Policing PC: how the government is stacking the deck in the debate over smoking

National Review, August 28, 1995 by Thomas DiLorenzo

STANTON Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, is a major recipient of government grants for scientific research. He received more than $4 million from the state of California over the period 1989 to 1993 for his research on tobacco. But his research had nothing to do with the medical effects of tobacco use; it involved ``tracking the political activities'' of tobacco companies in that state.

He was eventually defunded by the state legislature when it learned that the money had gone not for genuine medical research, but to ``the kind of thing we [politicians] do to each other when we run for election,'' as State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown put it.When Glantz's grant from the state of California was terminated he tapped into an even bigger revenue source -- the Federal Government. According to material I received under the Freedom of Information Act, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) awarded Glantz $223,214 in 1994, the first installment of a three-year grant. According to the grant proposal, ``the purpose of the project is to determine the extent and nature of tobacco-industry influence on state tobacco policy making.''Glantz couched his application in ``scientific'' terms, saying that ``the central hypothesis of this research is that the tobacco industry increases its political activities in a state in response to activities by tobacco-control advocates.'' In other words, the NCI is giving Glantz almost a quarter of a million dollars per year for three years to ``determine'' that if anti-smoking activists lobby for smoking bans, then the tobacco industry will respond by defending itself. Nice work if you can get it.Although the first page of the proposal sounds scientific, with a formal definition of a ``central hypothesis,'' Glantz essentially admits later that his purpose is purely political: anti-smoking ``advocates'' might be ``more likely to prevail if armed with information and insights into the strategies and tactics of the other.'' ``Our study will examine specific tobacco-industry strategies and the most effective counterstrategies that tobacco-control advocates should use to counter the industry's actions. Providing such systematic information is the goal of this project.''There is nothing wrong with anyone's gathering information about his political adversaries. But to give taxpayers' funds to activists on one side of a political debate is, as Thomas Jefferson remarked in the Virginia Declaration of Religious Liberty, ``sinful and tyrannical.'' The shareholders, managers, employees, and customers of the tobacco companies are, in Jefferson's words, being ``compell[ed] -- to contribute to a cause with which [they] disagree.''Americans have a right to petition their government, and campaign contributions are one way citizens have to express their views to legislators. There is nothing illegal about the campaign contributions Glantz is scrutinizing. And yet we are supposed to be shocked -- shocked! -- by his ``results,'' to be obtained by ``using a simultaneous-equations regression model,'' that ``the greater the campaign contributions the tobacco industry made to a member of the [California] legislature, the more pro-tobacco he or she appeared to tobacco-control advocates.''MUCH of Glantz's ``research'' simply recounts his political activism over the past seven or eight years. For example, Americans for Nonsmokers Rights (ANR), a Berkeley-based political organization, was instrumental in lobbying for California's Proposition 99, the 1988 law that raised excise taxes on tobacco products and earmarked some of the revenue for political activism by organizations like ANR. One of the aims given in Glantz's NCI proposal is to interview his old cronies at these organizations to write up ``a case study of the passage of Proposition 99.''One reason Glantz is recording a history of the Proposition 99 campaign is to provide a political ``roadmap'' for activists in other states. His collaborators include nonprofit anti-smoking activists, such as the Group Against Smoking Pollution (GASP), that will gain financially if excise taxes are enacted in their states. California's tax has raised over $3 billion thus far, and among the recipients of the revenues have been nonprofit lobbyists, who were paid as much as $265 per hour for their services, and university researchers who discovered such ``truths'' as that smoking may make one's skin wrinkle, and that ``bad boys'' are more likely to become smokers than well-behaved ones. There is a virtual goldmine for Glantz and his collaborators if his political intelligence gathering can be used to create similar sources of funding in other states.The fact that the National Cancer Institute is supporting Glantz's research is a signal that it is moving into the political arena at the expense of medical research per se. Every NCI dollar that goes to a study of political coalition building is a dollar that is not used for cancer research. It is telling that Glantz himself is not a medical doctor nor is his chief collaborator in the study, who is a political scientist at the