Perjury & alphabet soup

[Vocalek]

In today's "AskMarilyn" column, Marilyn vos Savant defines what is meant by the oath that witnesses are asked to swear in court.

She says

In court, these truths are stated explicitly so people cannot escape the consequences of lying.

When you promise to tell “the truth,” you must not lie in response to a question.

Telling “the whole truth” goes further. You must not state the truth so narrowly that the effect is a lie. Say that your mother asks you if you kicked your brother, and you reply, “I didn’t touch him.” That may be true because it was your shoe—not your bare toe—that contacted his shin. But the effect is a lie.

Telling “nothing but the truth” covers still more territory. For instance, if you answer a question with the truth, then add a lie, you haven’t told “nothing but the truth.”

None of this will stop dishonest people, but it does give us ammunition to charge them with perjury.

Sunday's Column May 30, 2010 | Parade.com

I have to wonder how cleverly FDA lawyers have structured their paperwork. If Plaintiff's attorneys could find even one instance where an affidavit, sworn to by an FDA employee, fell into the category of failing to tell the whole truth (which is what FDA and the other alphabet soup organzations are so very good at), perjury charges could be brought against that employee.

There's no law against FDA employees lying in a press release or a report. It's only against the law to lie to the police (in some jurisdictions) and to lie to a court (in every jurisdiction.)

So did an FDA employee swear in an affidavit, "they contain carcinogens and toxic chemicals" without bothering to add that the quantities were miniscule, well below the level where they would present a danger to health, making electronic cigarettes thousands of times less dangerous than tobacco smoking?

Whether a lie is a straight statement of untruth or one of the other two types, lies can be dangerous. Lies can kill.

In Relentless, Dean Koontz has one of his characters make this statement:

"The innocent die, the wicked prosper. With a cunning ability to invert the truth, evil men claim to be noble, and people abandon reason, bow down to them, and accept all kinds of slavery."

How many lives have been lost since 1986 when the government began adding "not a safe substitute for smoking cigarettes" to smokeless tobacco products? Actually, I can tell you the numbers. If in 1986 all 55.8 million smokers had switched to smokeless, there would have been zero tobacco-related deaths from lung disease and cardiovascular disease. The rates of cancer would have plummeted so that only 0.078% would have died (from oral cancers) rather than the 0.8% of smokers - 43,524 per year instead of 400,000 per year. So an excess of 356,476 deaths per year times 24 years equals 8,555,424.

That's a lot of dead bodies.

 

[Thulium]

How many lives have been lost since 1986 when the government began adding "not a safe substitute for smoking cigarettes" to smokeless tobacco products? Actually, I can tell you the numbers. If in 1986 all 55.8 million smokers had switched to smokeless, there would have been zero tobacco-related deaths from lung disease and cardiovascular disease. The rates of cancer would have plummeted so that only 0.078% would have died (from oral cancers) rather than the 0.8% of smokers - 43,524 per year instead of 400,000 per year. So an excess of 356,476 deaths per year times 24 years equals 8,555,424.

That's a lot of dead bodies.

Elaine, I think your math is incorrect, but I can't check it because I don't know your sources. Where did you get the .078% and .8% mortality rates? Is that per year or over the course of a lifetime?

 

[chrisl317]

I'm from just outside of Detroit, we here know all about perjury

The FDA gives half truths and we all know lawyers have their own version of Webster's dictionary. That's how we got more than one definition of "is".

 

[cliff5550]

You Michigan folks ain't got nothin'. We have a whole bunch of Illinois politicians here. So ha!

 

[Vocalek]

Elaine, I think your math is incorrect, but I can't check it because I don't know your sources. Where did you get the .078% and .8% mortality rates? Is that per year or over the course of a lifetime?

Per year. I found a chart -- and I am scrambling to relocate it -- that showed that of all the 417,000 annual deaths due to tobacco-related diseases, smokeless tobacco was responsible for only 6,000 per year (from oral cancer) as opposed to 411,000 from lung diseases, cardiovacsular diseases, and all types of cancer attributable to smoking. (The oral cancer deaths attributable to smoking was 11,500).

I arbitrarily reduced the total for smoking deaths to 400,000 and divided it by 46 Million to come up with 0.00869. I looked up the number of smokeless tobacco users and found the number was 7.6 million. Dividing 6,000 by 7.3 million gave me 0.0007894.

