An August 8, 2006 Boston Herald article noted a piece by ACSH's Todd Seavey chastising Melanie Griffith for letting her teenage daughter smoke:
Griffith, who married Don Johnson, the girl's father, at age nineteen (the first time), staked a place in Tinseltown with her barely legal portrayals of porn stars and prostitutes. But the American Council of Science and Health argues that by condoning underage smoking -- the legal age being eighteen -- the 48-year-old actress has taken her reckless reputation too far!
Harm Reduction
A July 13, 2006 column (reprinted on July 17) by Steve Chapman on the use of smokeless tobacco instead of cigarettes as a method of harm reduction concludes with a quote from ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross:
Beginning in the 1950s, people suffering from smoking-related diseases started suing cigarette companies.
That made sense. Those companies were found to be suppressing evidence cigarettes cause any number of health issues and trial lawyers were happy to take a cut for helping patients get compensation.
New York, NY -- July 2006. Foods are not cigarettes and should not be treated like them in the courts, according to a new publication by the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH).
A May 7, 2006 article on the website of the Pakistan News Service quotes ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross countering fears about smokers gaining weight when they quit:
Smokers who want to quit should not be deterred by this, said Dr. Gilbert L. Ross, medical director of the American Council on Science and Health in New York.
"The negative impact on lungs and lung function of weight gain by smokers who quit is way, way overshadowed by the negative impact of smoking on lung function as well as every other part of the body," Ross said.
A new report from Norway, published in Annals of Internal Medicine, presents stark new data on the lethal effects of cigarettes. The Norwegian scientists accumulated smoking and mortality data from almost 50,000 people over the course of twenty-five years -- the largest study ever to include women, who comprised half of the study subjects. The subjects were in the forty- to seventy-year age range.
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.
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.