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Tobacco donations blasted 

Alberta's Liberal Opposition is criticizing the governing Progressive Conservatives for taking political donations from a tobacco firm.

The Liberals point to public documents that show the Alberta PC party received three donations last year worth a total of $5,125 from the National Smokeless Tobacco Co.

But PC party spokesman Jim Campbell says he sees nothing wrong with taking such donations, which in this case were tickets to leaders' dinners in Calgary and Edmonton.

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Liberals Accuse Stelmach Tories Of Taking Donations From Big Tobacco 

Alberta's Liberal Opposition is criticizing the governing Progressive Conservatives for taking political donations from a tobacco firm.

The Liberals point to public documents that show the Alberta PC Party received three donations last year worth a total of $5,125 from the National Smokeless Tobacco Co.

Party spokesman Jim Campbell says he sees nothing wrong with taking donations from `a legal company selling a legal product.' . . .

Liberal health critic Dave Taylor says it simply doesn't look right when a government that's taking steps to reduce smoking is also taking political donations from a tobacco firm.

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BAT, CEPS Fight Counterfeiting  

The British American Tobacco (BAT) company and the Customs, Excise and Preventive Service (CEPS) are engaged in a two-day anti-counterfeiting workshop at the La Palm Royal Hotel.

The two organizations signed a Memorandum of Understanding to collaborate in the area of fighting counterfeiting and trading in such products with particular reference to cigarettes.

In his overview of the workshop, Don Ayao Dussey, BAT's Corporate & Regulatory Affairs Manager, West and Central Africa, described the event as another milestone in the fight against illicit trade in Ghana. . . .

"It is in recognition of the tremendous contribution of CEPS and other security agencies to reducing the illicit trade that we donated 12 jungle motorbikes to help CEPS in their efforts to have better control of our borders and the product flow," he said.

BAT, he said, was committed to setting high standards of good corporate citizenship by helping to improve the capacity of their partners in the process of eliminating illicit trading activities. . . .

Some 12 countries mostly in Africa and the Middle East accounted for most of the financial losses of BAT in terms of illegal trade in tobacco products.

Nigeria with a very big market, he pointed out, accounted for $48 million, followed by South Africa with $44 million.

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• Traders Offer Bribe to Stop Anti-Smoking Campaign 

Tobacco traders in the Kingdom offered a bribe of SR4 million to organizers of a campaign titled “Family Without Smoking ... For Protection from Cancer” to stop it, said Fahd Al-Suleimani, president of Iman Charitable Society for the Care of Cancer Patients.

“They also offered a bribe of SR2 million if we remove the words ‘For Protection from Cancer’ from the campaign slogan,” Al-Watan Arabic daily quoted Al-Suleimani as saying at a press conference held to announce the campaign.

He said the monthlong campaign, which began yesterday, includes a three-kilometer walk on the Jeddah Corniche on Wednesday with the participation of Makkah Gov. Prince Khaled Al-Faisal and Saudi singer Muhammad Abdu.

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Boris: wants local authorities to have discretion to allow smoking in pubs and clubs 

Boris Johnson was plunged into a row over the smoking ban today after it emerged he had taken upto £10,000 from the tobacco industry.

The Tory mayoral candidate triggered criticism when he declared he wanted an "online referendum" to give Londoners a say on whether they wanted the ban overturned.

But Mr Johnson came under further fire when it was revealed that he had pocketed "between £5,000 and £10,000" for a speech to the Association of Tobacco last year. The payment is listed in the MPs' Register of Interests for June 2007.

Mr Johnson's new policy was revealed in an online webchat with The Sun today. . . .

Ken Livingstone said: "Boris Johnson's minders are again desperately scrabbling to conceal his real positions. The smoking ban represents one of the biggest health improvements we have seen, and Boris Johnson's admission that he wants to give boroughs the power to overturn the ban on smoking to pubs and clubs, shows he is hopelessly out of touch to be the Mayor of a modern, forward looking city like London.

"It is made even worse by the fact that it follows a donation from a tobacco group. The smoking ban has been hugely successful and is very popular with Londoners." . . .

