on the TIRC were unfavorable, whereas 65 percent were favorable without reservation.¹⁷

There is no question that the tobacco industry knew what scientists were learning about tobacco. The TIRC maintained a library with cross-indexed medical and scientific papers from 2,500 medical journals, as well as press clippings, government reports, and other documents. TIRC employees culled this library in search of any and every scrap of scientific data with inconclusive or contrary results regarding tobacco and the harm to human health. These were compiled into a carefully selected 18-page booklet, titled “A Scientific Perspective on the Cigarette Controversy,” which was published in 1954 and mailed to more than 200,000 people, including doctors, members of Congress, and the news media.

During the 1950s, tobacco companies more than doubled their advertising budgets, going from $76 million in 1953 to $122 million in 1957. The TIRC spent another $948,151 in 1954 alone, of which one-fourth went to Hill & Knowlton, another fourth went to pay for media ads, and most of the remainder went to administrative costs. Despite TIRC’s promise to “sponsor independent research,” only $80,000, or less than 10 percent of the total budget for the year, actually went to scientific projects.¹⁸

In 1963, the TIRC changed its name to the Council for Tobacco Research. In addition to this “scientific” council, Hill & Knowlton helped set up a separate PR and lobbying organization, the Tobacco Institute. Formed in 1958, the Tobacco Institute grew by 1990 into what the Public Relations Journal described as one of the “most formidable public relations/lobbying machines in history,” spending an estimated $20 million a year and employing 120 PR professionals to fight the combined forces of the Surgeon General of the United States, the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, and the American Lung Association.¹⁹

Smoke-Filled Rooms

The tobacco industry’s PR strategy has been described by the American Cancer Society as “a delaying action to mislead the public into believing that no change in smoking habits is indicated from existing statistical and pathological evidence.”²⁰ Of course, no propaganda strategy can permanently mask the mountains of evidence that have accumulated regarding tobacco’s deadly effects. By the 1980s, virtually no one believed the industry’s attempts to deny that smoking causes cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and a long list of other diseases. Even the industry’s own spokespersons could barely stand to repeat the same old lies. Philip Morris would not publicly admit that smoking causes cancer until the year 1999, but its attorneys and PR advisers were already planning a strategic retreat from this position as early as the 1970s. Rather than continue to defend a scientific position that everyone knew was bogus, they set out to build a scientific case against the mounting body of evidence showing that nonsmokers were also suffering adverse health effects from second-hand smoke inhaled in bars, restaurants, and other public places.

Secondhand smoke appears under a variety of names in the industry’s internal memoranda, which refer to it variously as “indirect smoke,” “passive smoke,” “sidestream smoke,” or “environmental tobacco smoke” (often abbreviated ETS). Industry executives realized early on that the issue of tobacco’s indirect effects posed a potentially greater threat to business profits than the issue of its direct effects on smokers themselves. Once the public discovered that cigarettes were killing nonsmokers, anti-tobacco activists would press forward with increasing success in their campaigns to ban smoking in public places. “If smokers can’t smoke on the way to work, at work, in stores, banks, restaurants, malls, and other public places, they are going to smoke less,” complained Philip Morris political affairs director Ellen Merlo in a speech to tobacco vendors. “A large percentage of them are going to quit. In short, cigarette purchases will be drastically reduced and volume declines will accelerate.”²¹ A 1993 Philip Morris budget presentation complained that “smoking restrictions have been estimated, this year alone, to have decreased PM profits by $40 million.”²²

The campaign to cultivate pro-industry scientists on the issue of secondhand smoke was massive, multifaceted, and international. Some scientists were positioned as public voices in defense of tobacco, while others played behind-the-scenes roles, quietly cultivating allies or monitoring meetings and feeding back reports to the tobacco industry’s legal and political strategists. A 1990 confidential memorandum by Covington & Burling, one of the main law firms representing Philip Morris, reported on efforts by industry consultants in Lisbon, Hanover, Budapest, Milan, Scotland, Copenhagen, Switzerland, Norway, Australia, Finland, and Asia. “Our European consultants have organized and will conduct a major scientific conference in Lisbon next month on indoor air quality in warm climates,” it stated. “More than 100 scientists from throughout the world will attend. . . . The focus of the conference will not be tobacco; rather, the point of the conference is to show the insignificance of ETS by emphasizing the genuine problems of air quality in warm climates. Some degree of ‘balance’ in the presentation of the issues is of course necessary to achieve persuasiveness, but the overall results will be positive and important. . . . A major meeting of the Toxicology Forum will be held in Budapest in July, and will include a session on ETS delivered by one of our consultants. . . . We ask our consultants to cover all substantial scientific conferences where they can usefully influence scientific and public opinion. They also attend many other conferences on their own, as part of their ordinary scientific activities.”²³

In addition to scientific conferences, consultants were at work giving media briefings; trying to sway airline flight attendants in favor of in-flight smoking; producing and appearing in videos and op-ed pieces; and testifying in court proceedings regarding allegations of fraud in tobacco advertisements. “Our consultants have created the world’s only learned scientific society addressing questions of indoor air quality,” the report boasted. “It will soon have its own periodic newsletter, in which ETS and other [indoor air quality] issues will be discussed in a balanced fashion to an audience of regulators, scientists, building operators, etc. It will also have its own scientific journal, published by a major European publishing house, in which [indoor air quality] issues will again be addressed.”²⁴

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. Reynolds 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.” Planned 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

Carruthers began his media tour in December 1993, with stopovers in cities including San Diego, Dallas, and Denver. News releases sent out in advance of each stop described TASSC as a “grassroots-based, not-for-profit watchdog group of scientists and representatives from universities, independent organizations and industry, that advocates the use of sound science in the public policy arena.” As examples of unsound science, it pointed to the “Alar scare,” asbestos-abatement guidelines, the “dioxin scare” in Times Beach, Missouri, and “unprecedented regulations to limit radon levels in drinking water.” In Texas, local TASSC recruits involved in the launch included Dr. Margaret Maxey and Floy Lilley, both of the University of Texas. “The Clean Air Act is a perfect example of laboratory science being superficially applied to reality,” Lilley said. Carruthers took the opportunity to inveigh against politicized uses of science by the Environmental Protection Agency “to make science ‘fit’ with the political leanings of special interests.” EPA’s studies, he complained, “are frequently carried out without the benefit of peer review or quality assurance.”⁴² In Denver, Carruthers told a local radio station that the public has been “shafted by shoddy science, and it has cost consumers and government a good deal of money.” When asked who was financing TASSC, Carruthers sidestepped the question. “We don’t want to be caught being a crusader for a single industry,” he said. “We’re not out here defending the chemical industry; we’re not out here defending the automobile industry, or the petroleum industry, or the tobacco industry; we’re here just to ensure that sound science is used.”⁴³

