Tobacco.org

• VCU worried about research for big tobacco 

Faculty and students told a Virginia Commonwealth University panel that they're concerned about the moral and ethical implications of entering research agreements with tobacco giant Philip Morris USA and other corporations.

Wednesday's meeting was the final one held by the task force, formed in the wake of a controversy over a consulting contract between VCU and Richmond-based Philip Morris USA.

The group is expected to consider whether to refuse research funding from tobacco companies, as several other schools have, and will issue its recommendations to VCU President Eugene P. Trani by Oct. 1.

A number of speakers told the task force that the university should rethink whether its researchers should sign "work-for-hire" agreements with Richmond-based Philip Morris, a unit of Altria Group Inc. The forum was open only to faculty, staff and students.

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UHRICH: Smoke and mirrors 

At least we're safe, or so I reasoned after seeing a Homeland Security police cruiser parked in a red zone last week in front of a neighborhood tobacco retailer.

Inside the usually bustling smoke shop at around lunchtime sat two uniformed officers -- a man and a woman, the man delicately fondling a fat stogie that he was puffing on as his partner just sat there quietly, looking around the shop.

It was all very convenient and cozy. . . .

Then the flipside of all that hit me: If they were on the clock, what the hell were they doing in a smoke shop puffing on cigars?

With that, I decided to check out what was going on and walked into the cigar shop to say hi and introduce myself.

“Is that your car?” I said to the officer twirling the cigar between his moistened lips.

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• Tobacco industry preaching 'responsibility' 

In an interesting development that took place this week in a nice and cozy hotel located in the famous tourist resort of Nathiagali, a leading tobacco industry spent hundreds of thousands of rupees to organise a one-day workshop on 'Responsible Journalism.'

Around 20 journalists were taken to Nathiagali on the expenses of the tobacco industry to learn the A, B, C of 'responsible' journalism and the impact that irresponsible reporting can have on people reading or watching their scripts.

Taking note of the development, Khurram Hashmi, coordinator of the Society for Alternate Media and Research (Samar) as well as Coalition for Tobacco Control, told 'The News' that his organisation will register its regret to the Ministry of Health and the World Health Organisation (WHO) against the tobacco industry openly engaging with mediapersons. . . .

The tobacco industry also distributed attractively designed booklets about how hard it is trying to save the crippling economy of the country by contributing millions and millions of dollars as taxes. Interestingly, none of the booklets contains any mention of the millions and millions of dollars the government requires to provide treatment to patients suffering from diseases induced by tobacco use.

This new move by the ever-intelligent managers of the tobacco industry has come almost a month after the Ministry of Health and WHO facilitated the establishment of the Journalists' Health Forum . . .

'The News' has learnt that some of the tobacco industries operating in NWFP and parts of Kashmir have openly started violating the anti-tobacco law by issuing banned advertisements to various media outfits.

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• VCU-Philip Morris Agreement Researched  

Although the NYT has not printed a correction, clarification, editor’s note, retraction, or any other indication that the veracity of Mr. Finder's reporting has been called into question, they did offer, rightly, the opportunity for VCU to respond in the form of a letter to the editor from President Trani. This letter, although more thoughtfully articulated than his prior memo, continues to downplay the real problems of any university engaging in research service agreements and the even greater ethical problems with this particular research service agreement, setting aside the sponsor for now.

As part of my commentary on this, I disclose that I have been sent a copy of the agreement obtained by a third party through a Va FOIA request (details and downloadable PDF below) and will quote verbatim a few critical points omitted by Trani in his letter and overall response to this story.

For example, secrecy (from the agreement itself):

”19. Neither party shall, without the prior written approval of the other party, (i) advertise or otherwise publicize in a written manner the existence or terms of this AGREEMENT or any TASK ORDER or any other aspect of the relationship between SPONSOR and VCU … If at any time a third party, including without limitation any news organization, contacts VCU concerning SPONSOR, VCU shall make no comment and shall notify promptly SPONSOR of the third party.”

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No Need for Research of Nicotine in Pregnancy?  

