Weaponised academia

How seemingly worthless studies serve a political purpose

A paper I wrote titled The Corporate Playbook: A Self-Serving Myth was published yesterday. There is a surprisingly large literature from ‘public health’ academics looking at the political strategies of industries they disapprove of (which is nearly all of them these days). The main conclusion of my paper is that the strategies and ‘tactics’ that supposedly constitute the corporate or tobacco playbook are bog standard public affairs techniques that everybody who engages in the policy-making process uses, not least ‘public health’ groups themselves.

A further conclusion is that fatuous rhetoric about the ‘tobacco playbook’ serves a political purpose. It is itself a political strategy designed to undermine the opposition. Some of these academics say quite explicitly that the ‘tactics’ used by ‘unhealthy commodity industries’ are so underhand that the industries should be excluded from dialogue with policy-makers altogether.

This is the weaponisation of academia. Hardly anybody reads these journal articles and they make no contribution to political science, but they can be cited by others and the cumulative effect is to create the illusion that there is a serious, evidence-based and peer-reviewed basis for claims that are merely activist talking points.

A further function of this literature is to portray contentious ‘public health’ ideology, such as the belief that harmful consumption is the fault of producers rather than consumers and that advertising bans reduce harmful consumption, as unquestionable facts while portraying arguments against paternalistic lifestyle regulation as blatant falsehoods. A typical example of this was published in Tobacco Control this month. The authors looked at industry submissions to government consultations (a common methodology as it is simple desk work). The consultations were about e-cigarettes in Australia, where the sale of vapes is banned, and the authors made a subjective assessment of the responses from ‘industry actors’. The mere fact that anyone associated with the e-cigarette industry responded to the consultation was portrayed as ‘commercial actor interference’. Straight away, you can see how they are framing the issue.

The authors don’t list these ‘industry actors’ but since e-cigarettes are banned in Australia, they can’t be from the e-cigarette ‘industry’ as people in more civilised countries would know it. They are described as ‘actors with a direct and indirect financial stake in ENDS [the pointless ‘public health’ term for vapes]’, which mostly means retailers and various trade associations. Only 12% of the submissions were from the vape or tobacco industries.

The authors conclude that:

Almost all submissions featured the misuse of evidence (96%), with the use of unsupported factual assertions (92%) and the promotion of weak evidence (79%) the most common practices identified.

That sounds like an absolute avalanche of misinformation, but look more closely and it becomes obvious that there are some very subjective judgements being applied.

For example, they claim that 53% of submissions “mimicked scientific critique”. This is a phrase increasingly used by activist-academics to describe any dispute about evidence.

They privileged the testimony of purported experts over the balance of the evidence, despite some of the ‘experts’ receiving direct or indirect industry funding.

Whether or not an expert receives industry funding has no bearing on whether they are telling the truth, but this alone counts as ‘misuse of evidence’ in this study.

Submitters also stated that they supported rigorous, evidence-based approaches but denied the effectiveness of evidence-based public health strategies.

What are these ‘evidence-based public health strategies’? Alas, we are never told, but we can tell from the tone of the paper that they involve the total prohibition of e-cigarettes. There is a huge amount of evidence that prohibition has been a fiasco in Australia and that a more laissez-faire approach has been a success - both socially, economically and in public health terms - elsewhere in the world. But that is not what the authors think and therefore to say so counts as misinformation.

Misleading inferences were frequently made (26%); for example, submitters claimed that the uptake of ENDS in certain countries coincided with reduced smoking prevalence in youth, making it seem as though the latter was solely due to the former.

Did they claim is was solely due to vaping? I doubt it, but there is strong evidence from the UK, USA and many other countries that it was at least partly due to vaping. Who decides if this inference is misleading? Apparently it comes down to three ‘public health’ academics in Australia.

The authors then claim that 88% of submissions contained “logical fallacies and flawed arguments”. What were these logical fallacies?

Appeal to hypocrisy featured in almost half of the submissions (45%), with submitters typically noting that it was hypocritical for combustible cigarettes and/or nicotine replacement therapies to be more freely available than ENDS.

It’s not really the hypocrisy that’s the issue, is it? It’s more the absurdity of banning virtually every nicotine product except the one that is exceptionally dangerous. Why shouldn’t people point this out to the government?

Just over one-third (34%) of submissions featured false equivalence arguments. These arguments typically promoted less restrictive ENDS legislation by equating ENDS with substances such as coffee, or likening ENDS to other forms of harm reduction, such as seatbelts.