Virtually every news release made some reference to the “Alar scare,” usually invoking the name of former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. In an “advertorial” titled “Science: A Tool, Not a Weapon,” TASSC noted that “respected experts, including then-Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, said the scientific evidence showed no likelihood of harm from Alar. . . . This is not an isolated case of bad science being used by policymakers,” it added. “It’s happened regarding asbestos, dioxin and toxic waste. . . . It’s happening in the debate over environmental tobacco smoke, or second-hand smoke. The studies done so far on the topic do not demonstrate evidence that second-hand smoke causes cancer, even though that is the popular wisdom.”⁴⁴ To the casual reader, it would almost appear as if the venerable Dr. Koop were a defender of environmental tobacco smoke, rather than one of its most prominent critics.⁴⁵

EuroTASSC

By 1994, Philip Morris was budgeting $880,000 in funding for TASSC.⁴⁶ In consultation with APCO and Burson-Marsteller, the company began planning to establish a second, European sound science organization, tentatively named “Scientists for Sound Public Policy” (later renamed the European Science and Environment Forum). Like TASSC, the European organization would attempt to smuggle tobacco advocacy into a larger bundle of “sound science” issues, including the “ban on growth hormone for livestock; ban on [genetically engineered bovine growth hormone] to improve milk production; pesticide restrictions; ban on indoor smoking; restrictions on use of chlorine; ban on certain pharmaceutical products; restrictions on the use of biotechnology.” The public and policymakers needed to be “educated,” Burson-Marsteller explained, because “political decision-makers are vulnerable to activists’ emotional appeals and press campaigns. . . . The precautionary principle is now the accepted guideline. Even if a hypothesis is not 100 percent scientifically proven, action should be taken, e.g. global warming.” Companies that B-M thought could be recruited to support the European endeavor would include makers of “consumer products (food, beverages, tobacco), packaging industry, agrochemical industry, chemical industry, pharmaceutical industry, biotech industry, electric power industry, telecommunications.”⁴⁷

A turf war broke out between Burson-Marsteller and APCO over the question of which PR firm should handle the European campaign. Jim Lindheim of Burson-Marsteller laid claim to the account by stressing his firm’s already-proven expertise at defending tobacco science in Europe. “We have the network, much of which is already sensitized to PM’s special needs,” he stated. We have a lot of experience in every country working with scientists. . . . We’ve got a large client base with ‘scientific problems’ whom we can tap for sponsorship.”⁴⁸

APCO’s Margery Kraus responded by reminding Philip Morris regulatory affairs director Matthew Winokur that Burson-Marsteller’s long history of tobacco industry work was public knowledge and therefore might taint the endeavor. “Given the sensitivities of other TASSC activities and a previous decision not to have TASSC work directly with Burson, due to these sensitivities in other TASSC work, I did not feel comfortable having Steig or anyone else from Burson assume primary responsibility for working with TASSC scientists,” Kraus stated.⁴⁹ As for experience handling “scientific problems,” she pointed to her parent company’s work for “the following industries impacted by science and environmental policy decisions: chemical, pharmaceutical, nuclear, waste management and motor industries, power generation, biotech products, packaging and detergents, and paint. They have advised clients on a number of issues, including: agricultural manufacturing, animal testing, chlorine, dioxins, toxic waste, ozone/CFCs, power generation, coastal pollution, lead in gasoline, polyurethanes, lubricants.”⁵⁰

TASSC was intentionally designed to appear outwardly like a broad coalition of scientists from multiple disciplines. The other industries and interests—biotech, chemical, toxic waste, coastal pollution, lubricants—served as protective camouflage, concealing the tobacco money that was at the heart of the endeavor. TASSC signed up support from corporate executives at Santa Fe Pacific Gold Corporation, Procter & Gamble, the Louisiana Chemical Association, the National Pest Control Association, General Motors, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Exxon, W. R. Grace & Co., Amoco, Occidental Petroleum, 3M, Chevron, and Dow Chemical. Many of its numerous news releases attacking “junk science” made no mention of tobacco whatsoever. It objected to government guidelines for asbestos abatement; said the “dioxin scare” in Times Beach, Missouri, was a tempest in a teapot; scoffed at the need for an EPA Superfund cleanup in Aspen, Colorado; dismissed reports of health effects related to use of the Norplant contraceptive; denounced the Clean Water Act; and orchestrated a letter-writing campaign to oppose any government action aimed at limiting industrial activities linked to global warming.

ACSH TASSCwards

In many respects, TASSC was closely modeled after Elizabeth Whelan’s American Council on Science and Health. Both organizations boasted a “board of scientific advisers” with several hundred members, many of whom worked for industry or served in university departments with corporate affiliations. Both relied heavily on corporate funding and shared pro-industry views on a wide range of issues.

Founded in 1978, ACSH is described in minutes from a meeting that year of the Manufacturing Chemists’ Association (today known as the Chemical Manufacturers Association) as “a tax-exempt organization composed of scientists whose viewpoints are more similar to those of business than dissimilar.” In recent years, ACSH has stopped publishing its complete list of corporate funders, but reports from prior years showed that as much as 76 percent of its budget came either directly from industry or from foundations that were closely linked to industry.⁵¹

The views of ACSH and Whelan have remained remarkably consistent over the years. Whelan describes herself as a lifelong conservative who is “more libertarian than Republican.” Since the founding of ACSH, Whelan has attacked environmentalism and defended corporate polluters. In a 1981 article titled “Chemicals and Cancerphobia,” she decried “the cancerphobia which now grips our nation and is dictating federal policy in a number of government agencies seems to be largely traceable to a fear of chemicals. . . . For businessmen, the implications are clear: more regulation, higher costs, fewer jobs, and limited production. For me as a scientist and consumer the implications are also clear: high prices, higher taxes, fewer products—a diminished standard of living. . . . [W]ith today’s consumer advocates leading the show, we are heading toward not only zero risk, but zero food, zero jobs, zero energy, and zero growth. It may be that the prophets of doom, not the profits of industry, are the real hazards to our health.”⁵²

ACSH board chairman A. Alan Moghissi is a former Reagan-era EPA official with similar views. He characterizes environmentalism as a belief that “members of endangered species deserve protection and that, because there are billions of humans, humanity does not qualify for protection.” The 17-member ACSH board of directors also includes representatives from two PR and advertising firms: Albert Nickel of Lyons Lavey Nickel Swift (their motto: “We change perceptions”), and Lorraine Thelian of Ketchum Communications. Thelian directs Ketchum’s Washington, D.C., office, which handles the bulk of the firm’s “environmental PR work” on behalf of clients including Dow Chemical, the Aspirin Foundation of America, Bristol-Myers Squibb, the American Automobile Manufacturers Association, the Consumer Aerosol Products Council, Genentech, the National Pharmaceutical Council, the North American Insulation Manufacturers Association, and the American Industrial Health Council, another industry-funded group that lobbies against what it considers “excessive” regulation of carcinogens. Ketchum boasts that its Washington office “has dealt with issues ranging from regulation of toxins, global climate change, electricity deregulation, nuclear energy, product and chemical contamination, and agricultural chemicals and Superfund sites, to name but a few.”

