Weapon. I dont buy that. I think it is lazy, sloppy and i think it is time that our diplomats and i am from britain and europe and nato are just as guilty, much, much smarter way of dealing with this and using the leverage we have from the financial programs to get better results visit booktv. Org to watch any of the programs you see here. Type the author or book title in the top in search. And you can share things easy by clicking share and selecting the format. Next, john staddon says cigarette smokers are being unfairly targeted by the government and argues smoking isnt as risky as many people believe and also says the data on Secondhand Smoke isnt reliable. And he said taxing smokers for being a burden on the Health Care System is unjustified. This is about 50 minutes. Welcome, everyone. I am cory swanson. Executive Vice President of the john locke foundation. I wish to extend a warm welcome to our cspan audience. It is pleasure to have you. Uled i would like to ask you to put your cellphone on silence or turn it off. Today our talk is from john staddon from Duke University. He is no stranger here and he has been a friend of ours for well over two decades. John it is rumored when he was starting to talk that his first sentence was i am and forever an iconic clast. As a scientist, john is known for research on interval timing, behavioral economics in rats, pigeon, fish and human beings. He is known for his critiques of behaviorism and a proposal of new behavioralism. He has written against affirmivie action. A prime example of his driving habits issues is the fourway stop that causes more accidents than we thing. He was written on the function and malfunction of markets. In his recent book his conclusion is that regulations are not effective. Today john proceeds the politics and science and law of the Tobacco Industry in his new book unlucky strike. John will tell us about things that go on in the Scientific Research and why he says smokers have been given a very bad wrap. Without further ado, dr. John staddon. [ applause ] well, thank you, cory for that very find introduction. I suppose i never would think of myself as a controversialist but i was made aware that i must be because i did see a critique of this book in something called the Huffington Post which was an article that seemed to misunderstand ever point i made. I recommend if you dont want to read the book, take a look at that. This little slide is just to get it started and remind you of the theme of the talk and the theme is indicated by this red arrow that goes from the way research is actually done which is to say what you will find in the public press is 7080 of the reports are of correlations between something under a certain set of conditions and something else. And then within a nano second those correlations become causes and everywhere you will read things like eating junk food fast food causes premature birth which is a recent one i ran into. These are all correlations and most of the research, not entirely all, but almost all of the research on smoking is correlation. Okay. This little slide is to show you some failures caused by smoking. People whose career paths were cut short because of their smoking habit. And this other slide is to illustrate that 50 years ago smoking was regarded as a matter of politness. This is a wonderful old film called i am all right jack and here is terry thomas offering the communist cigarettes and neither side objected at that time. Okay. Lets get on to the topic of the talk. Some of you recognize this gentlemen as james buck duke the founder of Duke University on the backs of smokers, of course and you see he is not smoking a cigarette which is what he made but rather a cigar. And as i say we all know western civilization comes to an end when that cigar is secretly removed from that statute. This is a quote to remind us this country was saved from possible failure in 1614 at james town when somebody stole tobacco seeds and this new crop was found and it shows how the industry expanded in 1614 there is ten tons exported and five years up to 750. So the Tobacco Industry was a huge driver of the United States of america in its early days. What i want to do in the rest of this talk is go through all of the things we know or think we know about smoking and address the issue of the evidence. How good is the evidence for these things. And the last part i say a few words about something called the Tobacco Settlement agreement which is a legal masterwork of extorti extortion. Here are the things we know. It is legal and dangerous to others, it is unpleasant, costly to society and even sinful. Lets look one by one. Here is a typical comment you see from political leaders. They know they are killing themselves says michael bloomberg, mayor of new york. And here is what official statements say about smoking. I will read this smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, and cancer in the mouth lips throat bladder kidney and cervix. Half of all smokers will by prematurely. It is seen to be called copd, asthma in strokes. It is harmful to children causi causing sids and other diseases. This was written in july 2005. These are echoed by over conclusive report. And the warnings on the cigarette packets, which dont have pictures of dreadful diseases on them. If you cannot read galic at the top the one i particularly like is this one. Which i am sure it putathizes puts the fear of god into college males. Smoking pay cause impotence. The greatest generation were smok smokers, right . And they were the baby boom. And yet the parents were all smokers. And Everybody Knows you smoke afterwards. The proof the public is scared is that manufactures are make strenuous efforts to produce a safe smoke. This is an old ad now. It was novel when i first ran into it. It is about ecigarettes. They are becoming poplar. And they are probably safer than cigarettes. Another thing i keep seeing advertised is the natural smoke. I dont know what that is. There they are. Advertised in magazines like the atlantic. These are to sway people to the evils of smoking. Lets get down to the fact. How dangerous is smoking . People are going to over stress the risks. This is from a survey. Do people realize the extent of life that might be lost because of smoking . Estimates of that loss are in the range of 68 years but the public believe it is greater. Men believe it is 10 years and women 14. 