That’s not a false equivalence. Coffee and nicotine are genuinely equivalent in most important respects and ‘ENDS’ are indeed a form of harm reduction.

One-third of submissions (33%) featured ad hominem arguments, with submitters criticising people or organisations that did not support liberalised access to ENDS rather than addressing the argument being made by these groups.

Coming from people who dismiss out of hand any evidence involving people who have received “direct or indirect industry funding”, this is pretty rich.

We are then told that 60% of submissons made “unsubstantiated claims about the benefits of liberalising access to ENDS.” How so? Strap yourself in….

For example, submitters argued that permissive ENDS legislation would benefit public health by (1) saving lives or reducing harm from smoking (33%), (2) reducing smoking rates (33%) and (3) increasing the quality or safety of ENDS (12%). Other arguments were based on economic grounds, with claims that permissive legislation would increase tax revenue and benefit small businesses (26%).

All of this can easily be substantiated. The points about tax revenue and product quality are so obviously true that they shouldn’t even require evidence while the public health arguments have plenty of evidence from multiple disciplines to draw on. All of these points are, in fact, very difficult to argue against, but the authors don’t need to do that because they have appointed themselves as the sole arbiters of the truth.

There is much more of this, but let’s jump to the conclusion:

Findings from the present study indicate that persuasive and misleading communication practices are being widely used by commercial actors and those with indirect interests in ENDS products to undermine the development of public policy that threatens industry profits. To ensure Australia meets its obligations as a signatory to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, immediate action is required to limit the influence of these actors on policymaking processes. Inoculating policymakers against actor influence, arming policymakers with tools that automatically identify misleading communication practices and misinformation and improving transparency in public consultation processes is critical.

As is often the case with these studies, the conclusion is that opponents should be silenced. As this study has now been published in a peer-reviewed journal, albeit a glorified activist newsletter, it can now be cited as a ‘fact’ that the vast majority of industry-adjacent submissions to Austraian e-cigarette consultations contain lies.

To take another example, also from Australia, a systematic review of tobacco industry responses to consultations on tobacco taxation identified several industry arguments which they concluded were “unsupported by available evidence”. These included the claims that increases in tobacco tax fuel the illicit trade, are regressive, and are “unfair on smokers”. The latter is clearly a subjective judgement that cannot be proven or disproven with evidence. As a simple matter of economic fact, indirect taxes on products which are disproportionately purchased by people on low incomes are regressive. And although the impact of tobacco taxation on black market tobacco sales is contested by many in public health, studies from the economics literature such as this show a positive relationship. It is also bleeding obvious, as Australians should know better than anyone.

In their rebuttal, the authors argue that “tobacco tax increases can also be viewed as progressive because poorer smokers are more price sensitive” and that “[w]hile some may agree that high tobacco taxes are unfair on smokers, it is also true that most smokers want to quit”. These are counter-arguments at best and non sequiturs at worst. Public health academics may believe that the negative impacts of tobacco taxation are outweighed by the benefits, but this does not justify the strong claim that the existence of negative impacts are “unsupported by available evidence”.

When Martino et al. (2017) used the same methodology to study alcohol industry submissions to an Australian consultation on alcohol marketing, they went so far as to reject the term ‘argument’ when describing industry arguments. It was, they said, too flattering a word for claims which they considered to be completely without merit.

While Savell et al. use the term “arguments” to refer to assertions or claims made by the tobacco industry in support of its position in favour of or against particular policies, we suggest a more suitable label. The word “argument” is generally understood to refer to a connected series of propositions intended to establish a conclusion. The validity of the conclusion depends on the veracity of the propositions and the soundness of the logic linking them. In our view, by using the term “argument”, Savell et al. elevate what are, almost without exception merely claims or assertions, to a status they do not deserve. Accordingly, we use the terms “claim” and “assertion” interchangeably in our analysis reflecting the class “argument” in Savell et al.’s system.

The industry’s arguments in this instance included the claim that alcohol marketers adhered to the self-regulatory code, that alcohol misuse had been declining in Australia for decades and that advertising bans would make it more difficult for producers to win market share. Such claims were often demonstrably true and, when not beyond dispute, were at least defensible, and yet the authors dismissed them out of hand. In the text, they downgrade certain claims to “mantras”!

