Trust Us, We're Experts PA

by Sheldon Rampton

  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 to
day’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