Public Misled

A November 22, 2006 piece by S. Fred Singer in the Financial Post notes the author's ACSH Advisor status and his impatience with the misuse of science, even in a good cause:

I hate tobacco smoke and sit on the board of the anti-smoking American Council on Science and Health. But I don't tolerate the misuse of science, even by anti-smokers. So I gladly assented when, more than a decade ago, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute asked me to serve as a consultant for a couple of months to review and contribute to a report on misuse of science in environmental policies.

I soon discovered that in their anti-smoking zeal the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had cooked the data on second-hand tobacco smoke, claiming 3,000 lung cancer deaths a year. Specifically, I uncovered a report to the US Congress by the Congressional Research Service (CRS-95-1115) that documents how the EPA had "cherry-picked" the available evidence.