Who's Blowing Smoke Where?

Pharmacology professor Sorell Schwartz of the Center for Environmental Health and Human Toxicology testified against the industry-funded Tobacco Institute, during the ongoing $280 billion federal lawsuit against big tobacco. Schwartz said that, in the 1980s, the Institute's PR team, "who felt that we were not being cooperative enough," urged him and other supposedly independent researchers to "take a more advocative position" on issues like secondhand smoke. But former Institute lawyer John Rupp (now with the Covington & Burling law and lobbying firm) insisted that "the industry sought out scientists and paid them to make an 'objective appraisal'" on secondhand smoke, to "dispel the 'extreme views' of some anti-smoking activists."