8. How dangerous is it . Well i tried to find statistics on motorcycles and all i could find is 46 times as many fatalities compared to miles when it comes to car. My guess is more dangerous than cigarettes. Smoking is risky. That is my point. It is isnt lethal. Many smokers live to a good age and many do not. This was reported on many years ago. 1998. Lies, damn lies, 1400 thousand smoking related deaths. And the summary of this article that came out 12 years ago was truth was an early victim in the battle against tobacco. And smoking has gone down since 1998 to 40 to 15 depending on the state. And the figure we now see bruited all over the media isnt 400,000 deaths but 480,000 deaths . Maybe the manufactures are making cigarettes more dangerous . Is that possible . There are other possibilities. Smoking is it addictive . Yes and no i would say. It certainly isnt addictive for everybody. This is a picture from 1984 when a bunch of tobacco executives held out and were asked do you think smoking is addictive and they said yes, they didnt thing it was. Which was laughable in those days. But in fact, they should have turned the question around to the committee. This was 1994. And asked how Many Committee members smoked. My guess is maybe 50 of them. So obviously smoking isnt addictive to everybody. There maybe a residue of people that dont give it up, would like to and cant, but i think you could argue that the issue is one of incentive and disinsensiti disinsensitive disincentive. I will say i measured your genotype and you will get cancer in five years hundred percent for sure. Would you continue to smoke . Probably not. People are gambling as it is. A probability of illness 2030 years down the road from the pleasure they get from smoking. There are two big issues with smoke. Passive smoke is one of them. Everybody thinks this smoke is harmful. I read you some of these official statements about the dangers of Secondhand Smoke. It is dangerous, isnt it . Not real. If you look at the original discussion of the issue this is the the 1990s, i will read you the red bit. A number of studies were reviewed this is is a paper in the general regulations. None of them have showned a relationship that passes the test of statisticing significan significance. You cant put people in a house and expose them to smoke and a group not exposed to cigarettes. You cannot do that. But that is what needs to be done to see if there is a cause and effect. This is one of the criticisms of the study. In the selected studies, epa didnt demonstrate a Significant Association between tobacco and lung cancer. The publics perception assumes that Secondhand Smoke is lethal. All right. There is a good study that i was able to find. A fairly wellknown study. The best you could do with a correlation. It is called environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality. The thing they are looking at is mortality. This is a good thing because there is no doubt about mortality when it comes this. No doubt you are dead. It looked at mortality in a population of 35,000 people. That is a lot of people. In california. 35,000 never smokers who had a spouse who smoked or didnt. And the issue is do the people with smoking spouse have a shorter life with people that have a nonspoking spouse. With a study with 35,000 people it is a miracle if you dont find a significant difference but they found no differences. The results dont support environment of tobacco and tobacco related mortality. They dont rule out the effect, you can never rule out a small effect. Okay. This reference appears in the citations for chapter 7 of the 2006 Surgeon Generals 709 page report. But it isnt discussed in the text. It doesnt appear at all in the most recent report that came out a month or two agree. Cherry picking the data. How about effects on the unborn. Everybody knows pregnant women shouldnt smoke. You can only study this with correlation. This is a natural experiment. There were people who had their own children and also children by ivf the mother hatched an egg from another couple. Okay . So if the child that grows up from this ivf egg has problems they are not genetically related to the birth mother. They have to be related to the birth mother environment in the womb she provided for this egg. That was the bases. They looked at birth weight of the baby and behavioral problems. The motivation was behavioral problems if the mother smokes. What they found was there was no association with the behavioral problems and the smoking. So that was genetic. That was determined by the birth mother of the egg. I mean the genetic mother of this egg. But there was a small effect on birth weight. People that smoke tend to have babies smaller than normal but they dont have behavioral programs. So there is a small effect. My point on this study is that i think very many of the effects that are contributed to smoking could be attributed to genetic differences between the population being studied. Never the less, there is no limit to smoking alarmism. This one struck me. This is a quote from pediatrics. There is a quote, what is known on this subject they say . There is no safe level of exposure to tobacco smoke. No safe level. Thirdhand smoke, do you know what