This week, a Richmond paper reports on a VCU proposal for a Center for Healthy Pregnancy and Neonatal Outcomes submitted in May or June to Philip Morris (despite repeated initial denials by the University) for up to $30M in funding. . . .

the reporter’s focus was rightfully whether an academic health center should even be soliciting funds from the tobacco industry for a purely public health project to stop the harmful effects of smoking during pregnancy. At least one outside expert felt unsettled as well:

“No reputable organization will accept money from the tobacco industry in the public-health sector, and none will solicit it,” says John F. Banzhaf III, a professor of public interest law at George Washington University, and a tobacco industry opponent for more than 40 years. Banzhaf is particularly concerned that Strauss’s proposal went looking for the money: “Solicitation is very unusual.”

Indeed, even a local business writer and VCU booster in Richmond had concerns with this aspect of the proposal and the manner in which the University handled the request and then the denials of making such a request.

There also remain all those statements that seem rather dismissive of the research process made by Strauss, who is an established physician scientist serving as Dean of the VCU School of Medicine (and by default the “emerging” VCU School of Public Health), which received $56.5M from the NIH in 2007; as Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs for the VCU Health System; and, astonishingly, as PI on:

* one P60 Comprehensive Center Grant (P60MD002256-02), . . .

Notably, despite his passionate stance that it would be “immoral not to” use tobacco funds for this “noble and unimpeachable” cause, Strauss’s own sponsored programs are bench science, not clinical or public health in design. Nor, given the level of funding requested, does he appear sufficiently noble to donate his time to this “urgent public health service.” Nor, surprisingly, has he seemed to have considered simply asking GlaxoSmithKline to donate the nicotine replacement products (versus asking Philip Morris for cash with which to purchase them).

Then again, his stated lack of desire to publish this work –

“His goal with the pregnancy center is not to study the effects of nicotine replacement therapy on pregnant women and publish the results, he says”

– could finally explain why VCU so willingly gives Philip Morris the right to control publication of research conducted under their previously secret agreement uncovered by the NYT last May. (see also this explanation of how Philip Morris finagled this and the IP giveaway plus a downloadable copy of the actual agreement, which remains fully in effect) . . .

Next Town Hall Meeting to discuss the relationship between VCU and Philip Morris (including Dr. Strauss's center proposal) will be held Wednesday, September 3 from 4-6 p.m. in the Student Commons Theatre

September 3 Town Hall Meeting Participant Handout (to submit written comments anonymously)

September 3 Town Hall Meeting Agenda

This has not been announced on the VCU Calendar as of today (8/25), despite having been scheduled in July. Please spread the word since VCU does not intend to.

More details on the Town Hall Meeting and the Task Force itself are available, as is a detailed review of the terms of the master research services agreement currently in effect between VCU and Philip Morris (uncovered by the NYT in May 2008).

Sign the petition expressing concern about the relationship between VCU AND Philip Morris USA

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An emperor has lost his invincibility  

As college presidents go, Eugene Trani made an outstanding mayor.

Trani, who announced Thursday that he's stepping down as president of Virginia Commonwealth University in July, was the rarest of local commodities -- a true visionary.

Not sharing that vision could be hazardous to your professional health if you were his subordinate. And if you lived in an adjacent neighborhood, Tranivision could be seen as a steamroller intent on pancaking preservation in the name of progress.

Trani, 68, is an empire builder. . . .

Any mayor with Trani's body of work -- from the Monroe Park campus to the medical center to the biotechnology research park to VCU's global outreach -- would probably puff up with pride and say the only way to go from here is governor. . . .

Trani has long had detractors among the VCU academic family. But the discontent spilled outside the university community and onto the pages of The New York Times, which wrote unflatteringly about VCU's research relationship with tobacco king Philip Morris USA.

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• Tobacco firms kept quiet on polonium role in cigarettes  

Some of the world's biggest tobacco firms researched the lethal radioactive substance polonium - present in cigarettes - over a 40-year period but never published the results, according to a new scientific article.

Experts have examined more than 1,500 internal documents from tobacco companies.