The Boris Johnson campaign said that he "was engaged to deliver a speech to the Tobacco Association on June 20th 2007 as part of his JLA Speakers Agency work".

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Constructing “Sound Science” and “Good Epidemiology”: Tobacco, Lawyers, and Public Relations Firms 

The tobacco industry has attacked “junk science” to discredit the evidence that secondhand smoke—among other environmental toxins—causes disease. Philip Morris used public relations firms and lawyers to develop a “sound science” program in the United States and Europe that involved recruiting other industries and issues to obscure the tobacco industry's role. The European “sound science” plans included a version of “good epidemiological practices” that would make it impossible to conclude that secondhand smoke—and thus other environmental toxins—caused diseases.

Public health professionals need to be aware that the “sound science” movement is not an indigenous effort from within the profession to improve the quality of scientific discourse, but reflects sophisticated public relations campaigns controlled by industry executives and lawyers whose aim is to manipulate the standards of scientific proof to serve the corporate interests of their clients.

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Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health 

ENGBER: The Paranoid Style in American Science 

In 1969, a series of historic memorandums began to circulate at a tobacco company in Kentucky. The documents addressed growing public concern over the health risks associated with smoking and outlined a brazen response: The cigarette manufacturers would "establish—once and for all—that no scientific evidence has ever been produced, presented or submitted to prove conclusively that cigarette smoking causes cancer." To support this ludicrous assertion (which the tobacco executives knew to be false) would require a spin campaign of monumental proportions. That campaign's inaugural words have now become a slogan for corporate connivery: "Doubt is our product," read one infamous memo, "since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public."

This corporate strategy of "manufactured uncertainty" has become only more refined in the last 40 years. According to former Assistant Secretary of Energy David Michaels, whose startling new book, Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health, comes out this week, manufacturers routinely hire "product defense" firms to challenge scientific findings and stave off government regulation. Scientific consultants are brought in to dust off and reanalyze data sets, group and regroup subject pools, and dream up confounding variables—all so that a given study can be discredited as inconclusive or, worse, labeled as "junk science." . . .

The success of these programs shows how the public's understanding of science has devolved into a perverse worship of uncertainty

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• Tobacco lobby has infiltrated Hong Kong government, campaigner says 

Anti-smoking legislation in Hong Kong has been weakened over the past decade partly because of the links between officials and the tobacco industry, a campaigner alleged Thursday.

Judith Mackay, World Health Organization advisor and director of the Asian Consultancy on Tobacco Control, claimed industry influence has caused a 'recession' in smoking controls.

She said the tobacco industry had become more influential with the government over the past 10 years, resulting in the watering down of long-awaited anti-smoking legislation.

Mackay complained about continuing delays to a full ban on smoking in pubs and nightclubs in the former British colony, and low taxes on cigarettes. . . .

'There have been ministers appointed in the government who have had serious tobacco industry contacts,' the activist said. 'There have been people appointed to the central policy unit who have very close links with the tobacco industry.'

Mackay argued that Hong Kong has gone from being the regional leader in tobacco controls to an also-ran, with Singapore overtaking the city as the one with the toughest anti-smoking legislation.

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Supreme Court turns out the 'lights' 

By refusing to take action Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court wrote the end to one of the most celebrated and controversial legal cases in the history of Madison County.

The Supreme Court sided with Philip Morris USA, refusing to disturb an Illinois Supreme Court ruling that threw out a $10.1 billion verdict out of Madison County over the company's "light" cigarettes. The court issued its order without comment. . . .

The case became part of a contentious Illinois Supreme Court campaign in 2004. Tort reform groups, including the Illinois Civil Justice League, pointed to Byron's ruling as symptomatic of what they said was bias toward plaintiffs and their attorneys in the Madison County court system. The Republican candidate, Lloyd Karmeier, who was supported by the ICJL, won election to the Supreme Court.

Philip Morris appealed Byron's ruling directly to the Illinois Supreme Court.

Last year, Karmeier was part of the 4-2 majority on the Supreme Court who overturned Byron's verdict, effectively ruling that the Federal Trade Commission had permitted Philip Morris USA to use the term "light" in its packaging and advertising.

Tillery appealed the Illinois Supreme Court's ruling to the nation's highest court, which declined Monday to hear arguments in the case.

