Stanton Glantz, Professional at Ad Hominem

I was a proud member of ban the ban Wisconsin when we filed a complaint against the Surgeon Generals report.  I do not hide my affiliations, I am a proud Libertarian who also is a member of “Americans for Prosperity” as well as several TEA Party groups.  Harry Chestnuts released the following video after we lodged the complaint. While the video is humorous it is not far from the truth.  Stanton has recently released a so called report besmirching TEA Parties as a front for “Big Tobacco”

Methods We used the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, the Wayback Machine, Google, LexisNexis, the Center for Media and Democracy and the Center for Responsive Politics (opensecrets.org) to examine the tobacco companies’ connections to the Tea Party.

I will not go into great detail about the scientific malpractice done by Stanton.  Historian Christopher Snowdon has already done a better job then I could here. I will simply state that Stanton an admitted neo-prohibitionist has had a long history of poor scientific methods as he was part of the 1992 EPA report that was proven in court to be a fraud. And he and his fellow EPA prohibitionist wrote the 2006 Surgeon Generals report.  If you read page 21 of that report you will see that they used the same questionable scientific methods that were slammed in federal court. But this is about the ad hominem attacks on the TEA Party movement.  The TEA Party movement is has always been about individual rights even when those rights may have a negative effect on that individual. With individual rights comes the personal responsibility for ones actions.  Stanton not only calls for Prohibition, (which history has proven numerous times as a failure) he calls for censorship.  He openly attacks anyone that does not carry his water to the letter. His recent attack on Dr Michael Siegel show his lack of integrity. On Stanton’s blog he says the following.

I normally do not comment on Mike Siegel’s blog because he has long since lost all credibility with me as a scientist.

Dr Siegel responded with the following.

Dr. Glantz is correct about one thing. I am guided by ideology. My ideology is that science is about the pursuit of the truth, and that we have to seek the truth wherever it takes us, even if it sometimes turns out that the truth is not favorable to our advocacy positions. I believe, also, in honesty and transparency and believe that public health practitioners should not deceive the public or distort the science, even if doing so might garner more support for our policies.

Now this is an ongoing smear campaign not just against those who oppose smoking bans and draconian taxes in order to pursue ”Nanny Statism” Paschal Diethelm and Martin McKee wrote an article basically putting those who oppose “Tobacco Control” and the “Global Warming” hoax the equivalent to Holocaust deniers.

This phenomenon has led some to draw a historical parallel with the holocaust, another area where the evidence is overwhelming but where a few commentators have continued to sow doubt. All are seen as part of a larger phenomenon of denialism.

They also try a strawman tactic.

Denialists are usually not deterred by the extreme isolation of their theories, but rather see it as the indication of their intellectual courage against the dominant orthodoxy and the accompanying political correctness, often comparing themselves to Galileo.

What is funny about that comparison is that there is a grain of truth in that statement. The flat earther’s rather then openly arguing the merits of their pseudoscience used consensus  political clout and out and out bulling to silence their opponents. Few know of the hoax perpetrated on the public when it pertains to second hand smoke as smoking has been denormalized and it is politically correct to discriminate against smokers. In the case of “Global Warming” they were literally caught with their pants down.  ”Climate Gate” made front page news and they resorted to renaming “Global Warming”,”Climate Change”  Now these activist withing the Green movement are embracing “Tobacco Control” tactics.

Climate change doubt is a key belief in the TEA Party, sparked by the Koch-related Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks. Big Tobacco was heavily involved from the 1980s onward, and by 1992 the “Tea Party” was already in play. Extensive new research has unearthed the real history.

I guess when you lack a scientific argument, one must resort to ad hominem.  Again the chicanery within the global warming hoax is well known, however the McCarthistic tactics within Tobacco Control are not.  Dr Michael Siegel was a lead “Tobacco Control” trainer and he discussed this in great detail.

The true colors of the modern-day anti-smoking movement showed brightly last week, as a prominent smoke-free air advocate (me) was thrown off a smoke-free advocacy list-serve for daring tocriticize an inflammatory and unfounded personal attack, bordering on defamation, of an individual (private citizen) who is a smoking ban opponent which was posted on the list-serve.

A fellow smoke-free advocate – Tim Filler, who is on the steering committee of Smoke Free Indy – posted on the list-serve a nasty personal attack against Michael McFadden, a smoking ban opponent. In the attack, Filler insinuated that McFadden is a tobacco lackey who is taking tobacco money. The suggestion was that McFadden is not speaking for himself as a private citizen, but that he actually is affiliated with Big Tobacco. The attack was posted without the knowledge of McFadden, who had no opportunity to defend himself.

But it gets better.  As a former “Tobacco Control” trainer the good Dr goes on to explain that these tactics are actually taught as part of the “Tobacco Control” indoctrination.

Here is the rest of the story:

If you take part in secondhand smoke policy training in the tobacco control movement, chances are that you will be taught that all opposition to smoking bans is orchestrated by the tobacco industry, that anyone who challenges the science connecting secondhand smoke exposure and severe health effects is a paid lackey of Big Tobacco, and that any group which disseminates information challenging these health effects is a tobacco industry front group. Consequently, the a chief strategy of tobacco control is to smear the opposition by accusing them of being tobacco industry moles. And in no situation should one say anything positive about an opponent, even if true.

