Research Question: How has the tobacco industry attempted to influence research?
Introduction:
Most Americans are aware of the regulations that have been enacted for the sale and use of tobacco. Anyone who smokes may see the surgeon-general’s warning label and picture of a shriveled-up lung on their pack of cigarettes. Time and research have shown us that smoking kills. According to the CDC, smoking just in the United States kills over 480,000 people yearly. (CDC) We don’t know how these numbers could change with the emergence of vaping. Since this new technology has not been extensively researched, it is important that we conduct research surrounding it in a way that will inform the public transparently. This post explores how tobacco companies have manipulated research in the past and how they are attempting to influence research at universities today.
Discussion:
In the past tobacco companies have attempted to skew the public’s and lawmaker’s perception of smoking by creating controversy around it. The more controversy that surrounds a topic, the less likely a member of a committee or congress is likely to create restrictions on the harmful product. Lisa Bero, a professor of Medicine and public Health at the University of Colorado, has conducted extensive research about the strategies that the Tobacco industry uses to devalue research that accurately depicts the harmful effects of smoking, and to fund and publicize biased and non-peer-reviewed studies. She concisely states 6 strategies the tobacco industry uses to push an agenda in her article, “Tobacco Industry Manipulation of research” in the Public Health Chronicles. An example she brings up of a Tobacco company manipulating research is how the Phillip Morris Company pushed their interest group’s position. In 1988 the Phillip Morris Company created The Center for Indoor Air Research. (Bero 202) Dr. Bero states, “From 1989 to 1993, CIAR awarded $11,209,388 for peer-reviewed projects and $4,022,723 for special-reviewed projects. Seventy percent of the peer-reviewed projects funded by CIAR examined indoor air pollutants other than tobacco smoke, diverting attention from secondhand smoke as an indoor air pollutant.” (Bero 202) In other words, the Phillip Morris company created a research center that spent over 15 million dollars in 4 years for research of air pollutants that weren’t tobacco smoke, to shift the conversation away from tobacco. Lisa explains why this diversion is helpful for tobacco companies by stating,” It is often to the benefit of interest groups to generate controversy about data because the controversy is likely to slow or prevent regulation of a given product.”(Bero 200) To elaborate, if decision makers must deliberate more extensively on a topic because of conflicting research, proceedings will be slower because any relative information must be considered before the vote can happen. If the doubt created is strong enough, regulation may not even pass a vote. This has proven to be an effective strategy for Phillip Morris International, since they are attempting to use a similar strategy today.
Regulations have thankfully gotten stricter since then and everyone sees the Surgeon General’s warning on their pack of cigarettes. Most people know that smoking causes cancer, but there is still a controversy to be created with vaping. Phillip Morris has recently changed their business strategy to push vaping. According to Andrea Chang from the LA Times, “Philip Morris International is trying to persuade customers to switch to its heated tobacco products, which it says are better alternatives because they are smoke-free. Eventually, the company hopes, governments will regulate cigarettes out of existence altogether.” (Chang) Phillip Morris International knows that information about the dangers of smoking is widespread, but the same can be said about vaping. Although regulations around funding from the tobacco industry have gotten stricter according to state laws and university regulations, The tobacco industry still has attempted to skew research in recent years to push their vape products. According to the Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance, Phillip Morris Company has announced that they are pledging 1 billion to research on the harmful effects of smoking. (SEATCA) These funds wouldn’t be directly received from the tobacco company, but instead they created “Foundation for a Smoke-free world”.(SEATCA) Although this is creating a degree of separation between the tobacco-industry and universities, this would still create a conflict of interest and is not much different than universities directly receiving the funds from Phillip Morris International.
This raises the question of whether they are doing this to help people quit smoking, create a better image for the company, or even more sinister, to skew the results of research conducted at universities. This may seem like when the Phillip Morris Company created CIAR in 1988. This is because it is. Just as CIAR was create controversy are indoor air pollutants (Bero 202), the “Foundation for a Smoke-Free world” is just a way for the Phillip Morris International company to boost their public image and get around conflict of interest regulations at universities. As Bero stated about the CIAR foundation, “Support for research can provide good public relations for the tobacco industry by portraying it as philanthropic.”(Bero 201) The same can be said also about the “Foundation for a Smoke-free world” foundation created in 2017 by the same company.
