" If repeated often enough, a lie will become the new truth. " Paul Joseph Goebbles, Minister of Propaganda,  Nazi Germany

The public, with little time to spend on investigation, wants simple answers to issues. Very few people are willing to read a scientific study, and examine how it was conducted. Even fewer have the necessary understanding of science to evaluate it well.

I'm with you... little scientific education, and not a lot of time to devote to investigation. However, what I have gleaned, over many years, is some ability to be able to detect when I'm being conned. Not by coincidence, much of the trickery and deception has revealed itself in the anti-smoking battle. Why there? I've paid more attention to that, certainly, but the main reason is that there has rarely been an issue where so much blatant deception has occurred. It's a bandwagon effect, and everyone wants to have a lead seat on the bandwagon. We have organizations trying desperately to be the one that can claim to have killed the smoking evil.

Organizations like the Cancer Society, Heart Association, Environmental Protection Agency, World Health Organization, and thousands more, have been so overt about smoking that there is no way they can afford to back off, even slightly, much less admit that it has all been a huge deception. Their public reputation is on the line, and has been for a very long time. They, with lots of help from our government and from the BILLIONS from the extorted tobacco settlement, have placed easy money within the grasp of "scientists" to add "proof" to the lie. Such a researcher will only have one grasp at the money... if their results don't jive with the lie, they'll have to look elsewhere for funding.

As a result, we've had studies that "prove" that secondhand smoke causes lower birth weight, causes ear infection in children of smokers, and even increases tooth decay... not in smokers, but in their children. As John Stossel would say... GIVE ME A BREAK! Only someone predisposed to believing could buy those possibilities. How do they "prove" such things? There are lots of tricks. One of the most widespread is cause versus correlation.

Cause versus correlation

If I prove that most rapists drink beer, what does that tell you? That's a correlation, and it probably IS true, but it certainly doesn't mean that drinking beer turns you into a rapist, or even makes it more likely. There's a CORRELATION, but a correlation doesn't imply causation. If I tell you that smokers as a group die younger than non-smokers, does that imply that smoking kills? It doesn't, at least until you know a whole lot more about who smokes and who doesn't.

Confounding factors

If I add that more blue-collar workers smoke than professionals (they do) and that blue-collar workers die younger than professionals, then type of work is a confounding factor. Physical labor is more dangerous and dirtier, so it will lead to less longevity. If I add that blue-collar workers tend to LIVE in more polluted areas, that further confounds the issue. If I add that they drink more booze, or eat less well, or have poorer health care, those facts also confound it. Very few "scientific studies" even attempt to separate out such confounding factors, especially those by researchers who have an incentive to bias their results.

Statistical trickery

I won't be elaborate here, because there is so much deception in this area that it's almost impossible to deal with. I have a friend who is lecturer on bad statistics, and his best examples come from the anti-smoking movement. They've become extremely adept at misleading by playing on the public's lack of statistical understanding. How bad does it get? The EPA (Enironmental Protection Agency), may be the leader in deception, because they want to increase their strength by gaining control of tobacco as a regulated substance. Here are some of the comments issued by a Federal court judge about the EPA's "scientific" results:

"EPA publicly committed to a conclusion before research has begun; excluded industry by violating the [Radon] Act's procedural requirements; adjusted established procedure and scientific norms to validate the agencies public conclusion, and aggressively used the Act's authority to disseminate findings to establish a de facto regulatory scheme intended to restrict Plaintiff's products and to influence public opinion"

"The Court is faced with the ugly possibility that EPA adopted a methodology for each chapter, without explanation, based on the outcome sought in that chapter"

"The Court is disturbed that EPA and Kenneth Brown [one of the EPA report's authors] buttress the bioplausibility theory with epidemiological studies. EPA's theory must be independently plausible" (more commentary and a link to the full ruling)

Consider... this was a Federal judge, talking about a Federal agency and some of their cohorts. The judge threw out the EPA results. More importantly, this was in 1998. Has that stopped the EPA, or even slowed them down? Not in the least. They were willing to deceive us then (using our own money), and they've continued to do so, and they've assisted untold hundreds of other organizations to do so. Like many federal agencies, they just ignore court results unless it pleases them.

That's one example of hundreds, and that leads to another major problem in getting to the truth. We've all been told that "tobacco money" has been used to fund deceptive results intended to lie to us. We're to believe that scientists can be bought. Unfortunately, it's true, and it's becoming more true with time.

Now ask yourself these common-sense questions...

Is a scientist more likely to twist and distort results to satisfy a tobacco company or an organization like the EPA, or the Cancer Society?

Who do you think has a better chance of getting away with it?

Which result is more likely to be examined and exposed as a fraud?

Who has the time and money to tear into scientific studies and discover the truth? Is it the many volunteer, donation-funded organizations trying to defend smokers, or the wealthy, government-funded groups on the other side?

I can't prove that tobacco companies haven't coaxed dishonest results from scientists, but I can guarantee you that if they had, the anti-smoking zealots would have discovered it and exposed it in a minute. It has become standard procedure to argue that if a tobacco company had any part in funding, the results are to be ignored... unless the results are what the anti-smokers wanted.

I repeat my long-standing charge that the worst aspect of the anti-smoking war is not the effect on smokers, nor the effect on personal liberty, nor the effect of bans on individual property rights, but the effect on the scientific community. Honest scientific inquiry is being supplanted by JUNK SCIENCE. Formerly honest people and organizations are being twisted into shills for the anti-smokers. Big money and media attention are perverting science, and that leaves us with nobody to trust. The anti-smokers self-righteously smear (and even physically threaten) the credibility of anyone who disagrees with them, while deliberately deceiving the public themselves.

But remember... the anti-smokers don't have to be honest... they only have to claim to have our best interests at heart. People like me, and a few smoker's rights groups, don't have the resources to combat our own extorted money being thrown back against us. For the anti-smokers, if the cause is "just", deception is justified, and they've taken it to lengths we would have thought absurd 10 years ago, but they've been feeding off each other for a long time, getting rich in the process (along with thousands of trial attorneys), and getting enormous control, which is what most of them really want. They want the power to tell us how to live our lives. Anti-smoking is just one step, and it made them greedy for more.