Tobacco control admits lying!

Anti-Smoking Groups Admit to Knowingly Misleading the Public About Effects of Secondhand Smoke; Wall Street Journal Highlights the Admission

Essentially, what this response is doing is acknowledging that the statements being made by anti-smoking groups are misleading and deceptive, but arguing that these groups have no choice but to be misleading and deceptive because the public is too stupid to understand the truth.

Interestingly, while it is apparently acceptable for anti-smoking groups to misrepresent the science, it is intolerable and criminal for the tobacco companies to take even slight liberties with the use of language in their public communications. Of course, this double standard is justified because we’re doing it all for the kids.

Of course Stanton Glantz tries justifying it with this statement.

“When you take the science and put it in the public domain you can’t include all the caveats,” says Stanton Glantz, a tobacco researcher at the University of California in San Francisco. “The messages have to be simplified so people can understand them.”