ACSH calls the U.S. ban on DDT one of the 20 worst unfounded health scares of the twentieth century. It ridicules the risks that chemical endocrine disruptors pose to human health and fertility. In addition to pesticides and chemical food additives, it has defended asbestos, Agent Orange, and nuclear power. Whelan’s nutritional advice has raised eyebrows among health experts, many of whom take exception to her claims that there is “no such thing as ‘junk food,’ ” and that there is “insufficient evidence of a relationship between diet and any disease.” ACSH periodically sends a “Media Update” out to its donors, demonstrating its success at influencing public opinion with examples of newspaper and magazine clippings in which the organization has been cited as an authoritative source. Among the actual newspaper headlines it boasts of generating, the following examples are typical:

• “A Global Scare: The Environmental Doomsday Machine Is in High Gear”⁵³

• “Irradiation Only Sure Method to Protect U.S. Food Supply”⁵⁴

• “Safe Meat: There Is a Better Way” (a Wall Street Journal editorial column in which Whelan criticizes the USDA for recalling E. coli-contaminated beef)⁵⁵

• “Evidence Lacking that PCB Levels Harm Health”⁵⁶

• “The Fuzzy Science Behind New Clean-Air Rules”⁵⁷

• “Screaming About Breast Cancer”⁵⁸

• “Environmental Alarmists Can’t Explain Progress in Public Health”⁵⁹

• “Eat Beef, America”⁶⁰ and “Salad Days Are Over”⁶¹

• “At Christmas Dinner, Let Us Be Thankful for Pesticides and Safe Food”⁶²

With respect to the issue of tobacco, however, ACSH has taken a strong and consistently critical position in favor of public health. Whelan has authored numerous editorials and magazine articles about tobacco, along with books titled A Smoking Gun: How the Tobacco Industry Gets Away with Murder and Cigarettes: What the Warning Label Doesn’t Tell You. She has testified as an expert witness for plaintiffs suing the tobacco industry and has even criticized her fellow conservatives for what she calls their “blurred vision” about tobacco. When presidential candidate Bob Dole opined that smoking was not addictive, Whelan publicly differed, as she has on other occasions. “Conservative politicians, their spokesmen and right-wing journalists almost uniformly condemned Clinton’s ‘war’ against teen-age smoking,” she complained in 1995. “Conservative pundits pounce on anti-smoking activists with gusto, questioning not just our methods, but our priorities. . . . Republicans, posturing themselves as friends of the tobacco industry, are doing themselves and America’s youth a great disservice. As a public health professional and lifelong Republican I ask: Why?”

Despite some early feelers, Whelan’s position on cigarettes effectively doomed the possibility of any direct collaboration between ACSH and the tobacco industry. Shortly after the organization’s launch, ACSH director Frederick Stare sent an appeal for funds to Philip Morris vice president Ray Wakeham, but the appeal was unsuccessful. “Now that we are firmly established, and growing, we seek support from industry of all types,” Stare wrote in December 1980, following up on a presentation he had recently given to a PM-supported corporate coalition called the Industrial Research Institute. “A few of the companies who are members of the Industrial Research Institute have provided us with limited financial assistance, but we now want very much for all of you to help, and generously,” Stare stated. “We are a voice of scientific reason in a sea of pseudoscience, exaggeration, and misinformation. We believe it would be to your benefit to help ACSH. . . . Our basic corporate membership at present is $3,000, but we hope many of you will contribute a total of $10,000 or more.”⁶³

In an internal Philip Morris memorandum written two weeks later, Wakeham noted that he had read and agreed with a recent ACSH report downplaying the idea that there was a “cancer epidemic” in the United States. However, he added, “The little I know about Elizabeth Whelan, the executive director, would be enough to suggest that PM have nothing to do with the Council. Not only is she on record as being convinced that cigarette smoking is responsible for almost all it has been accused of but she has gone out of her way to accuse the cigarette industry of exerting pressure on magazines, particularly women’s magazines, not to accept articles which have derogatory statements about the effect of smoking on women. . . . I would not suggest that anyone in the cigarette industry support the American Council on Science and Health.”⁶⁴

In fact, ACSH frequently builds its defense of other polluting industries around the argument that tobacco deserves higher priority than the “hypothetical, miniscule” risks from environmental pollution. ACSH has its own magazine, Priorities, whose title and content derive from the notion that “unscientific” health advocates fail to prioritize real health risks while dwelling on risks that are “trivial at best, or, at worst, nonexistent.”

If Whelan had been more agreeable on the tobacco issue, Philip Morris might never have felt a need to create TASSC. However, the company did not need to look far to find others who lacked her principles. Many of TASSC’s closest supporters, in fact, were closely affiliated with the American Council on Science and Health. ACSH executive director Michael Fox was a member of TASSC’s advisory board, as were ACSH chairman A. Alan Moghissi and board members Victor Herbert and F. J. Francis. Another 46 members of the ACSH advisory board also served on the advisory board of TASSC.

Trash Talk with the Junkman

In February 1994, APCO vice president Neal Cohen made the mistake of boasting candidly about some of the sneaky tactics that his company uses when setting up front groups. His remarks were made at a conference of the Public Affairs Council (PAC), an exclusive association of top-ranking corporate lobbyists and PR counselors. New York Times political reporter Jane Fritsch later used his remarks as the basis for a March 1996 article titled “Sometimes Lobbyists Strive to Keep Public in the Dark.”⁶⁵

Shortly after APCO suffered this embarrassment, the responsibility for managing TASSC was quietly transferred to the EOP Group, a well-connected, Washington-based lobby firm whose clients have included the American Crop Protection Association (the chief trade association of the pesticide industry), the American Petroleum Institute, AT&T, the Business Roundtable, the Chlorine Chemistry Council, Dow Chemical Company, Edison Electric Institute (nuclear power), Fort Howard Corp. (a paper manufacturer), International Food Additives Council, Monsanto Co., National Mining Association, and the Nuclear Energy Institute. In March 1997, EOP lobbyist Steven Milloy, described in a TASSC news release as “a nationally known expert and author on environmental risk and regulatory policy issues,” was named TASSC’s executive director.⁶⁶

“Steven brings not only a deep and strong academic and professional background to TASSC, but he brings an equally deep, strong and passionate commitment to the principle of using sound science in making public policy decisions,” said Garrey Carruthers. “The issue of junk science has become the topic of network news specials, major articles in newspapers, and a key topic in Congress and legislatures around the country. I look forward to working with Steven to continue to drive home the need for sound science in public policy making.”⁶⁷

Although the news release referred to Milloy’s work “over the last six years” on “environmental and regulatory policy issues,” it did not mention that he had worked specifically for the tobacco industry. During 1992 he worked for James Tozzi at Multinational Business Services. Tozzi, a former career bureaucrat at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget who had spearheaded the Reagan-era OMB campaign to gut environmental regulations, is described in internal Philip Morris documents as the company’s “primary contact on the EPA/ETS risk assessment during the second half of 1992.” During that period, it noted, “Tozzi has been invaluable in executing our Washington efforts including generating technical briefing papers, numerous letters to agencies and media interviews,” a service for which Philip Morris paid an estimated $300,000 in consulting fees.⁶⁸ Philip Morris also paid Tozzi’s company another $880,000 to establish a “nonprofit” think tank called the Institute for Regulatory Policy (IRP). On behalf of Philip Morris, the IRP put together “three different coalitions which support sound science—Coalition for Executive Order, Coalition for Moratorium on Risk Assessments, and Coalition of Cities and States on Environmental Mandates. . . . IRP could work with us as well as APCO in a coordinated manner,” PM’s Boland and Borelli had noted in February 1993.⁶⁹

After leaving Tozzi’s service, Milloy became president of his own organization called the Regulatory Impact Analysis Project, Inc., where he wrote a couple of reports arguing that “most environmental risks are so small or indistinguishable that their existence cannot be proven.”⁷⁰ Shortly thereafter, he launched the “Junk Science Home Page” (www.junkscience.com). Calling himself “the Junkman,” he offered daily attacks on environmentalists, public health and food safety regulators, anti-nuclear activists, animal rights activists, the EPA, and a wide range of other targets that he accused of using unsound science to advance various political agendas.

