For the fact is that there is a deep conflict between what anti-smoking campaigners want to be true and what is true. This has fostered a strategy of deception and distortion. Such a strategy can succeed in the short run because of the peculiar circumstances of the tobacco market. Anti-smoking activists learned years ago that when they stretched the facts, those who corrected them were dismissed as industry hacks. This led to the amazing discovery that those who oppose smoking can wander far beyond the boundaries of good science (even in esteemed outlets such as the Journal of the American Medical Association) and still see their words accepted and amplified by an unquestioning media. Naturally, anti-smoking campaigners have seized this opportunity, introducing numerous absurdities into the everyday thinking of scholars, regulatory officials, journalists, and politicians. Thus we have been told that cigarettes are the most advertised product in America (wrong by more than an order of magnitude), that research has finally nailed down the connection between marketing and smoking by kids, and that secret industry documents show that the problem all along has been the targeting of youth. Such misinformation is routinely accepted and repeated as if it were the truth.
Here is a concrete example. One of the most often cited JAMA studies—in fact, the only non-governmental study the FDA cited in its regulatory initiative that actually used market data rather than surveys and the like—claimed to demonstrate that advertising in the late 1970s for the first women’s brands caused a surge in smoking by teenage girls. The authors used sales data (not advertising data), took their figures from an unpublished student paper, dropped the three of six brands that did not fit their thesis, mistook billions of cigarettes sold for billions of dollars worth of cigarettes sold (a forty-fold error), and concluded to much acclaim that massive advertising had fundamentally altered the market. This utterly useless study is repeatedly cited as proof that advertising causes teen smoking. This kind of thing would not happen in an ordinary intellectual environment.