I applied the two factors to the 55.8 million smokers in 1985, completel ignoring the fact that there were probably a bunch of smokeless users already in the population. But the point is the number of lives saved if all the smokers converted.

I think my numbers may actually be conservative, if the 417,000 was correct in the first place. Who knows with the way the government fudges numbers. I found a document on the CDC site that stated: "An estimated 315,120 deaths and 949,924 YPLL before age 65 years resulted from cigarette smoking in 1984." Perspectives in Disease Prevention and Health Promotion Smoking- Attributable Mortality and Years of Potential Life Lost -- United States, 1984

By 1999, CDC was estimating that the annual death rate for the years between 1995 and 1999 was 404,452 if you back out the ones they attributed to second hand smoke. Those of course would be gone if the smokers had switched to smokeless.
Annual Smoking-Attributable Mortality, Years of Potential Life Lost, and Economic Costs --- United States, 1995--1999

These are the adult smoking prevalence rates for those years (millions):
1995 47
1996 47
1997 47.1
1998 47.2
1999 46.5

The numbers CDC gives for 2000-2004 add up to 443,595, from which we need to deduct those attributed to second-hand smoke: 49,400 for a rate of 394,195 directly attributed to smoking.

Here are the prevalence rates for those years:
2000 46.5
2001 46.2
2002 45.8
2003 45.4
2004 44.5

Doesn't it seem strange that the number of smokers went down but the number of deaths attributed to smoking went up?

During 2000--2004, an estimated 443,000 persons in the United States died prematurely each year as a result of smoking or exposure to secondhand smoke. This figure is higher than the average annual estimate of approximately 438,000 deaths during 1997--2001 (2). The number of smoking-attributable deaths varies according to trends in smoking prevalence and the number of deaths from diseases caused by smoking. SAM estimates also change when a causal relationship is established between smoking and a disease not previously included in SAMMEC (1). Although smoking prevalence has declined dramatically since its peak in the 1960s, the number of smoking-attributable deaths has remained relatively unchanged, primarily because of increases in population size (particularly among older age groups). Even with declines in the rates of various smoking-related diseases (e.g., coronary heart disease), the absolute number of deaths is increasing as the total population increases. In addition, cohorts of smokers with the highest peak prevalence have now reached the ages with the highest incidence of smoking-attributable diseases.

Smoking-Attributable Mortality, Years of Potential Life Lost, and Productivity Losses --- United States, 2000--2004

Does the CDC's explanation make sense to anyone? The total population number should have nothing to with it.

I'm thinking that I found the chart with the 417,000 number in one of two blogs: Siegel's or Rodu's. Anybody else have a clue?

So let's be very conservative and take the lower death rate of 315,120 from 1984. We still need to calculate how many would have died from oral cancer, so I will stick with the factor of 0.0007894 * 55.8M smokers that gave me the smokeless death rate of 43,524. That's 271,596 deaths that could have been averted -- per year. Times 24 years equals 6,518,304. Still a very large city worth of people.

That is, of course, making the totally bogus assumption that every smoker would have switched in 1986 and that over the years none of the smokeless users quit using smokeless.

Still, if the truth had been told and a significant number of smokers had made the switch, the lives that could have been saved number in the millions.

 

[Vocalek]

Found it! It's from 1995.

Point | Counterpoint: Would a Switch from Cigarettes to Smokeless Tobacco Benefit Public Health? > Health Issues > ACSH

It was Brad Rodu and Phillip Cole, writing a Point/Counterpoint on the ACSH web site.

 

[chrisl317]

You Michigan folks ain't got nothin'. We have a whole bunch of Illinois politicians here. So ha!

Kwame Kilpatrick

 

[Thulium]

Looking at these numbers it becomes clear why compative safety numbers get confusing, that much is certain. It was confusing me until I found the key line:

In Table 1 we compare directly the annual mortality of 46 million smokers and an equal number of smokeless tobacco users

The 6000 deaths from smokeless use is not the actual number of deaths, it is the EXTRAPOLATED number if 46 million people were using smokeless, so it looks like the annual mortality rate for smokeless users is more like .013% compared to .91% for smokers.

As you pointed out, this information has been available to the FDA for at least 15 years, but according to the THR yearbook, in 2005 the reporting method for smokeless users was changed so that there is no distinction between types of smokeless products.