Polonium 210 is known to cause lung cancers in animals and studies suggest it is responsible for 1 per cent of all lung cancers - equivalent to 11,700 deaths globally - each year in the US.

It is also the substance that poisoned the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.

Yet tobacco companies, while attempting but failing to remove the substance from their products, have kept quiet about their research, experts say.

One of the documents - all of which were made public through legal actions - said publication would be "waking a sleeping giant". The authors of the article, published in the September edition of American Journal of Public Health, also say tobacco companies feared possible litigation.

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The World Health Organisation is trying to determine which constituents of tobacco smoke are most important in diseases including lung cancer, but as yet have not concluded polonium 210 is a priority constituent.
Unidentified spokeswoman for British American Tobacco.

[Publication of the tobacco industry's polonium 210 research] has the potential to wake a sleeping giant.
Unidentified 1978 tobacco industry internal document.

Your Money - Socially Responsible, With Egg on Its Face  

When the news broke late last month, it read almost like satire. The Securities and Exchange Commission had charged a mutual fund company that specialized in socially responsible investments with taking stakes in companies involved with alcohol, gambling and military contracting.

But it is a true story, and it’s the first time the S.E.C. has encountered this problem. Pax World, one of the oldest practitioners in the field of socially responsible investing, paid a $500,000 penalty. . . .

In the first half of the decade, Pax World had strict rules about what its mutual funds could not invest in, though they've since become a bit looser. The list of taboos included companies engaged in military activities, ones that derived more than 5 percent of gross sales from Defense Department contracts, and businesses that made money from liquor, tobacco or gambling. "The Funds' policy is to invest in securities of companies producing goods and services that improve the quality of life," its materials stated at the time.

The restrictions are known in the field as negative screens. When the S.E.C. showed up in late 2003 and 2004 to conduct a routine examination, it checked to see if Pax World was complying with the screens that it had outlined in its fund prospectuses. The examiners didn't like what they found, and they referred the matter to the S.E.C.'s enforcement staff.

Here's what the enforcement staff discovered later: 10 securities in 2 mutual funds -- the Pax World Growth Fund and its High Yield Fund -- violated Pax World's various negative screens. The fund managers had bought 6 of those securities even though Pax World had already screened the companies and placed them on the banned list.

The other four ended up in the portfolios without anyone screening them first, violating the fund's own rule that it had to review any securities that its managers wanted to purchase.

In an interview, Pax World's president and chief executive, Joseph F. Keefe, who joined the company after the transgressions occurred, seemed as surprised as anyone that Pax World employees didn't follow the rules. . . .

If you believe that sustainable investing is at least better than throwing up your hands and bringing no principles to your portfolio, an exchange-traded fund called the iShares KLD Select Social Index Fund is worth a look. While it does screen out tobacco firms, the rest of the index is composed of best-of-breed companies in other industries, based on seven criteria, including corporate governance and environmental standards.

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WASHBURN: Lack of ethics in business harms companies, individuals  

When the $1.15-billion fine against Imperial Tobacco and Rothmans' Benson & Hedges was announced last week, it was a paltry sum compared to the companies' actions. . . .

Socrates said, "Vice harms the doer." Even if no one ever finds out and we can get away with doing something wrong, the act hurts us more than it hurts the victims.

But in a cynical world, Socrates appears to be talking into the wind. No one pays attention to this kind of thinking any more. Since Gordon Gekko announced in the filmWall Street,"Greed is good. Greed works," a generation of MBA students has felt it had a license to do whatever it takes to make money.

And, this is the heart of the problem. When people lose trust in business, business loses even more. Business loses when we think every time a corporation sends out a press release, it is full of lies. . . .

Businesses need to take this issue of trust more seriously. It is true; one bad apple spoils the barrel. Not only does it undermine the fundamental economics of the 21st century, but it also deepens the pervasive cynicism, which is a trademark of our times. This distrust spreads like a cancer through all aspects of our lives.

If there is a way out, it will not be legislated. Morals cannot be successfully turned into laws. It is only the actions of individuals of conscience that will make this change possible. It is going to take a massive change of heart. Sadly, it is hard to see how that will happen.