that is . Anybody not know what third hand smoke is . You should all know what this is. This is the residual smoke left on the clothes of smokers. Your wife smokes, puff, puff, puff, your child near her dress or worse somebody else, third hand smoke. That is what third hand smoke is. It is residual smoke c contamination after this. Children are uniquely susceptible to this. How do they know that . They dont. But everybody will believe them because Everybody Knows cigarettes are so lethal. But they are not good for you. Lung cancer risk is absolutely sure. But smoking isnt as dangerous to others as say alcohol is. All right. People drink too much, kill people with cars and very dangerous to other people. To comfortable level of risk for smoking is either unknown or very low. And it certainly isnt bad for the smoker. Here is a roster of distinguished smokers. You know who this guy is . Freud. This is a british genetnist. Gen this man, do you know who he is . Russell. And this is a, i think this is a wonderf wonderf physic professor. And everybody who who this is . Good lord, no. She is much more attractive. This is millison figwig who game up cigarettes to smoke a pipe. But she never allowed herself to be pictured smoking the pipe. Not very lady like. Here are the ages at which these people died. Einstein young. Ho i think two died from tobacco related issues. Fraid had throat cancer. Russell, if you troll the internet there is a wonderful video of him being interviewed by the bbc and he is asked what is your worst vice and he said smoking. I smoke all of time when i am not eating or sleeping. This was when he was past the age of procreating. And the interviewer said isnt that bad . And he said they did say that 70 years ago but it seemed to work out all right. That is russell. And here is finwig. 82. This is my favorite. A wonderful british psyiologist and others may recognize this gentlemen who is now 70. But the only question is is it tobacco smoking . We dont know. All right. Moving along. What about rights . This isnt really a core thing of the talk. But these are the rights people talk about. The right of nonsmokers not to be exposed to unpleaseant but dangerous tobacco smoke. Permits it on your purpose and the right to a smokefree workplace. Given what i have argued which is passive smoke isnt proven to be dangerous at all. These things should be decided through the political process. They are not Health Related issues. But the argument is skewed about misinformation about the health risks of smoking. There are risks. You use a few years of average life. That is to say some people die of smoking and a somewhat larger number dont. Misinformation about the health risks of information contributed to them want to quit. If you walk around duke you will see people puffing on cigarettes. They are poor people and intimidated by the fact they know their habit is killing them and cannot give it up. It isnt a good situation. All right. Lets get on to the social cost of smoking which is a real issue. If it doesnt have direct ill effects on other people what about the social cost . This is something which appeals to fanatics world wide. Here is a very old ad from germany. [speaking german] the chain smoker. He doesnt devour it. It devours him. That is what chain smoker is in german. This is a nazismoking ad. [speaking german] they could have had 2 million more volkeswagon. And complaining about so forth and so on. So the financial cast is a big issue historically in the war on smoking or the desire not to get people to smoke. Here is another quote from british medical journal. 15 of total Health Care Cost is what smoking puts on the cost. In puerto rico it is an estimated. 4 of the gdp. A study could disagree. A dutch study the best. I will summarize it and show you a few numbers. The bottom ryline is prepare yourself for a shock. You will all die. And dying is very, very expensive. The last year of life, the medical cost are 34 times the average of the previous five yea years. The amount of time a personal spends dying and the age are the most important thing. This is when do you die and how expensive is it. And that is what they looked out. The title is the beasty. And they looked at three things. Obesity, smoking and nonsmoking nonobese people. The Healthy Living cohurt. And the bottom line was prevention was more costly than leaving them alone. Here is numbers. Here is the smoking cohert on the right chat. 225,000 euros there. And they are a drain on society you see with the healthy people. Smoking doesnt exhurt lifetime Health Care Cost. And they dont get pension so there is benefit with it. Monetary benefit. All right. Studies have yielded if you look at the lifetime difference here 77. 4 years expectancy for the smokers versus 64 so that is 7 years difference. Other studies show smaller 4. 3 and others show bigger and there is disagreement about that. Okay. High medical cost of smoking related to disease and here is the key point to take away. The underlying mechanisms is there is a substitution of in expensive lethal diseses toward less lethal and costly diseases. The issue of and this is something i cannot emphasis strongly enough. The issue isnt whether or not you will die but the issue is how long will it take from a Public Policy point of view and not to say a personal point as well. No body wants to drag out for ten years. This is mainly a Public Policy issue. And here is another example. This is an example of malaria. There are two types. One doesnt kill people but debilitates them. Not too many deaths. There is another kind thugs that is lethal. In columbia scientist found if they got rid of the lethal one there was no improvement. But if they got rid of the debilitating one it made a huge difference and big economic different. Eliminating the quick killing one had no