New at Reason: Cathy Young on Ridley Scott's Robin Hood

Now this is a Robin I can get behind. Interesting backstory of the legend and how it's become corrupted.

New at Reason: Cathy Young on Ridley Scott's Robin Hood: "

The new Ridley Scott film Robin Hood is
drawing some critics' political ire. In New York's leftist weekly,
The Village Voice, Karina Longworth laments that 'instead
of robbing from the rich to give to the poor, this Robin Hood
preaches about 'liberty' and the rights of the individual' and
battles against 'government greed'; the film, she scoffs, is 'a
rousing love letter to the tea party movement.' But as Contributing
Editor Cathy Young explains, the Robin Hood of myth and folklore
probably has much more in common with the 'libertarian rebel'
played by Russell Crowe than with the medieval socialist of the
'rob from the rich, give to the poor' cliché.

View this article.

"

From the Rest of the Story: GlaxoSmithKline lie about smokeless tobacco

Dr. Siegel is on top of 'em again. His words say it all--not much I can really add.

GlaxoSmithKline lie about smokeless tobacco: "

From the Nicorette website:

A lot of people believe that taking smokeless tobacco is safer than smoking cigarettes. This is not true.

This is an outright lie. Smokeless tobacco is far safer than smoking cigarettes. Perhaps Glaxo's justification for this statement is that there are still health risks associated with smokeless tobacco. And so there are, just as there is a risk involved with most things in life, but they are tiny compared to the risks associated with smoking cigarettes. Glaxo might just as well say:

A lot of people believe that eating chocolate is safer than smoking cigarettes. This is not true.

Or, indeed:

A lot of people believe that using Nicorette is safer than smoking cigarettes. This is not true.

We have seen this kind of fabrication before from the US Surgeon General (amongst others). Under the Data Quality Act, his office finally had to retract the lie that smokeless is not safer. I covered this in an article entitled The Untouchables back in 2008.

In 2004, the National Legal and Policy Center complained about a statement in a booklet produced by the National Institute on Aging which read: 'Some people think smokeless tobacco (chewing tobacco and snuff), pipes, and cigars are safer than cigarettes. They are not.' This was, of course, false. Smokeless tobacco is known to be around 98% safer than cigarettes. The complaint was upheld and as a result, the US Government is no longer allowed to pretend that the health risks associated with smokeless tobacco are as great as those associated with cigarettes*.

The upshot is that the National Institute on Aging now says: 'Some people think smokeless tobacco (chewing tobacco and snuff), pipes, and cigars are safe. They are not.' And former Surgeon General Richard Carmona - whose 2006 report into passive smoking is one big DQA complaint waiting to happen - had to subtly change his tune from 'smokeless tobacco is not a safer substitute for cigarette smoking' to 'smokeless tobacco is not a safe substitute for cigarette smoking' (my italics).

A slender difference indeed, but an important one, because at least now these statements are not outright lies. What has replaced them may still be misleading - they do not hint at how much safer smokeless tobacco is - but, as Jacob Sullum asked sardonically in Reason magazine, 'Why lie about smokeless tobacco when a misleading half-truth will do?' Demanding half-truths rather than outright lies from the anti-smoking lobby might be the most that can be hoped for in this day and age. The Data Quality Act may be the only way to get them.

* Anti-smoking groups, websites and charities who are not publicly owned remain be free to lie about smokeless tobacco and frequently do. For example: 'The fact is, chewing tobacco is every bit as dangerous as smoking it.' or 'There's a widely held myth that smokeless tobacco is a safe alternative to cigarettes, when actually it's just as dangerous as smoking.'

Thanks to Bill Godshall for the tip.

"

From Reason: More Militarized Than the Military

This is stunning, absolutely stunning. Bottom line? SWAT teams haven't militarized the police. They've turned them into a pack of rabid attack dogs with no discernable regard for either the public good [TM], or the oath they swore before pinning on the badge. Peace officer my @ss. Had enough drug war yet? How's that working for you?

More Militarized Than the Military: "

A reader who asks his name not be used writes about the
drug raid video from Columbia, Missouri:

I am a US Army officer, currently serving in Afghanistan.
My first thought on reading this story is this: Most American
police SWAT teams probably have fewer restrictions on conducting
forced entry raids than do US forces in Afghanistan.

For our troops over here to conduct any kind of forced entry,
day or night, they have to meet one of two conditions: have a
bad guy (or guys) inside actively shooting at them; or obtain
permission from a 2-star general, who must be convinced by
available intelligence (evidence) that the person or persons
they're after is present at the location, and that it's too
dangerous to try less coercive methods. The general can be
pretty tough to convince, too. (I'm a staff liason, and one
of my jobs is to present these briefings to obtain the required
permission.)

Generally, our troops, including the special ops guys, use what
we call 'cordon and knock': they set up a perimeter around
the target location to keep people from moving in or out,and then
announce their presence and give the target an opportunity to
surrender. In the majority of cases, even if the perimeter is
established at night, the call out or knock on the gate doesn't
happen until after the sun comes up.