The tone of the Junk Science Home Page seemed calculated to lower rather than elevate scientific discourse. If his targets were not “psychologically challenged” or “bogus,” they were fearmongering “blowhards,” “turkeys,” “wacko enviros,” or members of the “food police.” Using school-yard taunts and accusations of “mindless anti-chemical hysteria,” Milloy routinely attacked the world’s most prestigious scientific journals, including Science, Nature, the Lancet, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. He dismissed reports of a thinning ozone layer as “nutty.” He opposed automobile emissions testing as “just another clever ploy to separate you from your money.” His website also featured an extended attack on Our Stolen Future, the book about endocrine disruptors by Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, and Peter Myers. Milloy’s online parody, titled “Our Swollen Future,” included a cartoon depiction of Colborn hauling a wheelbarrow of money to the bank (her implied motive for writing the book), and referred to Dianne Dumanoski as “Dianne Dumb-as-an-oxski.” Nor was he above an occasional ethnic slur. “Tora, tora, tora,” he wrote in response to reports that Japanese researchers were concerned about endocrine disruptors.

Milloy was also active in defense of the tobacco industry, particularly in regard to the issue of environmental tobacco smoke. He dismissed the EPA’s 1993 report linking secondhand smoke to cancer as “a joke,” and when the British Medical Journal published its own study with similar results in 1997, he scoffed that “it remains a joke today.” After one researcher published a study linking secondhand smoke to cancer, Milloy wrote that she “must have pictures of journal editors in compromising positions with farm animals. How else can you explain her studies seeing the light of day?” In August 1997, the New York Times reported that Milloy was one of the paid speakers at a Miami briefing for foreign reporters sponsored by the British-American Tobacco Company, whose Brown & Williamson unit makes popular cigarettes like Kool, Carlton, and Lucky Strike. At the briefing, which was off-limits to U.S. journalists, the company flew in dozens of reporters from countries including Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Peru and paid for their hotel rooms and expensive meals while the reporters sat through presentations that ridiculed “lawsuit-driven societies like the United States” for using “unsound science” to raise questions about “infinitesimal, if not hypothetical, risks” related to inhaling a “whiff” of tobacco smoke.⁷¹

The differences between ACSH and TASSC over the tobacco issue came to a head in June 1997, after Milloy attacked a Harvard University study published in the New England Journal of Medicine as an “abuse of statistics” and a case of “epidemiologists trying to pass off junk science as Nobel Prize work.” This rhetoric became the basis for a story, titled “Smoke Rings,” which appeared in a June 1997 issue of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s, conservative National Review. Elizabeth Whelan, who describes herself as “a longtime National Review fan,” was so “disappointed” in the article that she wrote a letter to the editor warning that “NR should be wary of relying on a source that considers the New England Journal of Medicine a purveyor of junk science. In labeling the Harvard study ‘junk science,’ you may be inadvertently junking all science.”

“We respect Dr. Whelan’s work on many subjects, but when it comes to tobacco she loses her grip on reality,” the National Review replied.⁷² Even she, it seemed, could sometimes be a “wacko fearmonger.”

Junk Bonds

Casual visitors to Milloy’s Junk Science Home Page might be tempted to dismiss him as merely an obnoxious adolescent with a website. They would be surprised to discover that he is a well-connected fixture in conservative Washington policy circles. He currently holds the title of “adjunct scholar” at the libertarian Cato Institute, which was rated the fourth most influential think tank in Washington, D.C., in a 1999 survey of congressional staffers and journalists.⁷³

Milloy’s vitriolic style may seem strange to outsiders, but it generates and channels the anger that right-wing pseudopopulists have become adept at mobilizing against environmentalists. Milloy’s website frequently provides phone and fax numbers that visitors can use to bombard news editors and politicians with correspondence. Using dittoheads to amplify his messages, he has claimed responsibility for engineering the 1999 firing of George Lundberg as editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, and for the passage of legislation by Congress that substantially alters the rules regarding data disclosure by government-funded scientists.

In addition to the website, Milloy is a prolific author of eco-bashing articles that the Cato Institute helps circulate to newspapers and other publications. His diatribes against junk science have run in publications including the New York Post, the Washington Times, Arizona Republic, Electricity Daily, San Francisco Examiner, Detroit Free Press, Investor’s Business Daily, Cincinnati Enquirer, USA Today, New York Post, London Financial Times, San Francisco Examiner, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Chemical and Engineering News. The Chicago Sun-Times has run “special reports” by Milloy that are offered as news stories rather than editorials, in which he downplays environmental concerns about issues such as biotech foods. He can rein in the rhetoric when he needs to, and some of his stories read like straight news. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about his writing for the Chicago Sun-Times is the newspaper’s failure to provide its readers with any information about his background as an industry lobbyist. It describes him simply as “a Washington-based business writer specializing in science” who “holds advanced degrees in health sciences from Johns Hopkins University and a law degree from Georgetown University.” (Milloy’s “advanced degree” from Johns Hopkins is a master’s degree in biostatistics.) Indeed, some of the publications that quote Milloy tend to inflate or distort his credentials. He has been described in various places as a “risk expert,” an “economist,” and a “statistician.”