significant gains and the other one was good. Bottom line, what should the government do . My first point is there is no common good argument against smoking. What remains are moral objections. And i would argue corrupt incentives to attack smoking. All right. Smoking of course is risky to the individual. There is no question. Even though it is correlation the risk of lung cancer is higher for smokers particulary cigarette smokers than not. 2040 are what estimates vary from. Well, if it is are risky there are lot of other risky activities. Drinking alcohol, sky diving down to being sexual activity. Some kill people at young ages and they are not regulated at all. Indeed the government seeks to mitigate the ill effects of some of these activities by spending billion on targeted medical research on std, hiv when are behavior diseases. It is fine. How much is spent on making smoking safer . Well as the brits would say not adjacent to zero. Why pick on smoking and why offer abstinath an the only solution . Some people think it is immoral. Tobacco smoking is an ireprehensible activity. This was a science journal and i dont know why he thought to preach on smokers. And even if it doesnt cost others, and it is isnt a sin what else . Reduces Life Expectancy and longevity. It is nasty for others. It is just a taboo. Forth it does enable the government to exploit smokers. No question about that. Is longer life always better and who should decide . I want to go to the core of source so i picked the more recent document. The question wasnt whether man would chose to be in primal youth or if he would pass on the advantages that life brought with it. These bugs lived forever. He was envious. They lived like they were 90 not 20 so it wasnt good. A longer life maybe more painful life. Not for many people the years you save are not their best. So if happiness is part of the constitution afterall, maybe a short life is favorable to a happy one. Let me talk about society, and this is where my biological bias comes in. For every species there is an optimal lifespan. The may fly likes to win till september but they would produce more so they dont live that long. The ultimate lifespan in terms of the species isnt infinate. It isnt forever. There is nothing in science that says longer life is always better. Okay . So if the government has no scientific bases to saying everybody should live as long as possible surely it becomes a private matter and it is up for the smoker to decide. Suicide is a sin according to christianity but is it a sin to do things like smoking that may shorten your life . I think most people would say most things like this shouldnt be taboo. And finally smoking is nasty for others and people hate it. And the rarer it gets the more they hate it. Of course, i agree. But they are smokefree areas and they should not deprive smokers to endulge in public and even rented places. I will skip over this. No buddy is proposal we regulate these activities. What is so special about smoking . This is the final point. If smoking is evil and really bad for you it should be suppressed by any means possible. So a tax rate and a tobacco master settlement which i will talk about are okay. We can tax the heck out of this. And the europeans really do. But it is very convenient. We have this bad thing and we can make a lot of money out of it. Go for it. Smoking is bad why not tax it. There is a side issue here. If we tax something people to do but we know it is bad for them and that is why we are taxing on it but we are dependented on their doing it to get the money. Should state finances really dependent on people doing something that is bad for them . What about the tobacco master Settlement Agreement . We cannot tax as freely as the european can and we had to do it by indirect means. In 1998, 48 general state attorneys and four others worked out similar agreements, Tobacco Companies were to be freed from the threat of suits and in return they would pay 240 billion. The funds were to be used for Health Related purposes like wine making and broadbrand access . That is some of the things used. The custody paid by, drum roll, smokers. It reminds me of gangta films you can make a nice business you got there son, wouldnt want to be sued would you . Just help us out with this cost of smokers and we will be reasonables. That is fictional. You can charge the smokers what you like. Smoking is bad for them, isnt it . We will back the competition. So a Legal Protection record although some people question that. Where it extorts about 240 from b that is that is paid by c is born. Every detail of the msa, it is corrupt enterprise, was tailored to protect them from competition and allow them to extract what is needed from the massive payout to payouts to the state. Everybody is happy but the smokers and they feel bad about it so who is worried. This is the final bit aof data. This is a graph from had the sources. The vertical line is the date of the msa. This is the percentage of people that smoked. And it no effect on the smoking. It is going down uninterrupted by the msa as you can see. Here is the msa is go straight across. It is just a trend continuing. This is my final point and i will give you a summary. The question you have all been asking if as you say, as i say, smoking is risky but not lethal and not dangerous to third parties and doesnt cost society, then why does the Health Establishment hate it . And they do. They are against ecigarettes but they are less risky and help people give up cigarettes. There is an article in a british magazine that ecigarettes are making tobacco go away. And here is Something Like that else that says ecigarettes help people give up smoking but the antismoking people are against them, too. I suspect is the real reason for much of this is frustration among the medical