Oh, and all of the bad guys we're going after are closely tied
to killing and maiming people.

What might be amazing to American cops is that the vast majority
of our targets surrender when called out.

I don't have a clear picture of the resources available to most
police departments, but even so, I don't see any reason why they
can't use similar methods.

I've heard similar accounts from other members of the military.
A couple of years ago after I'd given a speech on this issue, a
retired military officer and former instructor at West Point
specifically asked me to stop using the term 'militarization,'
because he thought comparing SWAT teams to the military reflected
poorly on the military.

Back in 2007 I wrote a bit
more on this:

There's a telling scene related to all of this in Evan Wright's
terrific book
Generation Kill. Wright was embedded with an elite
U.S. Marine unit in Iraq. Throughout his time with the unit, Wright
documents the extraordinary precautions the unit takes to avoid
unnecessary civilian casualties, and the real heartbreak the
soldiers feel when they do inadvertently kill a civilian. About 3/4
through the book, Wright explains how the full-time Marines were
getting increasingly irritated with a reserve unit traveling with
them. The reserve unit was mostly made up people who in their
civilians lives were law enforcement, 'from LAPD cops to DEA agents
to air marshalls,' and were acting like idiot renegades. Wright
quotes a gunnery sargeant who traveled with the reserve unit:

'Some of the cops in Delta started doing this cowboy stuff. They
put cattle horns on their Humvees. They'd roll into these hamlets,
doing shows of force—kicking down doors, doing sweeps—just for the
fuck of it. There was this little clique of them. Their ringleader
was this beat cop...He's like five feet tall, talks like Joe Friday
and everybody calls him 'Napoleon.''

The unit ends up firebombing a village of Iraqis who'd been
helping the Marines with intelligence about insurgents and Iraqi
troops. Yes, it's just an anecdote. But it's a telling one. It
suggests that to say some of our domestic police units are getting
increasing militaristic probably does a disservice to the
military.

"

From Velvet Glove, Iron Fist: Big Pharma versus Big Tobacco

From a colleague in the UK (excellent blog btw, highly recommended--he cover's all manner of sanctimonious governmental and NGO shennanigans). If you still believe after reading this that the anti-smoking groups care in the slightest about the health of us nicotine addicts (smoking or not), this should erase all doubts. They've become...wait for it...nico-terrorists (like that?). Buch of sanctimonious tools. All of em.

Big Pharma versus Big Tobacco: "

The Washington Examiner hits the bullseye when it says that the regulation of nicotine products comes down to a straight fight between Big Pharma and Big Tobacco. The situation in America is now so messed up that the interests of neither liberty nor public health (however defined) are being served.

It's a full-fledged regulatory rumble between Big Tobacco and the even bigger Big Pharma -- the sort of ugly influence game that will become the norm as government sticks its arms deeper into the economy.

So says Timothy P. Carney, the newspaper's lobbying editor. And lobbying is the name of the game. Big Pharma's problem is that other industries keep producing better nicotine products which, given time, may turn out to be more effective stop-smoking aids. Whether it's the e-cigarette or Camel Orbs, alternatives to Big Pharma's 'medicinal nicotine' are making up market share and the drug companies want the government to stamp them out.

All these products deliver, for all practical purposes, nothing but nicotine. Big Pharma's approach is to claim that the nicotine in their products is safe (which is true), but that nicotine becomes magically harmful when it is delivered in the products of their competitors.

Their other line of attack is to claim that their competitors' products are marketed to—or at least might appeal to—children. RJ Reynolds, for example, have committed the crime of designing reasonably attractive packaging for Camel Orbs.

Would this appeal to children? Who knows? But if it does, then surely so will this Nicorette product.

Camel Orbs have been accused of having a 'candy-like appearance, added flavors, and easily concealable size'—all of which apply equally to Nicorette's Mint Mini Lozenges. They have been accused of having 'a very minty taste and seemed to deliver a jolt of nicotine'. Ditto. It is said that very young children could die if they eat a whole pack of Camel Orbs. Ditto again.

Either both of these products should be banned or they should both be legal. The group that will advise the FDA on what do is the Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee (TPSAC), and that's where the conflict of interests come into play.

Jack Henningfield is one of nine voting members on the TPSAC, and he is also one of eight patent holders of a cutting-edge nicotine chewing gum that has not yet been commercialized.

Henningfield is also vice president of health policy at a consulting firm that counts drug maker GlaxoSmithKline as a client. Glaxo holds the license for Nicorette, the leading nicotine gum currently on the market.

Camel Orbs may or may not be a real health risk, but they are certainly competition to Nicorette's gums and lozenges -- and Henningfield's patented gum. Yet our government will count on Henningfield and others in the pay of Nicorette's maker for counsel on how to regulate Camel's product.

And it doesn't stop there...

Neal Benowitz, another committee member, has also worked as a consultant to Glaxo as well as Pfizer, the Wall Street Journal has reported. Pfizer makes the quit-smoking drug Chantix.

