The American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) sides with big business in virtually every controversy involving corporate interests versus public health, but there is one big business that it relentlessly criticizes--the tobacco industry. ACSH and Elizabeth Whelan have taken a consistent and outspoken stand against the dangers of tobacco and have published hard-hitting critiques of magazines that downplay tobacco's dangers in exchange for advertising dollars.

Taking a strong stand on tobacco has helped ACSH cultivate a veneer of credibility among public health professionals. In particular, it has formed part of the bond between Whelan and former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop (see related story in this issue).

Whelan is the author of books about tobacco, titled A Smoking Gun: How the Tobacco Industry Gets Away With Murder and Cigarettes: What the Warning Label Doesn't Tell You, along with numerous editorials and magazine articles. 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, for example, Whelan publicly begged to differ, 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?"

ACSH's argument on many public issues is built around the idea that tobacco and other lifestyle-related health factors are more important and deserve higher priority than "hypothetical, miniscule" risks from pesticides and other pollution. The organization publishes a magazine, Priorities, whose title and content regularly return to 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."

Whelan has even attempted to deflect criticism of her own organization's funding by claiming that prominent environmental and consumer groups are beholden to tobacco money. "My counterparts, why aren't they quizzed as to funding?" she asked one reporter, claiming that the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Center for Science in the Public Interest (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 Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz investigated these allegations, however, he found that the NRDC and CSPI both disclose all of their funding sources except for individual membership contributions. As for the claim that they take tobacco money, both have received some funding from 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.

CSPI's Michael Jacobson acknowledges that the Babcock Foundation's money originally came from tobacco profits. "It's been sanitized by several generations," he says. "That's a very different situation from getting money from the Monsanto Fund, which is an arm of the company."

For his part, Jacobson expresses measured skepticism about the motives behind Whelan's anti-tobacco activism. "I think that ACSH took up the smoking issue to deflect the criticism that it always defends industry," he says. "Whelan often says things like 'X causes fewer deaths than tobacco, so it's not worth worrying about'--and, of course, everything causes fewer deaths than tobacco."

At the same time, Jacobson is careful to give credit where credit is due. "Fig leaf though it may be, ACSH deserves credit for its work on smoking," he says, "and journalists give extra credit to ACSH because they know it's a right-wing group and right-wing groups aren't expected to attack industry."

Of course, if CSPI's several-degrees-of-separation links to the tobacco industry are worth mentioning, it seems only fair to note that Whelan serves on the advisory council of Consumer Alert, another front group for industry whose funders include Philip Morris, Coors and the Beer Institute along with Monsanto, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, Chevron, Exxon, American Cyanamid and a host of other usual corporate suspects.

Guilty Associations

In fact, ACSH has numerous ties, through its board of directors and advisory board, to many of the right-wing, tobacco-funded organizations whose "blurred vision" Whelan criticizes. Its 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 features numerous articles from people affiliated with these and other pro-tobacco think-tanks, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Capital Research Center (which has published two recent books denying that smoking causes cancer).

ACSH also has numerous links to The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), a "corporate-supported watchdog coalition that advocates the use of sound sciences in public policy." Like ACSH, TASSC attacks what it calls "junk science" as it defends bovine growth hormone, genetically engineered foodstuffs, dioxin, electromagnetic fields and endocrine disrupting chemicals. Like ACSH, it is supported by the chemical, oil, dairy, timber, paper, mining, manufacturing and agribusiness industries.

Unlike ACSH, however, TASSC takes money directly from Philip Morris, and it has openly defended the tobacco industry. In August 1997, for example, TASSC executive director Steven Milloy was one of the paid speakers at a cushy little propaganda session for foreign reporters hosted in Miami. The tobacco industry flew in reporters from countries including Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Peru and paid for their hotel rooms and expensive meals while they 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.

Milloy likewise dismissed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's 1993 study 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 the New England Journal of Medicine published a Harvard University study linking secondhand smoke to heart disease, he labeled the study an "abuse of statistics" and a case of "epidemiologists trying to pass off junk science as Nobel prize work."

Milloy's rhetoric appears to be the basis for a story, titled "Smoke Rings," which appeared in the June 16, 1997 issue of William Buckley, Jr.'s conservative National Review. 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."

Yet ACSH executive director Michael Fox is a member of TASSC's advisory board, as are ACSH chairman A. Alan Moghissi and board members Victor Herbert and F.J. Francis. Another 46 members of the ACSH advisory board also serve on the advisory board of TASSC. If TASSC is in the business of "junking all science," why are so many ACSH supporters willing to lend their name to it?

Secondhand Sophistry

ACSH does more than merely associate with the tobacco industry's defenders. It has endorsed and helped disseminate some of their arguments.

Jacob Sullum, for example, is one of the most vociferous defenders of the tobacco industry in print today. As editor of Reason magazine, a libertarian magazine published by the Reason Foundation, Sullum adopts a "Clinton defense" regarding the industry's long history of deceiving the public over tobacco's dangers. "Yes, the industry's position on the hazards of smoking has been disingenuous and irresponsible. But does it amount to fraud?" he asks. "What industry spokesmen said was not, by and large, literally false. Indeed, they carefully phrased their statements to avoid direct denial of tobacco's hazards. . . . The tobacco companies didn't fool anyone who didn't want to be fooled."

Although Sullum admits that "smoking is bad for you in the sense that it raises the risk of certain diseases and tends to shorten your life," he says smoking might "also be good for you, in the sense that it provides pleasure, relieves stress, or offers some other benefit. . . . The refusal to acknowledge the benefits of smoking--to admit the possibility that anyone could rationally choose to smoke--illustrates the arrogance of insisting, 'You shouldn't smoke because it's bad for you.'"

Sullum is one of the few inhabitants of planet earth who defended Bob Dole's ill-fated claim that tobacco is non-addictive. He accuses other journalists of serious errors, exaggerations, and a bias against the tobacco industry. In discussions of the secondhand smoke issue, he "also accuses the EPA of corrupting science and cites many of the tobacco industry's arguments that so far have persuaded virtually no one in medicine and public health who are not recipients of tobacco industry money," observed Andrew Skolnick, an editor at the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Sullum defends his reliance on tobacco-funded researchers by arguing that scientists who "have qualms about the case against secondhand smoke" and "have the courage to speak up are apt to be sought out by tobacco companies as consultants and to attract research grants from them. If such funding is grounds for doubt, so is money from private organizations, such as the American Cancer Society, and government agencies, such as the California Department of Health, that are committed to achieving 'a smoke-free society.' "

The tobacco industry itself likes Sullum's work 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 him $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. "We felt that this report was particularly objective," explained Philip Morris vice president Ellen Merlo.

Elizabeth Whelan is also aware of Sullum's track record as a tobacco defender. Shortly after his articles on secondhand smoke appeared, she complained that "Wall Street Journal, Reason, Forbes and National Review all recently carried essentially the same article by the same author--Jacob Sullum--who defies the now nearly unanimous view of scientists that [secondhand smoke] can be harmful."

Given his record and reputation, it is perplexing, to say the least, that ACSH chose to feature another of Sullum's essays, titled "What the Doctor Orders," as the cover story for a 1996 issue of Priorities.

In "What the Doctor Orders," Sullum waxes nostalgic for the health care standards and priorities of the 19th century. In addition to attacking efforts to curb smoking, he also criticizes motorcycle helmet and seatbelt laws, as well as public health measures aimed at alcohol and drug abuse, obesity, violence and handguns, as examples of the "fundamentally collectivist . . . aims of the public health movement."

In an accompanying letter, Whelan and ACSH Director of Public Health William London describe 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 offers commentaries on the Sullum article from eight other writers, who mingle similar fawning words of praise with occasional faint criticisms. To finish off this "symposium," Sullum concludes with a final response in which he throws in an attack on Medicaid and Medicare for good measure.

In his "symposium" in Priorities, Jacob Sullum argues that government efforts to promote public health are a threat to basic human freedoms.

Foggy Thinking and Poisoned Waters

What binds ACSH to a thinker like Sullum is their common roots in a far-right, "free market" ideology that overrides even ACSH's awareness of tobacco's murderous effects. 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 also sometimes places Whelan at loggerheads with the opinions and strategies of the rest of the anti-tobacco movement. She is one of the few, for example, who opposes the mandatory "surgeon general's warning" that appears on cigarette packages. In her view, the label "merely pre-empts the responsibility the industry would normally have for the consequences caused by their products."

Similar conservative sentiments against government mandates led ACSH and the pro-tobacco Competitive Enterprise Institute to join forces in May 1998 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, do not buy their cigarettes directly, since sale of tobacco products to minors is already prohibited.