Like other corporate-funded front groups, the organizations that flack for sound science are sometimes fly-by-night organizations. Called into existence for a particular cause or legislative lobby campaign, they often dry up and blow away once the campaign is over. The tendency of groups to appear and disappear creates another form of camouflage, making it difficult for journalists and everyday citizens to sort out the bewildering proliferation of names and acronyms. This was indeed what happened with The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, which was quietly retired in late 1998. Its legacy, however, continues. Milloy’s Junk Science Home Page now claims to be sponsored by an organization called “Citizens for the Integrity of Science,” about which no further information is publicly available. It is one of dozens, if not hundreds, of industry-funded organizations and conservative think tanks that continue to wave the sound science banner. Some are large and well-known, while others are small-scale operations, as the following examples illustrate:

• The Washington Legal Foundation continues to press the campaign against “junk science in the courtroom.” It runs quarter-page advertisements in the New York Times, calling them “public service messages” by “free enterprise advocates with public interest know how.” In a 1997 ad, headlined “Junk Science Makes Junk Law,” the WLF recited the familiar litany—Alar, Bendectin, breast implants. “Just imagine the products Americans will never have because of junk science,” it concluded.⁷⁴ Internal Philip Morris documents describe WLF as “a close ally of PM for many years. WLF has been involved in numerous aspects of the tobacco industry debate. They have filed amicus briefs against the EPA; they have written and promoted policy papers supporting our position on the advertising/First Amendment issue; and, most recently, they authored a major paper detailing why the tobacco industry is already one of the most highly regulated industries in America and does not need further regulatory control.”⁷⁵

• The Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank that spent the 1960s and 1970s envisioning nuclear war scenarios and defending the war in Vietnam, today employs “adjunct scholar” Dennis T. Avery as an in-house, anti-environmentalist expert on junk science. Avery is author of the tract Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic and has championed the idea that organic food is more dangerous than foods grown using synthetic pesticides. In the fall of 1998, Avery began claiming that “people who eat organic and ‘natural’ foods are eight times as likely as the rest of the population to be attacked by a deadly new strain of E. coli bacteria (0157:H7).” This happens, he says, because organic food is grown in animal manure. He claims his data comes from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the federal agency that tracks outbreaks of foodborne illness. In reality, organic food is no more likely to be grown in animal manure than nonorganic food. The CDC vigorously denies Avery’s claim and has even gone to the unusual step of issuing a news release disavowing it. Nevertheless, Avery’s message has been repeated in media op-ed pieces written by Avery with titles such as “Organic Foods Can Make You Sick”⁷⁶ and in news stories by the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, and numerous other publications in the United States and Europe. In February 2000, Avery was the featured expert for an ABC 20/20 story by television reporter John Stossel which speculated that “buying organic could kill you.” Stossel’s piece made no mention of Avery’s affiliation with the Hudson Institute, let alone any mention of the institute’s corporate funding from agrichemical and agribusiness heavyweights, including Monsanto, DuPont, Dow-Elanco, Sandoz, Ciba-Geigy, ConAgra, Cargill, and Procter & Gamble. Stossel also claimed that 20/20’s own laboratory tests had found as many pesticide residues on organic produce as on the conventionally grown variety—a claim the network would have to retract later when its researchers admitted that no such tests had been conducted.

• The Competitive Enterprise Institute, backed by major oil companies, claims that “thousands of scientists agree there’s no solid evidence of a global-warming problem.” It boasts of media hits in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today, MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, Good Morning America, and Larry King Live. CEI’s activities include a “Death by Regulation” project aimed at “shifting the policy debate” about environmental regulations by making the argument that “government intervention carries its own deadly consequences.” It claims, for example, that automobile emissions standards drive consumers to buy smaller, flimsier automobiles, causing more deaths from car crashes. Similarly, it argues that there are “adverse public health effects of medical drug regulation and nutritional labeling.” Drug regulations, it says, keep new medications off the market. As for nutritional labeling, it believes that wine makers should be able to advertise that wine consumption prevents heart attacks. ⁷⁷ However, there should be no requirement for labeling of milk from rBGH-treated cows. During the peak of the PR campaign against EPA’s secondhand smoke report, CEI cranked out opinion articles for major newspapers with titles such as “A Smoking Gun Firing Blanks,” “EPA’s Bad Science Mars ETS Report,” and “Safety Is a Relative Thing for Cars; Why Not for Cigarettes?” CEI funders include the American Petroleum Institute, Amoco, ARCO Foundation, Armstrong Foundation, Burlington Northern Railroad Co., Carthage Foundation, Charles C. Koch Charitable Foundation, Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, Coca-Cola, CSX Corp., David H. Koch Charitable Foundation, Detroit Farming Inc., Dow Chemical, EBCO Corp., Ford Motor Co., General Motors, IBM, JM Foundation, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Pfizer Inc., Philip Morris Companies, Phillip M. McKenna Foundation, Precision Valve Corp., Sarah Scaife Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, and Texaco Foundation.

• The Illinois-based Heartland Institute publishes anti-environmental books with titles like Eco-Sanity by institute president Joe Bast. It also has a “PolicyFax” system through which it makes position papers available on a wide range of issues, including reprints of essays by Jacob Sullum, ACSH, the Cato Institute, the National Smokers Alliance, Michael Fumento, and the Tobacco Institute. Although the PolicyFax database includes numerous reprints of articles by Elizabeth Whelan, her writings against the tobacco industry are not included. In addition to repeating the conservative line on everything from Alar to biotechnology to dioxin, Heartland enthusiastically reiterates the tobacco industry line on secondhand smoke. Its board of directors hails from General Motors, Amoco, Procter & Gamble, and Philip Morris, companies that are also among its principal contributors. An internal Philip Morris memo from March 1994 notes that Philip Morris “provided technical comments for the Heartland Institute’s book on Eco-Sanity.”⁷⁸

• The American Policy Center (APC), headed by longtime PR pro Thomas DeWeese, weighs in on what can safely be called the loony fringe of the sound science movement. One issue of the APC’s newsletter attacks longtime environmentalist and author Jeremy Rifkin as “anti-industry, anti-civilization, anti-people” and accuses him of preaching “suicide, abortion, cannibalism and sodomy.”⁷⁹ The APC is also the publisher of a report titled “Safeguarding the Future: Credible Science, Credible Decisions,” which says EPA regulatory initiatives rest on “shaky scientific ground.” It also publishes a newsletter called EPA Watch, edited by Bonner Cohen, which accuses the EPA of everything from destroying the U.S. economy to trying to stop people from taking showers. A Philip Morris strategy document describes EPA Watch as an “asset” created by PM funding allocated “to establish groups . . . that have a broader impact for PM.” Another strategy memo discusses plans to promote “EPA Watch/Bonner Cohen as expert on EPA matters, i.e., regular syndicated radio features on EPA activities . . . news bureau function, speaking engagements, whatever can be done to increase his visibility and credibility on matters dealing with the EPA.”⁸⁰

• The National Anxiety Center calls itself “a think tank headquartered in Maplewood, New Jersey” whose mission is to dispel the “widespread, baseless fears” fostered by environmentalism regarding deforestation, pesticides, garbage, and endangered species. Its founder and sole proprietor is Alan Caruba, a longtime PR adviser to the pesticide industry and a personal friend of Steven Milloy. On his website (www.anxietycenter.com), Caruba attacks everyone from EPA director Carol Browner to now-deceased oceanologist Jacques Cousteau as co-conspirators in a “green genocide agenda” to “save the earth by killing humans.” Caruba also contributes to the newsletter of the American Policy Center.