How do I know this?

Because for many years, I was one of the main trainers of tobacco control advocates in the United States. And this is what I taught, because this was what I was led to believe. I attended many conferences and trainings and this is precisely what I was taught. I accepted it for the truth, and passed it along to others.

But these activist don’t end their bullying there. They have actively attempted to get legitimate scientist fired for not adhering to their dogma. In the case of Dr James Enstrom the attempt was made several times.  Multiple times by those within “Tobacco Control” which prompted him to post the following rebuttle called “Defending legitimate epidemiologic research: combating Lysenko pseudoscience”

Continuing Glantz Campaign to Discredit Enstrom

Beginning with his activities at the time of the publication of our BMJ paper, Glantz has continually attacked me and my research, in spite of the fact that we are both established, long-term faculty members in the University of California system. Glantz is well-known as a long-time anti-smoking activist [10,56], whose ultimate goal is achieving a society free of smokers [57]. However, as a UC faculty member, he is supposed to adhere to the UCSF Campus Code of Conduct [58] and the UC Standards of Ethical Conduct [59]. For instance, the Code of Conduct states “Misconduct or Misconduct in Science means fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, or other practices that seriously deviate from those that are commonly accepted within the scientific community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research.” The UC Standards of Ethical Conduct states “Members of the University community are expected to conduct themselves ethically, honestly, and with integrity in all dealings.”

However, based on his clearly documented written and verbal attack on me, he has not adhered to these codes. Indeed, I have spent the past four years responding to his false and misleading statements and defending my honesty and scientific integrity. The full details of his campaign are too extensive to present here, but the selected examples below demonstrate the tactics that he used against me and the epidemiologic research that I have been conducting at UCLA.

Of course Dr Siegel blogged on how the American Cancer Society owed Dr Enstrom an apology in his post “Enstrom Cleared of Scientific Misconduct Charges; American Cancer Society Owes Him An Apology”

But then the activist within the green community tried to get him fired.

(Washington, DC) – The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) has filed suit on behalf of Dr. James E. Enstrom, a UCLA research professor who was terminated after he blew the whistle on junk environmental science and scientific misconduct at the University of California (UC).

“The facts of this case are astounding,” said David French, Senior Counsel of the ACLJ. “UCLA terminated a professor after 35 years of service simply because he exposed the truth about an activist scientific agenda that was not only based in fraud but violated California law for the sake of imposing expensive new environmental regulations on California businesses.  UCLA’s actions were so extreme that its own Academic Freedom Committee unanimously expressed its concern about the case.”

Now President Obama is calling on more government spending on “politicized science”  Dr Michael Crichton warned about such science, here is the intro to his piece called “Why Politicized Science is Dangerous”

Imagine that there is a new scientific theory that warns of an impending crisis, and points to a way out. 

This theory quickly draws support from leading scientists, politicians and celebrities around the world. Research is funded by distinguished philanthropies, and carried out at prestigious universities. The crisis is reported frequently in the media. The science is taught in college and high school classrooms.

I don’t mean global warming. I’m talking about another theory, which rose to prominence a century ago.

No he was not talking about global warming, but he was talking about another pseudoscience perpetrated by progressives of yesteryear called eugenics.  Now the modern day progressives demand that even higher taxes be imposed on smokers and then demand a piece of the pie to fund their lobbying efforts.  There already is an investigation into their illegal activity.

Federal healthcare grants might have been illegally used for political lobbying, according to the Health and Human Services Department’s inspector general.The inspector general said grants administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) might have been used for lobbying efforts — and that the CDC might have led recipients to believe lobbying was appropriate, despite a federal ban on using grant money for political activism.

It is time to pull all taxpayer funding from any scientific research as political influence taints the results.  This was true in 1992 when the EPA released it’s findings.

EPA has a long history of scientific malpractice. Both the General Accounting Office and the Congressional Research Service have been severely critical of EPA’s policies and procedures on a variety of issues. EPA has violated its own risk assessment guidelines and debased scientific standards regarding secondhand smoke. It was found guilty of violating six federal statutes for using harassment and intimidation to try to compel employee support for its policy on secondhand smoke. It has fraudulently misrepresented the findings of other scientists in order to make it appear they supported conclusions EPA favored.

It is equally true today:

The Union of Concerned Scientists said more than half of the nearly 1,600 EPA staff scientists who responded online to a detailed questionnaire reported they had experienced incidents of political interference in their work.

EPA spokesman Jonathan Shradar attributed some of the discontent to the “passion” scientists have toward their work. He said EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, as a longtime career scientist at the EPA himself, “weighs heavily the science given to him by the staff in making policy decisions.”

But Francesca Grifo, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Scientific Integrity Program, said the survey results revealed “an agency in crisis” and “under siege from political pressures” especially among scientists involved in risk assessment and crafting regulations.

So Stanton, when will you stick to facts and engage in legitimate science?

 

Update Feb 16 2013

Taxpayers paid for this attack on the TEA Party, who’s in power?

As for the taxpayer funding, he acknowledged that NIH and NCI might not have known the subject matter. 

But he asked: “Which is worse? That you simply give taxpayer dollars to people and say, ‘hey study whatever you want … or (say) ‘Oh so you’re going to go after people who oppose the president’s agenda?’ … ‘That’s good.’”