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ROBERT FLEURY : les grands contrebandiers [The Great Smugglers] 

It is happy that our governments send the good message: no one cannot be above the law, not even of manufacturing large companies. However, there N ’ is nothing amusing to think qu ’ they contributed certainly to develop the market of the smuggling of cigarettes.

Worse, they fed from the criminal organizations whose activities thus became more flourishing. . . .

For Quebec, these compensations of 210 million $ are a mean consolation. It had failed to recover tax losses of 440 million $ on behalf of JTI-MacDonald — on a total complaint of 1,4 billion $ —, the company S ’ being placed under the protection of the Law on arrangements with the creditors! Its leaders make however vis-a-vis criminal charges!

We recall which was the social context in 1989. . . .

It is at the very least shocking to carry out that the shareholders S ’ draw some on also good account. Aren't they those which it crime benefitted? Indeed, the value of their actions N ’ did not cease D ’ increasing these last years …

Thus, Philip Morris awaited the conclusion of the charges which hung on RBH to offer D ’ to buy remaining actions qu ’ it did not have yet (60%) by making an offer higher than the market of 16,9%. . . .

One can also S ’ question on the part played by certain persons in charge D ’ Imperial Tobacco and of RBH.

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• Blacks in Congress Split Over Menthol Cigarettes  

Free cigarettes are no longer handed out at Congressional Black Caucus functions. And it has been years since anyone referred to Edolphus Towns, Democrat of Brooklyn, as the “Marlboro Man” for his campaign contributions from the tobacco industry.

But the Congressional Black Caucus has not severed its financial ties to big tobacco. And that can complicate matters when the political discussion involves smoking's impact on African-Americans.

A rift has opened in the 43-member caucus over a menthol provision in legislation that would enable the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco. To reduce smoking's appeal to teenagers, the legislation would outlaw flavored cigarettes -- except for menthol cigarettes, which are specifically exempted. . . .

But the caucus's chairwoman, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, says the group's members, all Democrats, are deeply divided on the subject. "The caucus is split," she said. "We do want to see menthol regulated, but we're convinced that eliminating or prohibiting menthol would be a killer for the bill."

The legislation in its current form, with the menthol exemption in place, has broad support in the House. It also has the backing of many health groups, as well as the nation's biggest cigarette company, Philip Morris USA, whose support is considered crucial for passage. The company makes Marlboro Menthol, the second-biggest menthol brand.

Philip Morris over the years has been one of the biggest contributors to the caucus's nonprofit Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. That financial support, in some years exceeding $250,000, and lesser amounts at times from other cigarette makers, has been the reason some critics perceived an alliance between big tobacco and African-American members of Congress . . .

Some caucus members have always seen tobacco money as a Faustian bargain and refused to take such donations, urging their colleagues to do likewise. One of them, John Lewis of Georgia, once told a reporter, "People are reluctant to criticize the giver, to bite the hand that feeds them."

Black lawmakers who maintain strong tobacco industry ties include James E. Clyburn

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• Doctors Under the Influence? 

In April, four experts on smoking cessation published a paper espousing an unconventional plan for helping hard-core nicotine addicts quit. They proposed treating smokers as if they have a chronic disease akin to diabetes. Such patients should take prescription drugs for years to curb tobacco cravings, the researchers advised.

The article, published in the prestigious Annals of Internal Medicine, might have slipped quietly into the vast body of antismoking literature were it not for its two closing paragraphs. There, authors Dr. Michael B. Steinberg and Dr. Jonathan Foulds disclosed that they are paid by manufacturers of smoking-cessation products for speaking and consulting. Among those companies is Pfizer (PFE), whose controversial drug Chantix the researchers mentioned favorably, along with other treatments. Use of Chantix has led to reports of suicidal thoughts and other psychiatric symptoms. . . .

"There's an advantage to the drug companies selling their products to smokers for a lifetime rather than for six weeks," says Adriane J. Fugh-Berman, a Georgetown University scholar who co-wrote a scathing online attack on the paper for The Hastings Center, a health-ethics research group in Garrison, N.Y. "Medicine can be a useful adjunct to quitting [cigarettes], but the goal should be quitting," she says. . . .