This is what I mean when I say that the academic literature is being used to transform contentious opinions into peer-reviewed ‘facts’. The whole framing is one in which public health experts advocate for evidence-based policy while industry actors mimick scientific critique to lobby for unsubstantiated policies. In reality, both sides are doing much the same thing, but it sounds much worse if you are an actor lobbying that if you are an expert advocating.

The literature is sometimes used to blatantly settle scores. For example, in 2021, the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs published an article by Andrew Bartlett and Jim McCambridge titled ‘Appropriating the Literature: Alcohol Industry Actors' Interventions in Scientific Journals’ in which they effectively adjudicated between two noted critics of the alcohol industry (Mark Petticrew and Nason Maani) and some industry-funded organisations that had been disparaged by them. After Petticrew and Maani had written a series of articles accusing the industry-funded groups of downplaying the risks of alcohol consumption, one of the journals allowed them a right to reply. This enraged McCambridge.

Like Petticrew, McCambridge is an intense zealot who has shown that fanaticism and paranoia are no obstacles to a well-rumunerated career in ‘public health’. I wrote about him last year when he was fighting an unfair dismissal case on the basis that his extreme opinions about the booze industry were protected beliefs. Bartlett is also a strong critic of the industry and in their article they declared that the industry-adjacent organisations’ rebuttals not only had little merit, but had created a “counterfeit scientific controversy”.

The issue they were fighting over was hilariously trivial. Petticrew and his chums had been publishing various studies in which they rooted through websites and tweets trying to find evidence of industry-related organisations denying the link between alcohol consumption and cancer. I wrote about two of them at the time. They were tendentious garbage and possibly libellous, hence the journal allowing four of the organisations that had been criticised a right to reply. They included Drinkaware, a charity that normally doesn’t say boo to a goose, and the Portman Group. Their complaints were well founded. Petticrew had been guilty of taking words out of context and cherry-picking to arrive at a misleading conclusion. The conclusion was, as usual, that you can’t trust anyone vaguely associated with commerce and should put all your trust in people like Petticrew and McCambridge.

Absurdly, Bartlett and McCambridge portrayed themselves as honest brokers calmly assessing this storm in a teacup. McCambridge - who is the author of study titled ‘Be Aware of Drinkaware’ - declared that Petticrew was basically right and that the industry-funded groups were basically wrong, but that wasn’t his main concern. His main concern was that the maligned organisations had been given space to respond in a peer-reviewed journal at all.

In the future, it will be possible to write, “previous papers by Petticrew and colleagues have been heavily criticised,” attaching several references to add credibility to such claims, just as Sim et al. (2019) use Larsen et al. (2018). It is key to remember here that whereas the audience for a genuine scientific controversy includes other scientists in the field, the audiences for a counterfeit scientific controversy are people outside the field (e.g., the public, policy makers, journalists). These audiences cannot be expected to possess the tacit knowledge, obtained by socialisation in the research community, that would allow them to discriminate between sources and to identify genuine disputes between scientists.

They concluded with a strong suggestion that journal editors should reject publishing anything by industry-funded organisations.

It is appropriate for journals to consider why they publish this kind of content, which adds to the burden of doing work in this area, manufacturing doubt about (and distracting attention from) important scientific issues, in part by facilitating attacks on published research and researchers. These organisations can write what they like on their websites, but why should journals publish such harmful material? Gatekeeping is an essential part of doing good science.

In this example, we see the use of contrary views and evidence explicitly described as harmful and custodians of the peer-reviewed literature explicitly portrayed as gatekeepers. They alone know the truth and everything else is just ‘interference’, ‘counterfeit controversy’ and ‘mimicking scientific critique’.

There is a huge amount of projection in this corner of academia. ‘Public health’ academics accuse companies of using a mythical ‘tobacco playbook’ because they know, deep down, that they are using the anti-tobacco playbook on food, gambling, alcohol and much else.

There is projection in Bartlett and McCambridge’s silly study too. They assume that the industry is trying to give misinformation credibility by putting it in peer-reviewed journals because that is what ‘public health’ academics do all the time. They are aware that publication in an accredited journal confers a degree of (dubious) legitimacy that they don’t want their opponents to have. Policy-makers are explicitly mentioned as one group of people who may be (in their opinion) unduly impressed by a citation in the academic literature. And yet the study itself expresses little more than the authors’ own opinion and should have been a blog post. They published it in a journal because that allows it to be used as credible ammunition by ‘public health’ lobbyists. It is precisely because they know how easy it is to publish politically-driven junk in public health journals that they fear their opponents doing the same.