[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 39 (Wednesday, April 13, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: April 13, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                      THE EPA'S WAR ON CIGARETTES

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                     HON. JAMES H. (JIMMY) QUILLEN

                              of tennessee

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, April 13, 1994

  Mr. QUILLEN. Mr. Speaker, the following article from the Wall Street 
Journal was brought to my attention by Mr. Randolph Currin of 
Rogersville, TN, who is only one of the thousands of my constituents 
who feed and clothe their families, educate their children, and pay 
their taxes with the money they earn from the tobacco industry.
  I believe that this article points out the real motives of those who 
are using secondhand smoke as an excuse to stamp out all smoking as 
they distort the scientific evidence to fit their agenda. I commend it 
and its conclusions to my colleagues as this issue makes its way before 
the House.

                     [From the Wall Street Journal]

             Smoke and Mirrors: EPA Wages War on Cigarettes

                           (By Jacob Sullum)

       Smoking is everywhere under attack. This week a House 
     subcommittee considered the Smoke-Free Environment Act, which 
     would ban smoking in almost all indoor locations except 
     residences. New York is poised to join many other cities 
     across the country, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, 
     that have recently enacted sweeping restrictions on smoking. 
     In the past year, Vermont, Maryland and Washington state have 
     also adopted smoking bans, as have major public employers, 
     including the Defense Department.
       This flurry of antismoking activity is driven largely by a 
     1993 report from the Environmental Protection Agency that 
     declared environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) to be ``a known 
     human lung carcinogen.'' Testifying in favor of the Smoke-
     Free Environment Act last month, EPA Administrator Carol 
     Browner noted that ``in the year since publication of the EPA 
     report * * *  we have seen a rapid acceleration of measures 
     to protect nonsmokers in a variety of settings.''
       Most supporters of such measures probably believe that the 
     EPA report presents definitive scientific evidence that 
     exposure to ETS causes lung cancer. But those who have taken 
     a closer look have come to believe that the EPA twisted the 
     evidence to arrive at a predetermined conclusion. The 
     overriding motive was to discourage smoking by making it less 
     acceptable and more inconvenient. Indeed, the main benefit 
     that Ms. Browner claims for the Smoke-Free Environment Act is 
     its expected impact on smokers.
       Yet coercing people for their own good still raises a few 
     hackles in this country, so paternalists need to offer some 
     additional justification. That's why they're been pushing the 
     idea that smoking endangers innocent bystanders. The problem 
     is, the evidence for this claim is weak, inconsistent and 
     ambiguous. The EPA's report seems designed to conceal that 
     problem.
       The agency's most blatant trick is to use an unconventional 
     definition of statistical significance. Epidemiologists 
     generally call an association between a risk factor and a 
     disease ``significant'' if the probability that it occurred 
     purely by chance is 5% or less. This is also the standard 
     that the EPA had always used for risk assessment. Yet for the 
     report on ETS, the agency abandoned the usual definition and 
     called a result significant if the probability that it 
     occurred by chance was 10% or less. This change in effect 
     doubles the odds of being wrong.
       Even according to the broader definition, only one of the 
     11 U.S. studies that the report analyzes found a 
     statistically significant link between ETS and lung cancer 
     (according to the usual definition, none of them did). To 
     bolster the evidence, the EPA combined data from these 11 
     sources into a ``meta-analysis,'' a technique originally 
     intended for randomized clinical trials. UCLA epidemiologist 
     James Enstrom says using meta-analysis with retrospective 
     case-control studies, such as those examined by the EPA, is 
     ``fraught with dangers,'' because the studies are apt to 
     differ in the way they define smokers, the types of lung 
     cancer they include and the confounding variables they 
     consider, and so on.
       In any event, the EPA's conclusion--that being married to a 
     smoker raises a woman's chance of getting lung cancer by 
     about 19%--is justified only according to the looser 
     definition of statistical significance chosen especially for 
     these data. By the conventional standard, the meta-analysis 
     does not support the claim that ETS causes lung cancer.
       Furthermore, the EPA excluded from its analysis a large 
     U.S. study published in the November 1992 American Journal of 
     Public Health that did not find a statistically significant 
     link between ETS and lung cancer. Had this study been 
     included, the meta-analysis might not have yielded a 
     significant result even by the relaxed standard.
       Despite what a July 1992 article in Science described as 
     ``fancy statistical foot-work,'' the EPA was able to claim 
     only a weak association between ETS and lung cancer. With a 
     risk increase as low as 19%, it is very difficult to rule out 
     the possibility that the association is due to other factors. 
     In 1991 Gary Huber, professor of medicine at the University 
     of Texas Health Science Center, and two colleagues examined 
     the 30 ETS studies discussed by the EPA in its report. ``At 
     least 20 confounding variables have been identified as 
     important to the development of lung cancer,'' they wrote in 
     Consumers' Research. ``No reported study comes anywhere close 
     to controlling, or even mentioning, half of these.''
       Furthermore, to come up with its estimate of 3,000 
     additional cancer deaths a year, more than two-thirds of 
     which are supposedly due to exposure outside the home, the 
     EPA relied on several controversial assumptions. It assumed 
     that cotinine, a nicotine metabolite, is a reliable measure 
     of ETS exposure. Yet nicotine is present in a number of 
     foods, and the report itself concedes that ``cotinine is not 
     an ideal biomarker for ETS.'' The EPA also assumed that lung-
     cancer risk is directly proportional to ETS levels and that 
     no level of ETS can be considered safe. Yet, dose-response 
     relationships vary from one substance to another, and many 
     scientists believe that a carcinogen has to be present at a 
     certain level before it can do any harm.
       Given these and other contrivances employed by the EPA, it 
     is difficult to avoid the conclusion that policy has dictated 
     science in the case of ETS. This approach may be politically 
     effective in the short term, but it is ultimately self-
     defeating. By compromising the standards and methods of 
     science, the experts also undermine their claim to authority.

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