It's a good thing Carol Browner doesn't
have to make her living as a scientist.
Otherwise the Environmental Protection Agency
administrator would find herself dependent on
a very different kind of public assistance
than she does at present.
Late last week a federal district judge
issued a withering ruling on agency research
purporting to link second-hand cigarette
smoke - also known as environmental tobacco
smoke - with cancer in non-smokers. EPA had
claimed the smoke was a potent carcinogen
that causes 3,000 cancer deaths a year, give
or take several thousand. District Judge
William Osteen, however, accused the agency
of Alice in Wonderland-style justice, in
which the verdict comes before the evidence.
"In this case," he wrote,
"EPA publicly committed to a conclusion
before research had begun, excluded industry
by violating [statutory] procedural
requirements; adjusted established procedure
and scientific norms to validate the Agency's
public conclusion, and aggressively utilized
[statutory] authority to disseminate findings
to establish a de facto regulatory scheme
intended to restrict Plaintiff's products and
to influence public opinion."
He continued: "In conducting the ETS
Risk Assessment, EPA disregarded information
and made findings on selective information,
did not disseminate significant epidemiologic
information; deviated from its Risk
Assessment Guidelines; failed to disclose
important findings and reasoning; and left
significant questions without answers. EPA's
conduct left substantial holes in the
administrative record. While so doing, EPA
produced limited evidence, then claimed the
weight of the Agency's research evidence
demonstrated ETS causes cancer."
In short, this risk assessment is worth
every penny the recycling industry is willing
to pay for it, but not much else. Even
grading it on a government curve doesn't
help. Still, EPA officials said they will
probably appeal the decision. They also claim
most scientists and health experts side with
them about the potency of second-hand smoke.
Unfortunately for the agency, even if one
is somehow able to overlook all of the errors
in the study, second-hand smoke still doesn't
amount to much of a risk. Said one of the
report's co-authors, Steven Bayard, in the
wake of its release, "I don't think the
risk of lung cancer in non-smokers in general
is very high." Likewise Morton Lippman,
head of the EPA Science Advisory Board that
reviewed the second-hand smoke findings,
called it "a small added risk, probably
much less than you took to get here through
Washington traffic." The Congressional
Research Service raised its own questions
about the study, arguing, among other things,
that the findings on the exposure levels of
non-smokers to cigarette smoke were based on
the their recollections rather than
scientific measurements.
Could one dismiss the court's ruling, as
President Clinton suggested in another case,
by considering the source? Sure. But Judge
Osteen is also the man who ruled last year
that the Food and Drug Administration has the
authority to regulate nicotine levels in
cigarettes. So this is a "source"
with which the White House and EPA are going
to have to live.
The fallout from this decision could be
considerable. The much-hyped risks of
second-hand smoke changed the debate over
tobacco from one of individual choice to one
of public health: It was one thing to allow
smokers to put themselves at risk, something
else again to put others at risk. Based on
EPA's findings, numerous localities around
the country passed statutes restricting
smokers, in effect, to the back of the bus if
they got any seat at all. Last year, EPA also
justified controversial restrictions on
emissions of particulate matter - the health
risks of which are about the same size as the
particulates themselves - on grounds that it
was regulating similarly small risks from
ETS. What happens to those rules now?
The problem here, as a scientific panel
put it back in 1992, is that people both
inside and outside the agency believe EPA
science is based on EPA policy rather than
the other way around. With this latest
ruling, any reputation for sound science that
EPA still has is going up in smoke.
Copyright © 1998 Steven
J. Milloy.
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March 2005 at: http://www.junkscience.com/news2/wtedets.htm