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The best justice money can buy? Big Tobacco, Philip Morris and the US courts 

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Tobacco Co.'s Attempt to Overturn $10B Light Cigarette Verdict Begins in IL Supreme Court 

Newly elected Lloyd Karmeier, a Washington County Circuit judge, will not be on the bench for the hearing because he will not be sworn in until Dec. 6. But the case likely will not be decided before he joins the bench. That leaves open the question of whether Karmeier will weigh in on the matter.

If he decides to opt out of the case, Philip Morris would have the burden of winning over four of the five remaining judges to reverse the lower court's ruling. If the company cannot garner four votes, court precedent suggests that the verdict would stand.

Normally Karmeier's absence would leave six justices to decide the matter, but Justice Robert Thomas has chosen not to participate in the case because of a conflict of interest.

Court rules allow sitting justices to participate in all pending cases, said court spokesman Joseph Tybor. A spokesman for Karmeier said the judge has not determined if he will participate in the case, which involves Altria's U.S. tobacco unit, Philip Morris USA. After joining the bench, he plans to discuss pending cases with the other justices and then make up his mind, the spokesman said.

Court observers are betting that Karmeier will not stand aside because of the significance of the case. Karmeier, a Republican, replaces Philip Rarick, a Democrat whose term will expire in December. The court now has four Democrats and three Republicans.

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SAMUELS: Judges for Sale  

But some victory. The state Supreme Court justice who cast the deciding vote in the case, a former lower court judge named Lloyd Karmeier, received millions of dollars in campaign support in 2004 that Philip Morris and other tobacco interests tendered for the very purpose of trying to reverse the enormous "light" cigarette award. They got what they paid for.

Judicial ethics rules exempt campaign contributions from their otherwise strict approach of requiring judges to disqualify themselves whenever their impartiality might reasonably be questioned. But given the history, Justice Karmeier's failure to voluntarily recuse himself was a disgrace.

The Philip Morris case, it should be noted, was not the first time that Justice Karmeier, a Republican, ruled for big contributors in a high-profile case. . . .

Legislative and executive officials represent their various constituencies. Judges, in contrast, are supposed to represent only the ideal of justice. A judge deciding a case shouldn't be worrying how ruling a certain way might affect campaign fundraising, or whether it might invite a blitz of negative TV ads in the next election.

It is time -- long past time, really -- to drain the influence money from America's system of justice.

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EDITORIAL: ILLINOIS SUPREME COURT: Buying justice 

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an editorial today that begins: "BIG BUSINESS won a nice return on a $4.3 million investment in Tuesday's election. It now has a friendly justice on the Illinois Supreme Court." and wonders "might the new justice be tempted to do favors for the interests that lavished millions on his campaign? Given Judge Karmeier's record in the lower courts, we believe he will proceed with integrity. But you couldn't blame a citizen for wondering if it's payback time." . . .

The American system works because people have faith in the fairness of the courts. At this point, the people of Southern Illinois may have more faith in their laundry detergent than in their judges. And who could blame them?

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The Battle Over The Courts 

Big money is at stake in these seemingly small-time elections. In Illinois, where one court recently handed down a $10.1 billion damage award against tobacco giant Philip Morris, the Magg-Karmeier race has become a surrogate for the furious national debate over tort reform. In fact, both candidates complain that they do not have control over some of their more fanatical supporters. "This is not a political race, but we're being forced into the politics of it," says Karmeier, the pro-business Republican.

The force driving many of these changes is the same one that has played such a corrosive role in America's broader political culture: special interest groups. Increasingly, they have come to view the judiciary as something to be gamed and captured -- just like Congress or the State House. The political patronage that once existed in Mayor Richard J. Daley's Chicago is being replaced by a new form of interest-group patronage. The list of organizations that have jumped into America's judicial wars is long and growing. . . .

On Aug. 24, the Illinois State Bar Assn. said it will begin monitoring the Karmeier and Maag campaigns in an effort to bring civility to the race. A prominent new recruit to the state judicial election-reform bandwagon is Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), who told BusinessWeek that he worries that "the extreme amount of big money in this year's judicial elections will only reduce public trust in the courts."

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