Tobacco Chokes Off Voice Of Critic
In the 1940s, the leaders of the Soviet Union bent science to fit the needs of communist ideology. The government silenced any scientist who said that there was truth in genetics. The only views that would guide agriculture in the Soviet Union would be those of Trofim D. Lysenko, who held that genetics set no limits on what farmers could do to get greater crop yields. That sounded good to totalitarians who wanted to engineer away social and political problems without regard to the limits set by human nature. By ending funding for all research on genetics and by touting Lysenko’s nutty theories as true, the communists brought on a famine in the 1950s that resulted in the deaths of millions.
Your government has a foot on a similar path.
Stanton Glantz is a thorn in the side of the tobacco industry. Financed by a three-year grant from the National Cancer Institute, Glantz has exposed the role played by lobbyists in manipulating state public health programs aimed at reducing smoking.
Earlier this year, Glantz and his colleagues at the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco debunked the cigarette companies’ preposterous claims that they did not know about the health dangers of smoking or that nicotine is addictive.
Dr. George Lundberg, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, calls Glantz one of the scientists who “has done the most important work on tobacco in this decade.”
As Glantz began to score points against the tobacco industry, a political campaign was started to shut him up. Articles and letters ran in various right-wing publications and newsletters asking why research unfavorable to personal freedom - the right to smoke! - was getting federal support.
The blather about individual rights worked. On July 27, the House Appropriations Committee, yielding to pressure from legislators from tobacco-industry states, opted to delete funding for Glantz’s research. There is actually a rider in the bill for next year’s $12 billion budget appropriation to the National Cancer Institute explicitly killing off Glantz’s $200,000 grant.
As the Soviet leadership did in the 1950s, members of Congress are trying to silence someone whose valid scientific findings do not suit their political tastes.
The campaign to silence Stanton Glantz has drawn almost no attention in the mainstream news media, but it should. Allowing Congress to flack for the tobacco companies by ordering grants terminated is political censorship.
If you think Congress ought to be able to recast science in ways more pleasing to its ideological taste, you might want to ask those who survived the Soviet Union’s agricultural holocaust if they think putting politicians in charge of what scientists can study and say is a good idea.
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Art Caplan King Features Syndicate