profession with the failing war on cancer. It has been about as successful as the war in iraq. I hate to say that but it is true. They must feel at least we can stop smoking because that that reduced lung cancer. Here is another science journalist writing a few years ago, but i think things may have improved slightly since then, other death rates for cancer moves but there has been a pathetic concern that the millions of dollars invested in the car against cancer with the sole exception of smoking. Here is my summary. What you have been waiting for. Smoking is risky. No question about that. Perhaps not as risky as you thought. Smoking isnt probably dangerous to nonsmokers. Smoking can have a quality life. They dont cost society in fact they save society cost. Conseque consequently the government has no business regulating taxes and extorting money from mostly poor smokers. It is a private matter and a public disgrace. This guy isnt me. This is david hog who i found out is wellknown as an artist in england than here. He had two shows in california this year and had a big Rural Academy show. Here is and i am not totally with him on this. He is a passionate prosmoker. And he gave us pictures of antiques like ashtrays for example. Thank you very much. [ applause ] questions . I am sure that was so compelling that you all do you smoke . Well now you see that is what is called the landmark in my argument. I gave up cigarettes when i was in graduate school when i found you could not smoke in library and there was a library and i had to go into it. But i do smoke the occasional cigar. My mother, god bless her, did smoke. She died at 96. Not of smoking related illness. Yeah . One of the things you hear about when you talk about taxing cigarettes and we want to tax the cost of society. Do you find that hog wash . Hog wash is a good term. They dont cost society. They simply dont. They dont in health care. They save a huge amount in pension and pay a lot of taxes and save Social Security and that kind of thing. They have been in several studies on it. So that is simply a lie and it is not good when the government cries wolf and tells you things you know are not true. And we seem to see more and more of it. We were driving and there was a sign saying traffic monitored by air craft. Have you seen an aircraft fly over i95 . People say the government lies all of the time. It isnt good when they say things like that for which there is no evidence. I have talked to many medical people and i gave my doctor a copy of this book and i thought she would be upset. And she had no, no, it is reasonable. If you talk to many doctors they will say we know it isnt as scary. I think it is interesting you compared obesity and we are told we cannot blame and vilify people for being obese but we can smokers. Why is it different . It is doublely incredible. You dont blame addicts. So only if you make more money from smokers than obese people. I dont know. But it is totally irrational. I had a little section in the book that gave me trouble with american publishers. Well, you can read the book. But smokers are stigmatized. They are mostly poor. Baby boomers seem to be the perfect generation to look at when it comes to Secondhand Smoke and smoking of mothers. My mother smoked probably while she was pregnant with me. I dont think she quit. And we all grew up totally surrounded by Secondhand Smoke. We should be dropping dead like flies. Yes, of course. And have baby boomer generation been the focus of research on this . It seems to me like a natural i dont know of anything specifically directed. They have done things like looking at these spouses and so on and the best study is this one with the ivf kids and so on. On its face it is ludicrous. That whole Generation Group around smoke. And the one before that didnt just grow up around it they smoked. And yet somehow they managed to win the Second World War and discover Nuclear Weapons and so on and so forth. It is no sense these are accepted now. It is clear there rate of smoking is going away but how much is correlated or does correlate to the increased taxation of smoke . Smoking is rather interlastic. In europe lets put it this way. I smoked as an undergraduate. I came to america where the cost was a quarter and i quit. The tax rates in europe were high higher and the smoking rate is higher. So i think smoking is tax sensitive which government loves. We can load it on. I think it is the scare factor that has driven it down. It is risky. No question about it. Particularly cigarettes. They compared the french with the americans in terms of smoking death because everyone smokes in france. I remember being in paris and going into a cafe with an outside thing in the winter and it is cold. They had these outside things and inside was somebody smoking. And i said, they must be cold. It was her cafe. She could not smoke in her own cafe. So they have these rules over there, too. I think in germany is where they have more smokers than almost any other european country and the longest Life Expectancy. There is a study on obesity by a man named keys and he went to Different Countries and left out countries that would have controvercogone against what he was studding studying which was carbohydrates are bad. I tried to correlate gdp with the degree of smoking and i found zero or slight negative. So fewer people smoke the richer the country is but not a big effect. And because of causation you cannot tell which way that goes. Probably rich countries have more pressure on smokers and not nonsmoking makes them rich. Yeah . Inaudible question. I dont think the book is accessible online. It is 20 here. But will you have one today . As luck would have it we do. The university of buckingham who published it are not noting for their
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