When anti-smoking Sen. Ortolan Finistirre (presumably D-VT) challenges tobacco industry public relations "hero" Nick Naylor, in the film Thank You for Smoking, about the need for a skull and crossbones warning on cigarette boxes, Naylor snipes back that if the senator's goal were really to protect the public health, he'd be trying to put the same warning on artery-clogging cheddar cheese. "The great state of Vermont will not apologize for its cheese!" shouts the indignant, self-righteous senator. It was one of many humorous and memorable lines in this enjoyable film version of the Christopher Buckley novel by the same name. And it's not so different from the public health community's broad anti-industry zealotry, which can obscure real public health problems.
Harm Reduction
One odd thing about the film Thank You for Smoking is the ironic omission of visible cigarette smoking. The ostensible hazards presented for consideration -- alcohol, firearms, cell phones, oil, and fatty foods -- subtly establish the film's risk-filled milieu, yet we never witness an actor smoke cigarettes.
Tony Soprano (of the HBO mega-series The Sopranos) is a mobster whose stock in trade is intimidation and murder. Nick Naylor, a character in the just-released movie Thank You For Smoking (based on Chris Buckley's 1994 novel), peddles the addictive killer, cigarettes. He blithely sells his product to any and all comers -- age is not a factor in his business. Indeed, in a key scene, Naylor asserted that he would buy his own son cigarettes at age eighteen, if the boy so chose.
Nick Naylor, master lobbyist for Big Tobacco in the just-released film Thank You For Smoking, is adept at making lemonade out of lemons. His creativity in twisting logic and reality is breathtaking -- but that may be the essence of the lobbyist's job.
Last night almost the entire ACSH staff trekked down to Times Square to see a preview of Thank You for Smoking, based on the Christopher Buckley novel (a very humorous one indeed) about Nick Naylor, the smokesman -- er, spokesman -- for the tobacco industry's pseudo-scientific research arm.
We all enjoyed it and laughed at the debates among the lobbyist characters over which of their industries killed more people -- cigarettes, alcohol, or guns. Clearly, as the tobacco rep argued, his industry won hands down. No debate there!
Skepticism is hard. As a recent best-selling book noted, doubletalk is a pervasive part of an attention-driven, media-dominated economy. But we can't just choose to doubt everything all the time, or we'd never be able to get out of bed in the morning for fear of the floorboards inexplicably collapsing. So we each come up with our little rubrics for deciding what to discount.
The very funny and intelligent movie Thank You for Smoking, out today, is (dare I say it) unquestionably a skeptical movie and one will that will encourage skepticism in its audience, but it's interesting that different people might take different rubrics away from it.
A January 4, 2006 column by Audrey Silk, head of NYC CLASH (Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment), not someone with whom ACSH usually sees eye to eye on smoking issues, quotes ACSH president Dr. Elizabeth Whelan and late ACSH Advisor Sir Richard Doll:
A Jan 3, 2006 article by Nick Schirripa about the difficulty of quitting cigarettes (for more, see ACSH's Kicking Butts in the Twenty-First Century) notes a statistic on quit rates gleaned from ACSH:
For many smokers, the arrival of the new year means one thing: It's time to quit smoking.
About 40% of smokers try to kick the habit each year, and it's no easy task.
According to the American Council on Science and Health, only about 5% succeed on their first try, and about half succeed after several attempts.
A December 28, 2005 article by Erin Kelly mentions a smoking-cessation statistic gleaned from ACSH:
Each year, about 40 percent of smokers try to quit. Of those, only about 5 percent succeed on their first try. About half succeed after several attempts, according to the American Council on Science and Health, a consortium of doctors, scientists and policy advisers.
A November 20, 2005 article by Chresten Anderson quotes an op-ed by Brad Rodu and ACSH's Jeff Stier, which made the point that it is specifically the tar from smoking that accounts for almost all tobacco-related health problems, not nicotine (which can be more safely acquired by chewing, for those who cannot beat nicotine altogether):
Thursday, November 17, 2005 is the Great American Smokeout -- but many not-so-great American doctors are neglecting to tell their patients to quit smoking.
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control released the latest statistics on smoking rates. The tone was generally self-congratulatory, and indeed, when matched against the marketing might of Big Tobacco, a decline in smoking from 21.6% in 2003 to last year's 20.9% is an accomplishment, even if some 44 million Americans remain smokers.
Stephen S. Hecht, Ph.D., co-director of the University of Minnesota s Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center, has issued the claim -- based on preliminary data he has yet to publish in a peer-reviewed journal -- that smokeless tobacco is worse than the standard nicotine replacement therapies as a smoking-cessation aid. His reason seems to be simply his (unsurprising) finding that use of smokeless tobacco leaves carcinogen traces in users' urine. But as ACSH has noted repeatedly, just because a substance is detected does not mean that it is necessarily present in very dangerous amounts.