The tobacco industry coordinated cross-industry campaigns to delay and weaken federal and international regulations on pesticide use, according to new findings by University of California - San Francisco (UCSF) researchers.
The findings are reported in a study and commentary posted online at the pre-publication website of Environmental Health Perspectives, the journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. The information will be published in a future issue of the journal.
Based on an analysis of internal tobacco company documents, the article outlines evidence that the tobacco industry hired ex-agency scientists to intervene in federal Environmental Protection Agency decision-making, hired a consultant to influence World Health Organization pesticide regulatory deliberations without revealing his industry ties, and staged a useless test aimed at convincing regulators that no further restrictions were needed to control an especially deadly pesticide, among other actions.
The authors point to the need for broader reform of the regulatory process to prevent abuses such as these in the future.
"This shows that the tobacco industry's influence on our nation's health extends far beyond policies directly concerned with smoking or cigarettes," said Ruth Malone, RN, PhD, associate professor in the UCSF School of Nursing and senior author on the study.
First author Patricia McDaniel, PhD, postdoctoral fellow at the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, added, "It's one thing for the industry to participate in the public policy process by providing information or arguments, but it's another to hire people to secretly influence the policy process and to manipulate the science guiding policymakers."
The researchers present three case studies based on examining approximately 2,000 formerly secret internal tobacco company documents as well as 3,885 EPA documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
EPA standards to reduce the risks of the fumigant phosphine:
In 1998, when the EPA proposed a series of risk mitigation measures to protect workers and the community from sometimes-fatal poisoning by phosphine, tobacco interests protested that the rules would "make it virtually impossible for our industry to continue to fumigate stored tobacco."
Tobacco companies invited EPA officials to view a series of emissions tests to persuade them that a 500-foot buffer zone was not needed around fumigated warehouses. The UCSF researchers cite a Phillip Morris email to show that PM experts knew that the test methodology was flawed and the results would show no emissions problems. The PM employee wrote, "...the test plan and methods will provide, literally, no information, so it won't hurt us to do it."
A coalition of phosphine users, including tobacco companies, hired Sciences International, a private company headed by Elizabeth Anderson, a former EPA director, to prepare a report challenging the EPA's plan to impose stricter exposure limits for workers and the community. Anderson obtained additional funding from the coalition to publish the consultant report in Risk Analysis, a journal for which she served as editor-in-chief.
Dan Barolo, former director of EPA's Office of Pesticide Programs, also served as a coalition consultant. In memos cited by the researchers, he emphasized the urgency of coming to agreement on the report's contents. In one memo, he commented, "Some day they are going to figure out there is a [stricter] standard in other countries and the door will close."