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TobaccoHarmReduction.org

Original Article	Our Response
U of A must say no to research funding from Big Tobacco	U of A must say no to research censorship and misinformation.
Dr. Charl Els Edmonton Journal Thursday, May 10, 2007 A year ago, I applied for federal research funding to answer the question "Do people with severe and persistent mental illness die of complications of their disease or do they die of tobacco-related illnesses?" This is important to learn because it is estimated that people with mental illness smoke half of all cigarettes consumed.	Els failed to mention that he has crusaded to prevent psychiatric patients from smoking prior to researching the matter. More than a few studies have shown nicotine to be of benefit to sufferers of various mental diseases. It shows a certain callousness to deny these patients a source of relief without investigating the potentially harmful consequences of deprivation. At the very least, he should consider supplying them with alternative safer sources of nicotine.
A requirement of the granting body was the absence of tobacco funding in my department. To my surprise, the department of psychiatry at the University of Alberta could not comply with this request due to alleged consulting work being done for the tobacco industry by an unidentified faculty member on his own time. The U of A faced a tough decision: should it halt the tobacco industry consultant's work or should it deny another project access to federal research cash.	In making the "argument" that appears in this commentary, Els conveniently ignores three critical facts that he is no doubt aware of: 1) The reason that some tobacco-prohibitionist funding streams have restrictive covenants that attempt to dictate university policy (specifically restrict the freedom of other researchers at the institution to accept industry funding) is because activists like Els put them there! The problem is not created by the industry funding, it is created by the people who are claiming that industry funding is the problem. This is similar to the metaphorical definition of chutzpah, in which a boy kills his parents and then pleads for mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan. It is rather hard to feel sorry for someone who was surprised that the outlandish rules that he and his allies imposed might come back to bite him. 2) Not that he was surprised. It has been reported here that Els is closely associated with at least one of the organizations who denied him funding. In addition, the same funding stream was administered by a close colleague of his, Peter Selby. No doubt Els knew about the restrictions and should not have been shocked. Presumably he could have gotten the restriction waived if he had really been interested in getting the money, rather than in generating political theater to try to shut down competing research. 3) As Els implicitly points out himself, the bans on research grants that he is calling for would not actually fulfill the terms of the restrictive covenants in the funding. Those covenants typically demand that the university restrict professors' freedom of association on their own time (e.g., forbidding consulting for the tobacco industry), a rule that the university is never going to try to impose (and if they did, it would certainly be struck down by the courts). Thus, the "problem" that he claims that funding bans will eliminate will not actually be eliminated.
The tobacco industry won; academic freedom lost.	We trust that anyone reading this will realize that the threat to academic freedom does not come from academics determining what research they think is important and then obtaining the required funding to do it.
This is not the only relationship with the tobacco industry at the U of A. Canada's first and only School of Public Health inherited from the faculty of medicine a researcher with $1.5 million in U.S. tobacco funding.	He fails to mention that this unrestricted funding is used at the discretion of the research group to study tobacco harm reduction, or to provide any details that would allow the reader to find this out. More details can be found elsewhere in this website, but suffice to say that this important research could not be done without industry funding.
These events raise the question: Is the tobacco industry an appropriate partner for universities? But why not start this process of checks and measures with the one industry that, through its own actions, has irreparably damaged its credibility? Its products make addicts of children, kill many of its customers after they take the product as intended, and is shunned by all self-described ethical investment funds. At various stages over half a century, it has hidden research findings, denied that nicotine is addictive, intimidated respected researchers, and created diversionary research tactics. The Canadian Medical Association has a policy that recommends and advocates that all Canadian medical schools adopt policies banning donations and/or grants from the tobacco industry. Influential journals, major foundations, some funding streams, and prestigious universities have been isolating the tobacco industry and have limited their influence by screening out tobacco industry-funded research. New strategies include expanding policies to restrict colleagues in the same departments from obtaining research dollars or to participate in educational opportunities.	Why not start this process of checks and balances on the research itself rather than the sources of funding? Few industries would withstand the scrutiny commonly applied to the tobacco industry. Pharmaceutical, food, energy, chemical and telecommunications industries, to name just a few, to say nothing of purveyors of gambling and alcohol, would be subject to many of the same criticisms.
Recently, a student from the School of Public Health was asked to leave a training course in Ontario because of a peer's connections with the tobacco industry. And another student from the same school encountered obstacles to employment with a government organization for this very reason. Where are the rights of these students?	This is probably the most Orwellian bit of the commentary, though most readers would not know it. Els definitely does not want people to know the truth about this. Though he did not mention names or details, it is fairly clear which cases he was talking about. Both of those individuals worked for ASTER, and so had actually been exercising the very rights that Els is trying to deny them -- to work on tobacco harm reduction research that would not be possible without industry funding. The first of them was Paul Bergen (actually a fulltime School of Public Health researcher, not a student) was thrown out of a workshop on tobacco at an academic conference (which was primarily about subjects other than tobacco) because he refused to sign a "loyalty oath" that said, among other things, that he and his academic unit refused all industry funding. Paul had already participated in about 3/4 of the workshop, and had proven to be a valuable enough contributor that the other participants argued that he should be allowed to stay. Nevertheless, Peter Selby (yes, the same Peter Selby mentioned above) threw him out of the room. The other individual was a student who was employed by ASTER and completed work on several projects, but was then intimidated into giving up the authorship credit she deserved. This would been outlandish behavior by a government organization, had that employer really been responsible, but on further investigation it came out that it was actually academic staff at the university who caused the trouble for her, and there actually were no direct problems from the employer. We thought the "killing your parents / orphan" maneuver was chutzpah, but this takes it even further. This is more like killing someone else's children, and then demanding that the parents be punished for not taking better care of the kids. It was Els and his cronies that inflicted these indignities on honest researchers who chose to pursue particular research, not some mysterious existential force that was exacting punishment on random unassociated people.
These events raise the question: Is the tobacco industry an appropriate partner for universities? Although the counter-actions may appear punitive, it is in actuality more a situation of David and Goliath. In comparison with industry, health advocates operate on a shoe-string budget and rely on policies and legislation. This is the very reason why the Schizophrenia Society of Canada and the Canadian Mental Health Association banned tobacco funding.	Unlike many of the above misleading claims, that we suspect Els is well aware of the inaccuracy of, we guess that he actually believes this. More's the pity. The tobacco prohibitionists have completely dominated tobacco research, funding, and policy discussions for well over a decade. Its quite the bejewelled shoe string when you consider the many billions of dollars they have to work with. They have failed to reduce smoking rates and, unwilling to admit that the failure might be due to their strategy, have convinced themselves that they are losing because they are a tiny, underfunded voice in the wilderness, overwhelmed by powerful enemies. It might be funny if it were not for the fact that this delusion causes them to continue pushing the same failed approaches, and thus cause countless smokers to die needlessly.
The University of Toronto decided to divest its tobacco holdings, stating that "tobacco is a very rare case where there is no social debate and no academic debate around the harmful effects of it. There's also a body of policies in the university and a body of regulations and laws in the country that already restrict tobacco in a big way. So, the combination of these two things made this something we could act on." The U of A's faculty of medicine and dentistry just banned all tobacco-industry-funded research. Why does the U of A continue to partner with Big Tobacco, even at the expense of other researchers and students?	Making misleading statements must just become a habit at some point…. There is nothing resembling a "partner" relationship when one entity gives an unrestricted grant and walks away. "Big Tobacco" refers to the major cigarette manufacturers, while our funding comes from the much smaller smokeless tobacco industry. The damage to other researchers and students is caused by the policies of the anti-tobacco activists, not the industry funding.
If the research currently funded by tobacco dollars is important, legitimate, and can stand up to the scrutiny of a panel of reviewers, it could be the recipient of neutral funding, which would allow dissemination in appropriate journals and conferences.	If the research is not important and legitimate, let's hear what Els has to say about it. Since he is resorting to innuendo, and has never once stood up for himself and made claims that our research was flawed, we have to assume that he is admitting that it is important and legitimate. We detect a hint of envy here, and more than a hint of misinformation. Getting research funding is a miserable pain that no one likes, but that is necessary to do certain kinds of research. We have the funding, and can do our research rather than wasting our time chasing more funding. The "neutral funding" is pure disinformation. Readers are unlikely to realize that most of the research funding related to tobacco is controlled by the tobacco prohibitionists (i.e., people like Els). If only the research permitted by that funding could be done, there would be no serious harm reduction research.
Should the tobacco industry continue to benefit by indicating that its consultants are academics with the prestigious U of A? Should the university continue to allow this dilution of its reputation through the outside work of a very small number of its faculty? It is both the responsibility, and within the power of, the board of governors to redirect the few tobacco-funded faculty members, and thereby promote academic freedom and integrity, and thus align the U of A with the minister of health's vision for tobacco control.	Actually, we have offered to Els and his cronies that if they want to replace our funding with the same amount of completely unrestricted money from another source, we will take it. If he really was worried about the funding source, and was not simply trying to shut down competing research, perhaps we would have gotten some response to these offers.
Just as smoking bylaws have become inevitable across Canada (and our society is beginning to reap the health benefits), the marriage between academia and tobacco money is dissolving.	A funny thing happened on the way to dissolution: On the same day this commentary was published, it was reported that the University of California faculty voted overwhelmingly in favor of academic freedom and against a ban on tobacco funding.
Herein lies a great opportunity for ethical leadership in Alberta.	Nowhere does Els ever state what the ethical basis is for his proposal. "Those guys are really bad, so we will forbid them from having their voices heard" is not exactly an ethical standard that is widely accepted in the modern Western world.
Dr. Charl Els is a psychiatrist and addiction specialist in the faculty of medicine and dentistry at the University of Alberta, and a member of Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada.

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