Boston University professor Michael Siegel has reported on his blog that the committee's chairman, Dr. Jonathan Samet, 'has received grant support from GlaxoSmithKline. In addition, the organization that he directed -- the Institute for Global Tobacco Control -- is funded by GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer.'

Finally, committee member Dorothy Hatsukami has been paid by a small drug maker to study its proposed nicotine vaccine.

Michael Siegel, who remains the go-to man for these issues, writes...

The last individual in the world who you would want to serve on such a panel would be a Big Pharma consultant, especially one who consults specifically in the area of smoking cessation medications. The fact that this individual also has a personal financial interest in such medication and who also has testified in court on behalf of Big Pharma simply adds insult to the public's injury.

Pharmaceutical funding has been one of the key developments in the story of the anti-smoking movement in the last 20 years. Many millions of dollars have been spent financing groups who have campaigned for smoking bans, higher cigarette taxes and other tobacco control measures that have pushed smokers towards pharmaceutical nicotine.

I have never been one to see the anti-smoking movement as a pharmaceutically led enterprise. The money has helped enormously, no doubt, but anti-smoking campaigners were around long before the drug companies got involved and their prohibitionist aims have not changed significantly.

Until recently, it could be said that the interests of public health and the pharmaceutical lobby merely happened to coincide. That is no longer the case. Big Pharma's attempts to use regulation to prevent its competitors from selling virtually identical, safe and probably more effective nicotine products is the final proof that this is all about money. As Carney concludes:

It's an ugly game, this use of regulation to kill competitors and guarantee business, and conflicts of interest are unavoidable. The Pharma-vs-Big Tobacco scrum shows that Obama's project of increasing government control is at odds with his talk of cleaning up government.

"

From The Rest of the Story: Insanity of the Modern-Day Tobacco Control Movement...

More craziness courtesy of Dr. Siegel:

Insanity of the Modern-Day Tobacco Control Movement: Approve and Protect Existing High-Risk Cigarettes; Get Rid of Everything Else: "If you didn't know any better, you would think that the major, national anti-smoking groups were working with the intention of protecting tobacco company profits, especially those of the largest companies.

The current tobacco control agenda makes absolutely no sense. The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, American Heart Association, American Lung Association, and American Cancer Society have been working for years to promote legislation that institutionalizes and protects existing cigarettes. On top of that, they are doing everything they can to remove far safer products - like electronic cigarettes - from the market.

Ironically, these groups are doing exactly the opposite of what makes sense from a public health perspective.

1. They are trying to force ex-smokers who have quit with the help of vaping to return to cigarette smoking.

2. They have successfully gotten rid of the flavored cigarettes which no youth are smoking and protected the market share of menthol cigarettes which tens of thousands of kids are smoking.

3. They are worried about Camel orbs and other dissolvable tobacco products for which there is no evidence of significant use among youth, but at the same time, they have forced the FDA to give official approval to Marlboro, Camel, and Newport cigarettes - the products which are addicting those youths and ultimately killing them.

Frankly, there is no longer any difference between the agenda that these groups are supporting and that of Philip Morris. And that is a sad thing.

When you wake up every morning to find out that your policy agenda is precisely that of Philip Morris, it should give you pause and cause you to re-think your actions. Unfortunately, that has not happened with the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, American Heart Association, American Lung Association, and American Cancer Society. At this point, they are too far down the road to turn back.

The rest of the story is that these anti-smoking groups have forsaken the health of the public, and instead, are pursuing an agenda which is designed to institutionalize and protect the very products which are addicting our nation's youth and ultimately killing many of them.

"

Dr. Siegel scores another bullseye

Over at "The Rest of the Story" Dr. Siegel devastatingly analyzes American Lung's inexplicable attitude toward ecig's. Of course such a fine organization would never allow itself to become beholden to corporate interests, or have anything other than the bests interests of the public at heart. Of course not... Another fine example of science compromised "in the public interest."

Bastards.

http://tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/05/american-lung-association-says-there-is.html

From Reason: Does the Constitution Need a Parental Advisory Sticker?

From our "Are you f'ing kidding me?" Dept:

Does the Constitution Need a Parental Advisory Sticker?: "

Walter Olson
highlights a remarkable reader advisory attached to a $4.95
paperback version of the Constitution, Declaration of Independence,
and Articles of Confederation:

This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same
values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to
discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality,
ethnicity, and interpersonal relations have changed since this book
was written before allowing them to read this classic work.

Of course, several of the actual amendments to the Constitution
reflect a few of those changes, but I suppose you can never be too
safe when it comes to the children.

"

Sullivan: Scenes From the Drug War, Ctd - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Fantastic. The Drug War related overreach of Police, needless deaths and just plain creeping tyranny of and by Law Enforcement have reached Sullivan's radar. This has to be a good thing. Follow the links to Radley Balko's encyclopedic archives on the topic. If you're willing to risk cranial explosion...

Scenes From the Drug War, Ctd - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan