Tag Archives: trANTZlator

“We were wrong about this” trANTZlates into “we were still right, just for another reason”

Posted on 13 April 2013 by | 2 Comments

by Carl V Phillips

An aside that does not relate to THR, but provides a rare opportunity to observe how the ANTZ act when they have to admit one of their claims was wrong.  It is exceedingly rare because no matter how badly the ANTZ bungle their data or analysis, and no matter how clearly it is refuted, they never admit they made a mistake.  They are not, after all, real scientists; they are marketers who ape science to support their propaganda.  But in this case, a newspaper retracted the data so they had to respond.

A letter to a Japanese newspaper was supposedly from a six-year-old, telling the heartwarming story of talking a merchant into letting her buy cigarettes as a present for her grandfather, the only product that he really cared about.  This story sparked condemnation by the usual suspects about how screwed up Japanese society must be that a young child would be allowed to buy cigarettes for any reason, and that Something Needs To Be Done About It.

It became apparent that the letter was a hoax.  So the ANTZ naturally expressed relief that the world is not such a terrible place.

Ha! just kidding, of course.  What they actually did was publish a commentary in their pseudo-journal official party newsletter, Tobacco Control, that acknowledged the hoax but repeated the conclusion.  They interpreted the fact that the letter was considered a heartwarming story was evidence that Japanese society was screwed up and that Something Needs To Be Done About It.

Yes, life sure is easy in the ANTZ hill.  Not only do you take all the money you could ever want from smokers, providing job security as long as you dutifully recite the party doctrine, but no matter what the data shows, there is never a need to rewrite your conclusions.

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Kelvin Choi is remarkably clueless (and a liar) – part 2/2

Posted on 31 January 2013 by | 6 Comments

Yesterday I started dissecting the simplistic and false anti-e-cigarette claims being made by University of Minnesota researcher, and Ellen Hahn wannabe, Kelvin Choi.  This post picks up where that one left off.  To recount, Choi recently released a paper that contains some possibly useful historical data from a survey of knowledge and attitude about e-cigarettes.  But not content to do real science, he proceeded to tack on anti-e-cigarette lies and a conclusion that does not in any way follow from the research.  He then published an interview in which he bungles even the description of e-cigarettes and presents his reasons for worrying about the health effects, none of which actually involve any claim about any health effects.

I will note that the interview I am dissecting did not appear in some free weekly local paper or a radio news report.  It was published by the American Public Health Association (which runs the “journal” where Choi’s paper appeared), and was clearly crafted as a written document by that organization and Choi.  So we cannot attribute the gaffes to trying to dumb things down for a grade-school audience or misspeaking.

Continuing with examples of the lies that Choi and APHA chose to publish:

To date, e-cigarette marketing is not regulated.

Presumably he means in the United States (his apparent failure to recognize that regulations vary across jurisdictions is so minor among his errors that I only mention it because I need to clarify before continuing), in which case he is badly wrong.  Not only is e-cigarette marketing regulated by all basic federal and state rules about truth-in-advertising and such, but it is also severely restricted in terms of health claims.  Merchants cannot offer their customers any comparative risk or smoking cessation information, such as the obvious truths that switching to e-cigarettes is a good way to quit smoking for many people, or the health risk from e-cigarettes is trivial compared to that from smoking.  If this is Choi’s view of anarchy, I would hate to see what he considers to be regulation.

Advertisements for e-cigarettes appear on TV, magazines, the Internet and even in social media. Cigarette advertising has been known to have a strong influence on the perceptions and the use of cigarettes.

Ah, that explains it.  I believe he is mixing up the words “regulated” and “banned”, a common mistake when a native ANTZ speaker tries to communicate in English.

Therefore, it is similarly possible that e-cigarette advertising is one of the sources of influence on young adults’ views about e-cigarettes.

It is worth recalling that this interview was to tout a paper that reports results from a 2010-11 survey.  There was not exactly a lot of advertising of e-cigarettes back then.  This is the standard “public health” bait-and-switch:  do one simple and minor bit of research on a topic, with no policy analysis and no apparent understanding of the big picture, and then claim to be an authority on what policies should be implemented.

It appears that his complaint is that advertising — you know, that “unregulated” advertising which is prohibited from truthfully informing people about the smoking-cessation benefits or comparatively low risk of e-cigarettes — is contributing to people’s knowledge that e-cigarettes have low risk and are good for quitting smoking.  (Note that “knowledge” is the English word; to trANTZlate that into Choi’s ANTZ-speak, I believe their word for “knowledge” is “misinformation” when used in a context that means “knowledge that the ANTZ want to prevent people from learning”.)

I am sure the marketers will be glad to know that they are successfully communicating information that they are not allowed to communicate.  I suspect that during his continuing research on this topic, Choi will eventually learn about the restrictions on the advertising and then realize, like Stanton Glantz, that he needs to crusade for broader censorship of accurate information.

He concludes this thought with:

The challenge is whether we should swiftly regulate e-cigarette advertising before the issue gets out of hand.

Even trANTZlating “regulate” into “ban”, it is difficult to make any sense of this.  What issue?  What constitutes “out of hand”?  I am not even sure this qualifies as lying hype because although it tries to be hype, it is not at all clear what is being claimed.  So, moving on…

The second challenge lies in developing a better understanding of the effective communication channels to reach specific populations and how to best use these channels. For example, we know that a lot of young adults use Facebook, but we do not know how to effectively use Facebook to communicate the correct information about e-cigarettes to young adults. I think we still have a lot to learn in that regard.

Nice discovery about that Facebook thing.  Maybe he will write a paper about it before Facebook ceases being used by a lot of young adults — though I would not recommend holding your breath for that given that his claim to fame is his new paper about survey data from two years ago (ancient history in this fast-moving area, something he apparently does not understand).  But, of course, we again need the trANTZlator here to point out that when he suggests exploring ways to “communicate the correct information”, he really means to “get people to believe his lies”.

Because, after all, if he really wanted to use Facebook to communicate correct information, all he would need to do is point people to pages like CASAA, the We Are CASAA members page, ECCA UK, Vapers Network, the Tobacco Harm Reduction page created by my research group (which I believe is about as old as Facebook, though most of the traffic has shifted to those others over the last few years), or any of several other very active pages with a plethora of truth and where incorrect information is seldom posted without being corrected by someone.  His “we” may well be as clueless as he claims, but fortunately we are way ahead of them.

I wonder if this self-appointed e-cigarette “expert” has ever even seen those Facebook pages and our websites.  Probably not, or he would not have bungled so many simple points.  Still, maybe he is one of the rare ANTZ who actually reads outside of their echo chamber, and he will read this post and follow those links.  I look forward to seeing his comments there trying to provide us with “correct information”.  If you are reading this, Dr. Choi, please consider yourself encouraged to jump into the conversation — unlike your fellow ANTZ, we do not censor contributions from people who disagree with us.  Oh, but be warned, also unlike life inside your ANTZ echo chamber, when someone is lying, we call them on it.

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TrANTZlating “no safe level”

Posted on 26 October 2012 by | 4 Comments

posted by Carl V Phillips

I was asked by a CASAA member to turn the trANTZlator on the very confusing phrase, “there is no safe level of X”.  You have probably heard or read that phrase most often in the context of “there is no safe level of second-hand smoke.”  This is actually a pro-THR lie, as mentioned yesterday but the same phrasing is frequently used as an anti-THR lie in the context of the chemical exposures from THR products.

The reason this is a lie is that most anyone reading this phrase interprets it in the natural way:  no matter how low the quantity of the exposure is — and in particular, including whatever level of exposure is being discussed in the particular context — there are health effects that are significant enough to warrant being called “unsafe”.   But this is never what the phrase actually means.  It could be argued that the phrase is fine to use in a scientific context because readers there know what it really means.  But it clearly should never be used in popular communication where it will almost always be misinterpreted.

Those who use it in popular contexts either know that it is going to be misinterpreted (and thus are intentionally misleading people) or actually think that the sloppy technical phrase has its natural language meaning (in which case they have no business claiming they know what they are talking about).  Most readers of health science figure out the truism that quantities matter or “the dose makes the poison” — i.e., that trivial exposures do not matter in any practical sense.  The “no safe level” claim sends the message that this (true) belief is wrong, and it is difficult for the lay reader to have the confidence to reply, “I know that is never true.”

Most of the time, the claims “no safe level” is a sloppy shorthand (understood in the scientific context, but unknown to the broader audience that hears the phrase) for “no established safe level” or “no known safe level”, which in turn trANTZlates into “there is almost certainly a level of exposure that is perfectly safe, and it may well be that the levels being discussed in the particular context would be considered safe (in the common sense of the term), but the science has not been done.”  In other words, what is really a statement of ignorance is intentionally presented in a way that will be interpreted as a very strong affirmative claim.

Very occasionally the phrase actually does mean “we have tested exposures as small as we possibly could, and we still saw an effect” (example).  But even then it does not have the meaning that most people take from the phrase.  “As small as we could test” is still not “as small as could occur”, and “an effect” (e.g., at the molecular level) is not the same as “a measurable health effect” (i.e., real results on the actual health of people).  The former of these puts the lie to the literal interpretation of the statement, but it is the latter that really matters.  Any effects that are measured down to the lowest practical levels of exposure are not health effects, and only actual health effects can warrant use of the word “safe”.  Tiny measurable effects in vitro or even at the biomarker level do not necessarily imply actual health effects, and if they do, those health effects are almost certainly undetectable because they are tiny or extremely rare.

That leads to the ultimate problem with the phrase.  The natural interpretation of something being unsafe (which it must be, if there is “no safe”) includes the harm/risk having nontrivial magnitude.  What probably deserves to be called the #1 anti-THR lie is the statement “not a safe alternative to smoking”.  It literally means “there is some tiny tiny risk” or even “we are not sure it causes absolutely no risk whatsoever”, which is true for every exposure and thus technically true, but obviously misleading (i.e., the worst kind of lie).  When people read “not safe” or “no safe level” they do not interpret it as “some utterly trivial health risk that is so close to zero it does not matter”.

Indeed, there are a few exposures where any exposure actually does create a health risk because the risk is a constant role of the dice.  The simplest example is exposure to motorized transport:  Each second of exposure causes a tiny finite risk of injury from a collision.  The degree of safety is proportional to the quantity of the exposure, with any positive amount of exposure creating a positive amount of risk.  But if someone said “it is not safe to drive or walk to work”, it would be immediately clear that they were not using those words in the normal way (and so if they said the exact same thing in a context where people would believe them, it would be a lie).  If they said “there is no safe level of driving”, they would be effectively communicating that the phrase does not mean what people think it means.

As a slight aside, this reminds me of an ironic story that I recently heard (from a friend who contributes to this blog) about people who are so afraid of the “no safe level” of ETS will cross the street twice to avoid catching a whiff from a smoking area.  But we calculated that the risk from the average street crossing is three, maybe four, orders of magnitude higher than the risk from that ETS exposure — even if the effects of exposure are linear.  But furthermore, unlike the risk of accident from crossing the road which is pretty close to linear over the amount of exposure (crossing the road once is 1/1000th as risk as crossing 1000 times), chemical exposures like ETS tend to be far less than linear (that is, even if an exposure has risk X, an exposure that is 1/1000 as great has a risk much less than X/1000, and perhaps basically zero).  Of course, the total health damage done by the “no safe level” message in that case is pretty trivial compared to the damage done by using the phrase to discourage THR.

So what does “no safe level” mean?  Unfortunately, the trANTZlator can offer no consistent substitute.  The phrase is sloppy and can mean any of several things, ranging from “we are pretty sure there is a safe level but are not sure what it is” to “the risk is proportional to the exposure level and it never goes to zero, but it gets as small as you want, and well into the range that people would consider safe”  But it never means what most people think it means, that the quantities being discussed are known to cause health risk at a level that we should care about it (and moreover that any exposure causes such a level of risk).  After all, if the liars thought they could defend that claim, they would simply make that claim.

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“Smoking” and “nicotine” are not synonyms

Posted on 16 October 2012 by | 5 Comments

posted by Elaine Keller

The truthful statements in Justin Rohrlich’s story Smokeless Tobacco Advocate Rails Against ‘Frauds, Extremists, Liars’  were based on a two-hour-and-ten-minute phone interview with Smokefree Pennsylvania’s Bill Godshall. (How Rohrlich managed to gather so much information from Godshall in such a short phone call escapes me, but I digress.)

As a representative of one of the “Frauds, Extremists, Liars,” Danny McGoldrick, the Vice President of Research for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, was invited to comment, probably with the intention of bringing “balance” to the story.

To make any sense whatsoever of McGoldrick’s statements, you need the trANTZlator  that Carl recently introduced for the common Anti-Nicotine and Tobacco Zealot (ANTZ)  phrase, “smoking cessation.” Anyone who applies the common meanings of the words “smoking” and “cessation,” would think it is obvious that this phrase refers to the stopping (i.e. “cessation”) of the inhaling and exhaling of smoke.

*Gong* Wrong. When ANTZ people say “smoking cessation”, what they really mean is the act of stopping the use of any form of nicotine. Get it? Smoking = nicotine. Nicotine = smoking.

This is how Danny McGoldrick managed to testify at a legislative hearing on Tobacco Harm Reduction (THR) in Oklahoma with a straight face:

“…if the tobacco companies want to promote smokeless tobacco or anything else as a smoking cessation product, they can do this through the Food and Drug Administration like other cessation products by demonstrating with science that their products are a safe and effective way to quit smoking.”

“If the evidence is anywhere near what they claim, this should not present a problem for them,” he told the panel of lawmakers.

“There’s no evidence that people use smokeless tobacco to quit.”

There’s that bugaboo that Carl discussed in two previous posts: There is never no evidence (Part 1) and There is never no evidence (Part 2.) McGoldrick’s claim is nonsense from a scientific perspective.

If by “quit,” McGoldrick means “quit inhaling smoke,” it’s hard to believe that a man who holds the title of “Vice President of Research” was unable to track down any of the following articles, published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Effect of smokeless tobacco (snus) on smoking and public health in Sweden: “Snus availability in Sweden appears to have contributed to the unusually low rates of smoking among Swedish men by helping them transfer to a notably less harmful form of nicotine dependence.”

Is Swedish snus associated with smoking initiation or smoking cessation? “We investigated whether Swedish snus (snuff) use was associated with smoking cessation among males participating in a large population based twin study in Sweden. Snus use was associated with smoking cessation but not initiation.”

Randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind trial of Swedish snus for smoking reduction and cessation: “Swedish snus could promote smoking cessation among smokers in Serbia, that is, in a cultural setting without traditional use of oral, smokeless tobacco.”

The association of snus and smoking behaviour: a cohort analysis of Swedish males in the 1990s: “We found clear associations between the two habits. For the younger cohort (age 16-44 years), snus use contributed to approximately six smoking quitters per smoking starter attributable to snus. For the older cohort (age 45-84) there were slightly more than two quitters per starter.”

These are far from the only published scientific evidence that snus can be used for smoking cessation. If what McGoldrick really meant was that it is unlikely or unknown whether snus can be used for nicotine cessation, that’s another story. But what he said was “smoking cessation.” So either he is lying about there not being any evidence, or he is extremely incompetent at his job.

Even respected government agencies are guilty of using “smoking” and “nicotine” interchangeably, and therefore misleading the public. All FDA-approved “smoking cessation” products are aimed at a goal of nicotine cessation. There are three problems with this approach: 1) It doesn’t work for over 90% of smokers that try to quit, 2) It isn’t necessary to become abstinent from nicotine to achieve smoking abstinence, and 3) Smokers who switch to a low-risk alternative enjoy the same health improvements as those that used nicotine abstinence to stop smoking.

There are many published scientific reports on the beneficial health effects of switching to smokeless tobacco.

Smokeless tobacco: a gateway to smoking or a way away from smoking: “Sweden has low rates of smoking and a lower rate of respiratory diseases and lung cancers by comparison to other developed countries.”

Health risks of smoking compared to Swedish snus: “Although few in number, these seven studies do provide quantitative evidence that, for certain health outcomes, the health risks associated with snus are lower than those associated with smoking. Specifically, this is true for lung cancer (based on one study), for oral cancer (based on one study), for gastric cancer (based on one study), for cardiovascular disease (based on three of four studies), and for all-cause mortality (based on one study).”

Lung cancer mortality: comparing Sweden with other countries in the European Union: “There were 172,000 lung cancer deaths among men in the EU in 2002. If all EU countries had the LCMR of men in Sweden, there would have been 92,000 (54%) fewer deaths.”

Summary of the epidemiological evidence relating snus to health: “After smoking adjustment, snus is unassociated with cancer of the oropharynx (meta-analysis RR 0.97, 95% CI 0.68-1.37), oesophagus (1.10, 0.92-1.33), stomach (0.98, 0.82-1.17), pancreas (1.20, 0.66-2.20), lung (0.71, 0.66-0.76) or other sites, or with heart disease (1.01, 0.91-1.12) or stroke (1.05, 0.95-1.15). No clear associations are evident in never smokers, any possible risk from snus being much less than from smoking. “Snuff-dipper’s lesion” does not predict oral cancer. Snus users have increased weight, but diabetes and chronic hypertension seem unaffected. Notwithstanding unconfirmed reports of associations with reduced birthweight, and some other conditions, the evidence provides scant support for any major adverse health effect of snus.”

Again, the above are just examples. Anyone can access PubMed’s search system and find many more studies.

Rohrlich’s story states, “Danny McGoldrick just can’t wrap his head around the idea of Big Tobacco’s collective conscience telling it to guide people to smokeless for their health.”

Actually, what McGoldrick can’t wrap his head around is the concept of how Tobacco Harm Reduction works. Or perhaps he just doesn’t want to.

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