University of California. The top research assistant is a former employee of Common Cause, who has yet to earn even an undergraduate degree. It should not be surprising, then, that the research is all politics and no science.According to the proposal, extensive spying on ``smokers' rights'' groups will be conducted, an enemies list compiled, and the groups' activities ``analyzed.'' Virtually anyone who opposes Glantz's prohibitionist agenda may be a target of his government-funded spying operation.One of the primary arguments made by groups that oppose tobacco prohibition, according to Glantz's ``preliminary research,'' is that such laws interfere with individual rights. They focus on ``issues related to freedom, rights, liberty, the U.S. Constitution, and the paternalistic/exploitative/controlling nature of government,'' and they oppose ``government coercion'' and ``big brotherism.'' They also encourage ``tolerance,'' ``respect for others,'' and ``peaceful coexistence,'' according to Glantz. Glantz intends to catalogue all these arguments so that counterarguments can be made and incorporated into a ``How to Lobby'' manual for anti-smoking activists.Once the arguments against individual rights, freedom, tolerance, and peaceful coexistence are refined and all the opponents of tobacco prohibition identified, Glantz intends to advance the former and discredit the latter by utilizing his ``extensive database of media contacts,'' which he says includes CBS's Evening News, ABC's World News Tonight, ABC's 20/20, ABC's Nightline, NBC's Today show, NPR, and even Oprah Winfrey. Taxpayers who disagree with Glantz's neo-puritanical political agenda may find themselves the subjects of a CBS 60 Minutes interview or of derogatory commentary on NPR.Anti-smoking activists in California have already proved that they care little for civil liberties. They used taxpayers' money, for example, to pay teenagers to conduct ``sting'' operations against convenience-store owners, an activity condemned by local police as ``vigilantism.'' The teenagers were hired to try to buy cigarettes in order to ``spotlight the widespread illegal sale of cigarettes to minors,'' according to the San Francisco Chronicle. More than a hundred sting operations were conducted, prompting the police chief of the town of Novato, California, to ask, ``What are they going to do next, put drunk drivers out on the road to see if they're caught?'' The nonprofit group STAMP (Stop Tobacco Access for Minors), a state-government grantee, justified the ``merchant education'' program by arguing that ``a lot of people out there support what we're doing.'' What a lesson to be teaching children! As long as ``a lot'' of people agree with the ends, the means are justified.APREDICTABLE consequence of punitive taxation is the creation of black markets controlled by criminals, and tobacco is no exception. Already in California, cigarette smuggling from Mexico is a burgeoning business, and convenience-store robbers increasingly target cartons of cigarettes. In Canada, where excise taxes are several times higher than in the U.S., as much as a third of all cigarette sales reportedly take place on black markets. ``Organized crime is already involved in smuggling cigarettes from the U.S. to Canada,'' according to Jack Killorin, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Because of this, Canada recently rolled back its $3.50 per-pack cigarette tax.Glantz is not at all interested in these problems and has apparently learned nothing from drug prohibition. ``You know, in my view, illegal drugs is a trivial problem,'' he told a group in Los Angeles, a city that has been rocked by drug-related crime. But why should he worry? According to my Freedom of Information Act data, he earns as much as $25,000 for a single appearance at an OSHA hearing as one of the nation's premier anti-smoking ``activists.''The NCI's funding of Glantz's political crusade is a gross abuse of bureaucratic authority. Congress has not banned the sale of tobacco products, but the bureaucrats at the NCI have taken it upon themselves to sidestep Congress in order to promote de facto prohibition.Smoking may be a vice, but, to paraphrase the nineteenth-century writer Lysander Spooner, vices are not necessarily crimes. It is the aim of the politically correct in any generation, however, to turn vices that involve only consenting adults into crimes. To Spooner, this would have included the prohibition of gluttony, prize fighting, tobacco chewing, smoking, snuff taking, idleness, hypocrisy, and even corset wearing. It becomes a matter of which of our vices are objected to by our national nannies.The greatest danger in all this, as Ludwig von Mises once explained, is that once it is acceptable for government to determine what goes into our bodies, it is a logical next step to control what goes into our minds. Once the freedom to consume is lost, we are on the road to losing all freedoms. ``The naive advocates of government interference with consumption delude themselves,'' Mises wrote, ``when they neglect what they disdainfully call the philosophical aspect of the problem. They unwittingly support the cause of censorship, inquisition, intolerance, and persecution of dissenters.'' Professor Glantz, take a bow.