The American Spectator

Joel Miller replies : br> Sera Kirk’s beef caught me a bit off guard. First, it’s not like I said, “Smoking is good for you.” It’s not like I said, “Passive smoking is good for you.” It’s not like I even said, “There is no evidence it’s bad for you.” Here’s what I did say: “the jury is still out on the dangers of secondhand smoke.” The fact that the BMJ article was published at all is proof of that fact — debate and discussion continues. Of course, at least one thorn of the thistle under Kirk’s saddle is the fact that the BMJ article was published because the study was funded with tobacco dollars. /p>

The argument in short: Tobacco funding = discredited findings. Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal, a publication not exactly known for slavish adherence to the Tobacco Industry line, disagrees: “Of course the paper has flaws — all papers do — but it also has considerable strengths — long follow up, large sample size, and more complete follow up than many such studies. … We judged this paper to be a useful contribution to an important debate. We may be wrong, as we are with many papers. That’s science. But I remain convinced that it would have been wrong to reject the study simply because it was funded by the tobacco industry.”

Smith says this as a man who resigned his professorship at Nottingham University because it accepted brass from British American Tobacco. He has no particular love for the Tobacco Industry, just valuable research, which he and others at BMJ considered this study to be. It was peer reviewed and passed muster.

What is ironic is that no one seems to raise eyebrows when studies funded by anti-tobacco interests come back with results — surprise! — against tobacco; there’s little hand-wringing about bias there. With any subject suffused with politics, the method and results of the argument matter more than the truth of it. Genuine debate is not something valued by many regarding this issue, and Kirk provides the best proof. For Kirk to say that “anyone who disagrees will be called names” just poisons the well. It is a way of casting aspersions while looking honest and innocent — a tactic that wouldn’t withstand scrutiny even in a high-school public speaking course.

p> TOUGH SELL