Large health organizations have raised warnings to universities to not accept the funding from “Foundation for a Smoke-Free World”. The American Cancer Society called this a, “new twist out of the tobacco industry’s deadly playbook.”(SEATCA) Many universities have policies for reasearchers to not accept funding from tobacco companies, but this has not been the stance of a select few universities. according to Stanton Glantz in his article, “Tobacco Money at the University of California”, UCLA has made a hard stance that they would not be banning tobacco money in biomedical research because it’s a “slippery slope”.(Glantz 1068) To elaborate, UCLA believes that banning money from tobacco companies may cause controversy in receiving funding from other industries, such as pharmaceutical companies. Another example would be how UCSF failed to ban receiving funding from tobacco companies simply because they did not have enough votes. (Glantz 1068). This shows that there is a problem when it comes to the acceptance of dirty money and lack of regulation in research universities, even in the most liberal of states.
The USA is not alone in the controversy surrounding funding from the tobacco industry. According to J.E Cohen in his article, “Universities and Tobacco Money”, Nottingham University, a research university located in the UK, received the funding for one of their international centers directly from the British American Tobacco company of the amount of 3.8 million pounds, which is the equivalent to about 4.61 million U.S. dollars.(Cohen) Cohen makes the point that universities may feel more pressure to accept funding from the tobacco industry as government funding for universities goes down. (Cohen)This may be why UCLA is wary of losing their funding from the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries.
Authors Suzanne Schick and Stanton Glantz in the article “Old ways, new means: tobacco industry funding of academic and private sector scientists since the Master Settlement Agreement” also bring light to a similar issue; conflicts of interest among members of IFSH and LSRO, committees that issue grants to Universities conducting research in health issues.(Schick and Glantz) They found that many of the donors to the IFSH were from “anonymous private donations”, which is curious to say the least given the tobacco industry’s slippery strategies in the past. On top of the majority of their donations coming from anonymous sources, they found that, “ 54% of the members of the Cigarette Additives Expert Panel and 44% of the members of the Reduced Risk Core Committee have documented direct financial relationships with the US tobacco industry” (Schick and Glantz) In other words, roughly 50% of the LSRO panel members that issues grants to Health science research have either received funding from or are financially tied to tobacco companies.
Recommendations:
Students should be aware of where funding from university research comes from. In many cases, the funding may come from industries that are harmful to public health. Companies like the Phillip Morris International company have used unethical strategies to put a veil over the truth when it comes to the results of data. In addition, we need to be aware of where our money is going to when we donate to “non-profits.” We need to ask ourselves the questions, “How was this organization founded?”, “Where have these funds been distributed to in the past?”, “Where do the committee members of this organization have financial ties?” and, “Does the publication have anti conflict of interest measures?”. When committing our money to universities through tuition, we need to consider their ethical practices because it will reflect on the research you may conduct at this university. These individual measures will not be enough to solve the issue of excessive industry influence on research; we will need to commit more funds to higher education on a federal level to discourage researchers from accepting dirty money.
Sources:
Bero, Lisa A. “Home – PMC – NCBI.” National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Mar. 2005, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/.
Cohen, J E. “Universities and Tobacco Money.” BMJ (Clinical Research Ed.), U.S. National Library of Medicine, 7 July 2001, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1120656/.
Seatca. SEATCA, 26 Dec. 2017, https://seatca.org/top-universities-reject-big-tobaccos-research-funding/.
Glantz , Stanton A. “Tobacco Money at the University of California.” American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/full/10.1164/rccm.2503001.
Schick SF, Glantz SA. Old ways, new means: tobacco industry funding of academic and private sector scientists since the Master Settlement Agreement. Tob Control. 2007 Jun;16(3):157-64. doi: 10.1136/tc.2006.017186. PMID: 17565125; PMCID: PMC2598497.
Chang, Andrea. “Tobacco Giant Philip Morris Sees a Future without Cigarettes – but There’s a Catch.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 16 Apr. 2021, https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-04-16/q-a-with-the-ceo-of-philip-morris-international-america.
“Diseases and Death.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 29 July 2022, https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/diseases-and-death.html#:~:text=Cigarette%20smoking%20is%20responsible%20for,or%201%2C300%20deaths%20every%20day.