Experts at Being Experts

Since ideology, not science, unites industry’s self-proclaimed debunkers of junk science, it is not surprising that many of industry’s “experts” on scientific matters are themselves nonscientists. In July 1997, the Clearinghouse on Environmental Advocacy and Research (CLEAR) issued an analysis of the “sound science” movement titled “Show Me the Science! Corporate Polluters and the ‘Junk Science’ Strategy.” It examined the credentials of many leading “science experts” in the Directory of Environmental Scientists and Economists, published in 1996 by the conservative National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR). Ostensibly, the directory purported to identify experts in 27 policy fields, ranging alphabetically from agriculture to wildlife. “The environment is too important to leave in the hands of political activists,” it stated in the introduction. “Yet, this is precisely where the United States has left most environmental decision making in recent years. Political activists—not authentic environmental scholars, scientists and economists—have come to dominate both the headlines and Washington’s legislative agenda.” Upon scrutinizing the directory, however, CLEAR found that fewer than half of the experts listed in NCPPR’s directory were actual scientists, and in fact only 51 of the 141 individuals listed had a Ph.D. in any field whatsoever.

This does not mean that there are no reputable scientists who support the positions taken by groups like TASSC and ACSH. Norman Borlaug, a Nobel Prize recipient, has been involved with ACSH for many years and currently sits on the ACSH board of directors. Former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and former JAMA editor George Lundberg (whose firing Steven Milloy claims to have helped engineer) are also prominent ACSH supporters. For that matter, TASSC in its heyday was able to call on the support of Frederick J. Seitz, an eminent researcher in the field of solid-state physics, past president of the National Academy of Sciences, and retired president of Rockefeller University.

Even scientists are human beings. They may be brilliant in a particular field of research but naive or uninformed about fields outside their specialty, and they are not immune from political ideologies or the lure of money. The conservative political views of Koop and Seitz are well-known. Although Koop certainly deserves credit for his principled stand regarding tobacco, since leaving public office he has participated in several ventures that call into question his objectivity and ability to avoid ethical conflicts of interest. In April 1999, for example, he circulated a letter in Congress urging legislators to allow the Schering-Plough Corporation to extend the patent on its allergy drug Claritin. By keeping the drug under patent, the company would be able to prevent other companies from offering cheaper generic versions, thereby garnering an estimated $1 billion in additional profits. The following month, he met with members of Congress to defend the company’s position on legislation involving another drug used to treat hepatitis C. Koop did not disclose that Schering-Plough had given a $1 million grant earlier that year to his nonprofit organization, the Koop Foundation.⁸¹

On another occasion, Koop testified in defense of latex gloves, which have been linked to life-threatening allergies. Latex allergies affect roughly 3 percent of the general population and upward of 10 percent of health care workers who are regularly exposed through the use of latex gloves and other medical supplies. An estimated 200,000 nurses have developed latex allergies, which can be disabling and even deadly. Alternatives to latex exist and are gradually being adopted by the health care industry, but Koop told Congress that latex glove concerns are “borderline hysteria.” He also claimed—falsely, as he later discovered—that a study undercutting concerns about latex gloves had been conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In fact, the study he cited had been sponsored by a company that makes the gloves. And Koop had failed to disclose the fact that two years previously another maker of latex gloves had paid him a reported $656,250 in consulting fees to serve as a “spokesman for the company.”⁸²

“What this long admired and respected man has done in taking money from a glove manufacturer and then speaking out on its behalf is wrong,” said Susan Wilburn, senior specialist in occupational safety and health for the American Nurses Association.⁸³ Another ANA representative, Michelle Nawar, noted that latex allergy “is a very serious disease” that “can be a debilitating, career-ending illness.” In fact, five deaths have been reported from using latex gloves, four involving nurses.⁸⁴

The conflicts of interest involving Frederick Seitz are even more telling. Shortly before his retirement from Rockefeller University in 1979, he went to work as a “permanent consultant” to the R. J. Reynolds tobacco company, a hiring that was deliberately not publicized.⁸⁵ The tobacco industry eagerly traded on Seitz’s reputation, even though R. J. Reynolds CEO William Hobbs privately advised executives at Philip Morris in 1989 that Seitz was “quite elderly and not sufficiently rational to offer advice.”⁸⁶ In June 1993, the CNN news network ran a report citing claims by Philip Morris that “prominent scientists privately agree” with its opinion of the EPA risk assessment of secondhand smoke. “We asked for specifics, promising anonymity if necessary,” stated CNN correspondent Steve Young. “The only name Philip Morris provided was the former president of this prestigious institution, Rockefeller University, in New York.” Although CNN never discovered Seitz’s background as a tobacco industry consultant, he did not perform well in his role as third-party spokesperson. When Young called Seitz to ask directly if he had said that EPA’s report was based on flawed science, Seitz responded, “No, I have not.”

“You have not said that?” Young asked again.

“I have not said that, no,” Seitz replied.

“Well, why not?”

“I haven’t read it,” Seitz replied.⁸⁷

That same month, however, Multinational Business Services (Jim Tozzi’s lobby shop and Steven Milloy’s former employer) reported to Philip Morris that it had “initiated discussions with Dr. Seitz of Rockefeller University to support MBS findings on ETS.”⁸⁸ The following year, a report appeared with Seitz listed as the author, concluding that “there is no good scientific evidence that moderate passive inhalation of tobacco smoke is truly dangerous under normal circumstances.”⁸⁹

The Legacy

Industry’s campaign to stigmatize environmental and consumer health advocates has left its mark and continues to influence public and media attitudes. In 1999, University of Pennsylvania professor Edward S. Herman surveyed 258 articles in mainstream newspapers that used the term “junk science” during the years 1996 through 1998. Only 8 percent of the articles used the term in reference to corporate-manipulated science. By contrast, 62 percent used the term “junk science” in reference to scientific arguments used by environmentalists, other corporate critics, or personal-injury lawyers engaged in suing corporations.⁹⁰

“What’s starting to happen is that this term, ‘junk science,’ is being thrown around all the time,” says Lucinda Finley, a law professor from the State University of New York at Buffalo who specializes in product liability and women’s health. “People are calling scientists who disagree with them purveyors of ‘junk.’ But what we’re really talking about is a very normal process of scientific disagreement and give-and-take. Calling someone a ‘junk scientist’ is just a way of shutting them up.”⁹¹

Industry’s campaign against junk science has also provided a pretext for growing infringements on such basic constitutional rights as freedom of speech. With the publication of Galileo’s Revenge, Peter Huber took the concept of junk science out of the courtroom and introduced it to the mass media. Elizabeth Whelan’s revisionist campaign to rehabilitate the image of Alar transformed Huber’s concept into a weapon for attacking the media.

Huber charged that junk science was responsible for an avalanche of frivolous lawsuits, “The incentives for the lawyer today are simple and compelling,” he wrote. “If the consensus in the scientific community is that a hazard is real and substantial, the trial bar will trumpet that consensus to support demands for compensation and punishment. If the consensus is that the hazard is imaginary or trivial, the bar will brush it aside, and dredge up experts from the fringe to swear otherwise. . . . Junk science, to put things bluntly, has become a very profitable business. . . . Costly towers of litigation are being erected on the soft, ever-shifting sands of junk science.”⁹²

Once junk science was redefined as a media problem, however, organizations like ACSH began to argue that what society needed was more lawsuits—lawsuits aimed not at corporations that make dangerous products, but at citizens who question their safety. Writer Tom Holt posed this argument directly in ACSH’s quarterly magazine, Priorities. Holt’s essay was titled “Could Lawsuits Be the Cure for Junk Science?” It began with a review of the Alar saga, complaining bitterly that existing libel law “has been a major stumbling block to the progress of a lawsuit brought by the Washington Apple Growers against the Natural Resources Defense Council, perpetrators of the Alar scare. The growers initially filed suit in Yakima County (WA) Superior Court; but . . . the growers lost their case.” Fortunately, “agribusiness is now fighting back, shepherding what are known as ‘agricultural product disparagement laws’ through state legislatures.”⁹³

Agricultural product disparagement laws were designed to rewrite the rules of evidence so that future lawsuits against food industry critics would have a better chance of winning in court. In the years since Alar hit the headlines, cries of “never again” from the food industry prompted legislatures to pass product disparagement laws in 13 states—Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Texas. The new legislation was designed to protect industry profits by preventing people from expressing opinions that might discourage consumers from buying particular foods. “An anti-disparagement law is needed because of incidents such as the Alar scare several years ago. Apple producers suffered substantial financial losses when people stopped eating apples,” argued the Ohio Farm Bureau in lobbying for the new law.⁹⁴ According to Holt, the new laws placed “the onus on the disparaging activist, rather than under liability law, which would place the onus on the grower or manufacturer of the disparaged product.”⁹⁵ Shifting the onus meant that instead of corporations being forced to prove their critics were wrong, food safety critics could be judged guilty in court unless they could prove what they had said was correct.

In 1996, one of the new state laws was used for the first time when Texas cattle ranchers sued TV talk show host Oprah Winfrey over remarks that one of her guests made regarding the dangers of mad cow disease. The case finally went to trial in 1998, culminating in a victory for Winfrey, after which a second group of cattle ranchers stepped forward and filed a similar lawsuit in a separate jurisdiction. The second lawsuit was finally dismissed in early 2000. By then, Winfrey had spent millions of dollars in attorney fees to defend herself. In Ohio, a consumer group ran afoul of an anti-disparagement law when it discovered that a local egg producer was washing and repackaging old eggs for resale. “We interviewed over 40 employees who knew of the repackaging,” says Mark Finnegan, an attorney for the group. “We had workers tell us they found maggots in the eggs.” When the group went public with its finding, it got hit with a lawsuit and ran up large legal bills by the time the lawsuit was dropped.

Within the legal profession, this tactic of suing opponents into the ground is known as a “SLAPP suit”—a “strategic lawsuit against public participation.” Often, an actual victory in court is not necessary in order to achieve victory. The real goal is to force the defendant to run up huge legal bills. For someone who lacks Oprah Winfrey’s wealth, the costs of mounting a legal defense could literally mean financial bankruptcy, even if the case never goes to trial.

Friends and Enemies

Notwithstanding the differences between Steven Milloy and Elizabeth Whelan over the tobacco issue, they seem to have kissed and made up. An ACSH newsletter in early 2000 reported with satisfaction that ACSH had been mentioned favorably in several places on the Junk Science Home Page. “The top story on Junkscience.com for December 24 was ACSH’s ‘Love Canal: Health Hype vs. Health Fact,’ ” it stated.⁹⁶

ACSH returned the favor by helping disseminate a November 1999 “scientific study” in which Milloy claimed to find dioxin in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. By any reasonable standard of scientific inquiry, Milloy’s study, coauthored with the Cato Institute’s Michael Gough, would itself have to be condemned as junk science. Milloy has frequently attacked real scientists for using small sample sizes in their studies, but his own study relied on only a single sample of ice cream. He and Gough simply purchased a carton of Ben & Jerry’s in a grocery store and took it to a laboratory for analysis. Their results, written in the style of a scientific research paper, were never published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal and would have a hard time finding a reputable publisher, given that their statement of methodology consisted in its entirety of a single sentence. As for the finding that Ben & Jerry’s ice cream contains dioxin, this is hardly surprising, since dioxin accumulates in fatty tissues and is therefore common in dairy products. The real point of the study was to attack Ben & Jerry’s for “hypocrisy,” because the ice cream makers have been outspoken in calling for reforms that would reduce dioxin production and use a dioxin-free process to manufacture the cardboard cartons in which their product is packaged.

It would be more accurate to characterize the Milloy-Gough study as a publicity stunt than as scientific research. ACSH, however, loved it. “Ben & Jerry’s might be described as a chemically holier-than-thou company,” stated an editorial on the ACSH website. “So it was more than a bit ironic when two investigators . . . found that the product contained traces of dioxin. . . . Ben & Jerry’s has been caught in its own game.”⁹⁷ The ACSH newsletter boasted subsequently that “the ACSH editorial on Ben & Jerry’s ice cream received more than 700 hits over a 36-hour period.”⁹⁸

The cozy relationship between ACSH and Milloy stands in marked contrast with their hostile relationship to other, reputable mainstream consumer and health groups such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). Milloy calls CSPI’s Nutrition Action Health Letter a “rag” and accuses the organization of “doing its best to scare Americans about food.” Whelan likewise calls CSPI “the nation’s leading food terrorist group” for its warnings about excessive fat, sugar, and artificial additives in restaurant and snack foods. In one funding appeal to the Kellogg Company, she boasted of her organization’s lengthy history of combat with CSPI executive director Michael Jacobson over food issues. “We’ve been there to counter CSPI’s claims as he has attacked virtually every aspect of modern-day food technology, whether it be caffeine, sugar, dietary fiber, the fat-replacer Olestra, dietary fat and cholesterol, moderate consumption of alcohol—or whatever other alleged carcinogen, toxin, or ‘killer’ ingredient his organization has singled out for indictment,” she stated.

Whelan has long rankled at charges that ACSH is beholden to the corporations that pay its bills. “I’ve been called a paid liar for industry so many times, I’ve lost count,” she complained in 1997. She frequently cites her stand on tobacco as evidence of her personal integrity and has responded to criticisms of her organization’s reliance on industry funding by insinuating that prominent environmental and consumer groups are themselves beholden to tobacco money. “My counterparts, why aren’t they quizzed as to funding?” she asked Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz, adding that the Natural Resources Defense Council and CSPI receive “substantial funding from the cigarette families, including R. J. Reynolds family foundation. . . . Who knows where else they get their funding? They don’t publish their funding list on a regular basis.”

When Kurtz investigated these allegations, however, he found that unlike ACSH, the NRDC and CSPI do disclose their institutional funding sources. Whelan’s claim that NRDC and CSPI take tobacco money is based on the fact that both organizations have received some funding from the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, which is run by second-and third-generation heirs of tobacco money who choose to give their money to liberal causes.