But they don't routinely reveal their Pfizer pay to hundreds of patients they've steered to Chantix. That has thrust Steinberg and Foulds into the middle of a raging debate about proselytizing by medical researchers and how corporate relationships should be disclosed to patients.

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MICHAELS: It's Not the Answers That Are Biased, It's the Questions  

Wal-Mart and Toys R Us announced this spring that they will stop selling plastic baby bottles, food containers and other products that contain a chemical that can leach into foods and beverages. Even low doses of the chemical (bisphenol A, or BPA) are linked to prostate and mammary-gland changes in laboratory animals that were exposed as fetuses and infants. The big retailers are responding to the fears of parents, and Congress is considering measures to ban the chemical.

But is there enough evidence of harmful health effects on humans? One of the eyebrow-raising statistics about the BPA studies is the stark divergence in results, depending on who funded them. More than 90 percent of the 100-plus government-funded studies performed by independent scientists found health effects from low doses of BPA, while none of the fewer than two dozen chemical-industry-funded studies did. . . .

Who is surprised to learn that the funding effect is particularly strong in studies that look at the health effects of secondhand smoke and are sponsored by the tobacco industry? The cigarette manufacturers had initiated a special program to fund, publish and promote studies that found secondhand smoke harmless. When researchers at the University of California examined 106 review articles on this topic in the scientific literature, they found more than a third concluded that secondhand smoke was not harmful. Three-quarters of these dissenting reviews had authors who were affiliated with the tobacco industry. . .

It has become clear to medical editors that the problem is in the funding itself. As long as sponsors of a study have a stake in the conclusions, these conclusions are inevitably suspect, no matter how distinguished the scientist.

The answer is de-linking sponsorship and research. One model is the Health Effects Institute, a research group set up by the Environmental Protection Agency and manufacturers.

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• OGUZU: Tobacco firms should be socially responsible 

I wish to draw attention to the damage tobacco growing has caused to the environment in West Nile, the North, Bunyoro and south-western Uganda.

Several acres of woodland have been felled for flue-cured tobacco production in Maracha, Arua, Koboko, Yumbe, Hoima, and Masindi districts. Forests that would otherwise have filtered carbon emissions and protected arable land from erosion are removed, and temperatures in the tobacco-growing districts are rising.

Firms like British American Tobacco, Leaf Tobacco and Commodity, as well as Continental, in their fallacy, give eucalyptus seedlings to farmers supposedly to replace chopped forests without considering the long maturity period and its impact on the water table.

The tobacco firms do not plough back their high profits yet they hype their cosmetic social responsibility programmes. . . .

The negative impact of tobacco growing includes the accumulation of chemical compounds in soils and declining fertility. Tobacco production negatively affects people's health. The effects include nicotine poisoning, pesticide exposure, respiratory effects, musculoskeletal and other injuries.

The Government should assist tobacco growers in West Nile to produce alternative crops that thrive well there without fertilisers or pesticides. The sh48b the Government gets in tax revenues from tobacco exports and products should not shroud the negative effects on tobacco on the population.

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David Ignatius - Reining In the Kings of Tort 

In the novels of John Grisham and the real-life exploits of consumer advocates such as Ralph Nader, the plaintiff's lawyers are the good guys -- populist heroes who battle the avarice of corporate America. But that folkloric image has been battered by two recent cases that show how the plaintiffs' bar itself has been vulnerable to the greed and lawlessness it seeks to combat.

The cases involve two of the country's most prominent class-action lawyers, Melvyn Weiss and Dickie Scruggs. . . .

Nobody who remembers the primitive auto-safety standards before Nader, or the arrogant power of the tobacco companies, would want a system in which consumers couldn't challenge corporate wrongdoing. But the convictions of Weiss and Scruggs, two "kings of torts," tell us that something is seriously wrong in the plaintiffs' bar. It would be nice if the class-action lawyers reformed themselves, but if not, someone should file a lawsuit.

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