 

[chrisl317]

I was typing something but, it didn't sound right. This is going to sound paranoid and conspiracy - ish, but, what's with the whole , we all have to be healthy, skinny and stupid agenda? I mean I'm starting to empathize with a cow here.

 

[Vocalek]

Looking at these numbers it becomes clear why compative safety numbers get confusing, that much is certain. It was confusing me until I found the key line:

The 6000 deaths from smokeless use is not the actual number of deaths, it is the EXTRAPOLATED number if 46 million people were using smokeless, so it looks like the annual mortality rate for smokeless users is more like .013% compared to .91% for smokers.

As you pointed out, this information has been available to the FDA for at least 15 years, but according to the THR yearbook, in 2005 the reporting method for smokeless users was changed so that there is no distinction between types of smokeless products.

Wow! Good catch, Thad. I missed that. So that makes the number of potentially avoidable deaths much greater.

Just going by their chart, 419,000 smoking deaths, less 6,000 smokeless deaths gives us 413,000 potentially saved lives -- annually. If we just look at the last 15 years (the article was published in 1995), that's over 6 million lives.

But the anti-harm reduction folks just can't grasp how their stance is equivalent to puttng a bullet in the head of millions of smokers.

They. Do. Not. Get. It.

 

[Thulium]

Wow! Good catch, Thad. I missed that. So that makes the number of potentially avoidable deaths much greater.

Just going by their chart, 419,000 smoking deaths, less 6,000 smokeless deaths gives us 413,000 potentially saved lives -- annually. If we just look at the last 15 years (the article was published in 1995), that's over 6 million lives.

But the anti-harm reduction folks just can't grasp how their stance is equivalent to puttng a bullet in the head of millions of smokers.

They. Do. Not. Get. It.

It gets worse. As of 2005, the CDC stopped reporting the number of people using the old style chewing tobacco that has been linked to a slight increase in the risk of mouth cancers (accounting for the 6000 estimated deaths) separately from the newer products like snus where the nitrosamine levels have been reduced to levels not suspected to be carcinogenic. In other words, if all smokers switched to reduced risk smoke-free alternatives like snus and electronic cigarettes, the mortality rate would likely be indistinguishable from quitting completely.

I want to put a label on Big Pharma NRT and cessation products that says: "WARNING: Quitting smoking is 'not a safe alternative' to smoke-free tobacco products."

 

[rothenbj]

Wow! Good catch, Thad. I missed that. So that makes the number of potentially avoidable deaths much greater.

Just going by their chart, 419,000 smoking deaths, less 6,000 smokeless deaths gives us 413,000 potentially saved lives -- annually. If we just look at the last 15 years (the article was published in 1995), that's over 6 million lives.

But the anti-harm reduction folks just can't grasp how their stance is equivalent to puttng a bullet in the head of millions of smokers.

They. Do. Not. Get. It.

Elaine, I think they DO GET IT! That's where the problem lies. Why in 2005 did they stop separating smokers and smokeless? When did anti-smoking become anti-tobacco?

Really what value are retired people to the economy? We are not an asset, we are a liability. We are collecting, not contributing. We only become an asset one more time, and the earlier that happens, the better on the income statement.

I don't like to be cynical, but the gubberment bean counters certainly know this.

 

[D103]

That's absolutely correct rothenbj and that is why I feel very strongly that somehow we need to get this debate out in public....very public....we need to force the issue and after clearly demonstrating the potential savings to every U.S. citizen through reduced healthcare costs, etc. etc....their only argument against that is to publicly state the loss in revenues, both state and federal, from greatly decreased tobacco tax revenues, many more smokers living longer and thus, as you mentioned, collecting on medicare, medicaid and social security. We need to force someone to publicly admit to this or at the very least make it so d**n obvious that the public has to actually look at it and realize that much of what they enjoy in terms of good roads, police and fire, public entertainment, etc. typically comes, in part, on the backs of cigarette smokers through grossly dispoportionate and exhorbitant tax revenues and while they may be tempted to callously say "...well no one is making you smoke...you can quit..." they must then look at the systematic private and governmental efforts to withold from us the very technology which has thus far allowed many of to do just that. The public needs to SEE
the truth and that is 'they' - state and federal governments, BT and BP and the alphabet suits (and the public needs to understand their complicity in this) really don't want us to quit...they are quite simply and unconscionably unwilling to relinquish the money. No health concerns, no environmental concerns, no "precious children" ...just money.