But if CSPI’s several-degrees-of-separation links to tobacco money are worth mentioning, it seems only fair to note that Whelan serves on the advisory council of Consumer Alert, a tobacco-financed front group for industry. Founded by former Bush administration chief of staff John Sununu, Consumer Alert is funded by Philip Morris along with the Coors Company, the Beer Institute, Monsanto, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, Chevron, Exxon, American Cyanamid, and a host of other usual corporate sponsors. In 1993, when the Clinton administration proposed raising cigarette taxes to fund its health plan, Consumer Alert worked closely with Philip Morris to attack the plan. “The antithesis of the Nader/Citizen Action brand of ‘consumer defense,’ Consumer Alert has worked with us in the promotion of the concept that the Clinton plan is anti-consumer,” stated a Philip Morris strategy document. “Via continuation of their forums, position papers and op-eds, we are discussing a further media blitz for early Spring.”⁹⁹

In fact, ACSH has numerous ties, through its board of directors and advisory board, to many of the conservative, tobacco-funded organizations that Whelan accuses of “blurred vision” on tobacco. The ACSH advisory board includes representatives of the Hudson Institute, the Progress & Freedom Foundation and the Cato Institute, all of which receive funding from the tobacco industry and oppose efforts to regulate tobacco. Priorities magazine also repeatedly publishes articles from people affiliated with these and other pro-tobacco think tanks, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Capital Research Center (which published two books in the 1990s denying that direct smoking causes cancer).¹⁰⁰ The 17-member ACSH board of directors includes Henry Miller, a former FDA official now at the Hoover Institution, who regularly grinds an ax against what he considers the FDA’s “extraordinarily burdensome regulations” regarding genetically engineered foods and new drugs. In 1996, Miller also editorialized against the FDA’s proposal to regulate tobacco. “The FDA’s anti-tobacco initiative . . . has not been without its own costs to American consumers and taxpayers,” he stated, describing FDA commissioner David Kessler as “personally consumed by this single issue.”

Priorities has also published the work of Jacob Sullum, the Reason magazine editor whose vociferous defense of the tobacco industry appeared in full-page newspaper ads paid for by Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds. Whelan is well aware of Sullum’s track record as a tobacco defender, stating on one occasion that he “defies the now nearly unanimous view of scientists that ETS can be harmful.”¹⁰¹ In 1996, however, an essay by Sullum, titled “What the Doctor Orders,” appeared as a Priorities cover story. In it, Sullum attacked government efforts to curb smoking, alcohol and drug abuse, along with handgun controls and motorcycle helmet and seat-belt laws, calling them examples of the “fundamentally collectivist . . . aims of the public health movement.” In an accompanying letter, Whelan and ACSH Director of Public Health William London described Sullum’s essay as “the most important critique of governmental public health activities we have seen,” which “should be assigned reading in every school of public health.” The same issue of Priorities offered commentaries on the Sullum article from eight other writers, who mingled similar words of praise with occasional criticisms. To finish off this “symposium,” Sullum concluded with a final response in which he threw in an attack on Medicaid and Medicare for good measure.

What binds ACSH to thinkers like Milloy and Sullum is their common roots in a right-wing, “free market” ideology that overrides even Elizabeth Whelan’s awareness of tobacco’s dangers. These ideological underpinnings explain why Whelan blames the rest of the anti-tobacco movement for the failure of other conservatives to join them. “Discussions of tobacco and health policies are dominated almost exclusively by well-meaning social engineers and safety alarmists whose expansive agenda all but guarantees that many on the right reflexively gravitate to the opposite camp,” she argues. “In this way, liberal anti-smoking enthusiasts have poisoned the waters for the political right.”

The same ideology sometimes places Whelan at loggerheads with the opinions and strategies of the rest of the anti-tobacco movement. In May 1998, for example, ACSH and the pro-tobacco Competitive Enterprise Institute joined forces in a bizarre appeal for Congress to prove its “sincerity” by offering a tax rebate to adult smokers. Legislation then pending would have raised tobacco taxes (and thereby prices) in order to deter underage smoking. “If these taxes are truly aimed at reducing underage smoking, then Congress should give rebates of the tax to adult smokers,” argued Whelan and CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman in a joint news release. “By rebating the revenues collected from adult smokers,” they reasoned, “Congress could unequivocally demonstrate the purity of its motives—or it could drop the matter entirely.”

Left unanswered was the question of how vendors were supposed to rebate the tax to adults without also rebating it to minors—who, after all, cannot legally buy their cigarettes directly, since sale of tobacco products to minors is already prohibited.

Defining Terms

One of the striking things about the concept of “junk science” has been the refusal of its theorists to offer a meaningful definition of the term. Huber defines junk science as “a hodgepodge of biased data, spurious inference and logical legerdemain, patched together by researchers whose enthusiasm for discovery and diagnosis far outstrips their skill.” Milloy’s website defines junk science as “bad science used by lawsuit-happy trial lawyers, the ‘food police,’ environmental Chicken Littles, power-drunk regulators, and unethical-to-dishonest scientists to fuel specious lawsuits, wacky social and political agendas, and the quest for personal fame and fortune.” Neither of these definitions offers any way of distinguishing good from bad science. Instead, they consist of ad hominem attacks on the motives, morals, or competence of anyone who differs from the worldview of their authors.

The absence of real standards for distinguishing between junk science and sound science allows corporate apologists to use the term with confidence, while simultaneously managing to amicably disagree about an issue as fundamental and important as tobacco. The concept of junk science serves as a convenient way of reconciling their pro-corporate bias with pretensions of scientific superiority, while simultaneously glossing over ethical conflicts of interest.

Equally disturbing is the sheer amount of rhetorical venom and bile that the junkyard dogs of science have injected into public policy discussions, polarizing debates and lowering rather than elevating the tone of public scientific discourse. Some of the most respected voices in public life have been targeted for attack. Since its founding in 1936, Consumers Union and its monthly publication, Consumer Reports, have been icons of integrity, offering impartial scientific testing of consumer products and also serving as advocates for real consumer protection. None of this matters to “Junkman” Steven Milloy. In 1999 he launched a second website, called “Consumer Distorts” (www.consumerdistorts.com), which accuses Consumer Reports of socialism, sensationalism, and “scaring consumers away from products.” ACSH has also gone to war repeatedly with Consumers Union, accusing it of “irresponsible fear-mongering” for its reports on health threats represented by pesticides and other chemicals found in foods and common household items.

The failure of the self-proclaimed “sound science” movement to provide a sound methodology is doubly disappointing because, in the end, the critics of junk science have a certain amount of truth on their side. There is indeed a great deal of bad science in the news media and in courtrooms, and not all of it comes from corporations. Over the years, both business marketers and advocacy groups have become highly skilled at inventing and exaggerating fears, dealing in dubious statistics and using emotional appeals to sell products or mobilize public support for causes. The time constraints and visual nature of television make simple messages stand out more easily than complex ones, and marketers have learned to exploit this reality of the modern mass media. In addition to the political goals that underlie these appeals, sometimes there are commercial motives as well. Great profits can be made by selling overhyped “natural” food supplements like shark cartilage and melatonin. ACSH has rightly criticized some of these marketing ploys as the scams that they are.

The problem is that neither Elizabeth Whelan nor Steven Milloy—nor, for that matter, any of the other attack dogs in the junk science war—seem capable of distinguishing between scam artists and reputable voices in today’s debates over environmental safety and public health. The concept of junk science, as they have defined it, has proven itself unable to separate the wheat from the chaff. A movement that cannot tell whether tobacco science is junk science has little right to pose as society’s scientific arbiter.