Unhealthful News 214 - A great table of contents

I suppose this does not really qualify as news, even though it got sent to my inbox (I have a feeling my inbox is not representative of what is generally considered "news"), but I have not written a UN in an while.  It seems that the Journal of Addiction Research & Therapy just published a special issue on Tobacco Addiction.  They were pleased to inform me that the articles are all free online.

But I don't think I will be taking advantage of that opportunity to read....

The Waterpipe; a New Way of Hooking Youth on Tobacco by Wasim Maziak

"Hooking" seems like such an active verb, one with a clear subject/actor.  (No, not that kind of hooking.  Even the kind they mean implies active intent by someone.)  So who, exactly is setting out to do this "hooking"?  Big Waterpipe?  Large national chains of hookah bars?  And how are they forcing youth to use their product?  I suppose I could learn if I read the article, but it just sounds too scary.

Psychosocial Factors and Health-Risk Behaviors Associated with Hookah use among College Students by Carla J. Berg, Gillian L. Schauer, Omar A. Asfour, Akilah N. Thomas and Jasjit S. Ahluwalia    

At least that one does not involve any black magic.  Let me guess, the methods read:  We noticed there are hookah users around campus, so we gathered up whatever demographic and behavior survey we had on hand and asked them (and some non-users) to take it.  Since we were not exploring any causal hypotheses, and we figure that there really will be nothing made of these results, we would then be free to just publish whatever we came up with.  But we can still add some really cool jargon to the title.

Functional Brain Imaging of Tobacco Exposure in Humans by Steven S Storage and Arthur L Brody

Brain-scan researchers have an expensive toy they need to get grants to justify.  Anti-tobacco research has infinite money but wants to make sure none of it gets spent on anything that might actually be informative.  A match made in heaven. 

Oral Nicotine Self-Administration in Rodents by Sakire Pogun, Allan C Collins, Tanseli Nesil and Lutfiye Kanit

I will admit that I did click on that one -- I wanted to see the cute picture of a rat with a snus pouch in.  Turns out, no pictures.  I did learn, though, that studying rat behavior is very useful for understanding tobacco use because... um...???  Hmm, they did not explain that one, but I guess it is because it is so difficult to find any actual human tobacco users whose behavior can be studied.

This is another study that comes with added bonus of paying for and justifying your "equipment" (see previous example).  At least the brain scanner is not gratuitously killed at the end of the study.

Magnesium and Zinc Involvement in Tobacco Addiction by Mihai Nechifor

Conclusion:  Without magnesium and zinc, there would be no tobacco addiction.  Also, no brain scanners.  Or rats.  Or people.  Thank the Creator for magnesium and zinc!

Am I the only one who remembers a sketch comedy movie from c.1980 that included a fake 1960s style grade-school classroom movie about zinc, and how important it is in our lives?  It went through a series of "without zinc, you would not have that....", and the item disappeared, going from a few trivial items on up to someone's prosthetic leg.  This kind of reminded me of that.

The Cigarette-Carrying Habit of Occasional Smokers by Shu-Hong Zhu, Quyen B. Nguyen, Martha White, Steven D. Edland and Wael K. Al-Delaimy

Let me guess:  The conclusion is that if you can get someone to never carry cigarettes, he will not smoke.  Unless he can bum one.

And finally, one that seemed like good useful science:

Diurnal Evening Type is Associated with Current Smoking, Nicotine Dependence and Nicotine Intake in the Population Based National FINRISK 2007 Study by Ulla Broms et al.

It sounded interesting from a scientific curiosity perspective, so I gave it a quick read it.  Apparently the result confirms what has been found before.  Too bad that they did not go as far as to say "this research suggests that people with 'morning person' behavior and motivations may not benefit from nicotine nearly as much as 'night people' do"?  That could actually offer some insight into the benefits of smoking.  But they wrote it as clean straight science, not pathetic anti-tobacco rhetoric, so it can be read and interpreted by anyone who recognizes the value of this observation.

Of course, admitting that a study offered insight into the benefits of nicotine use would immediately put someone in the dangerous "might actually be informative" category noted above.  That would be funding suicide for the authors if they depended on ANTZ funding.  Fortunately for them, they apparently make their money consulting for a branch of the tobacco/nicotine industry (Pfizer), so they might be able to get away with doing some good science.

Enstrom sues UCLA "School" of Public Health -- seems like a sure win

I just learned that my friend (still true, though we have not talked in a while) Jim Enstrom is suing his former employer for unlawful termination and such, and has the backing of a legal foundation.  That is great news, considering how appalling the story is (even worse than my own? probably, yes.).  I will summarize a bit, but you can read more here (worth doing if you have any interest, and I know there is interest because my early posts about his situation are still some of the most-read on this blog).

I cannot help but think that some of the attack on Enstrom is still left over from the concerted campaign by the anti-tobacco industry, attacking him for daring to publish a study which showed that the risk from second-hand smoke is very small (see here for more).  This subjected him to concerted attack by Stanton Glantz and his pseudo-science colleagues at UCSF, as well as Jon Samet and others, though ultimately the real academics in the University of California system prevailed.  Not this time. 

This time it was not smoking, but his work on fine particulate air pollution (called PM), especially from diesel engines.  He not only published research that did not conform to the political preferences of his UCLA School of Public Health (SPH) colleagues and their political allies, but pointed out several bits of fraud being committed (by basically the same cabal) in the policy arena.

I cannot vouch for the accuracy of his PM research, though it sounds credible based on what I know of the subject, which is limited but not nothing.  I do not know whether his results might have been outliers in the current research, though obviously they are what they are.  His second-hand smoke research certainly was good work -- I can vouch for that, and for the fact that it was more similar to the bulk of the evidence than the politicized conventional wisdom is.  Enstrom is a much better scientist, and has ten times the integrity, compared to most people in public health, so I am certainly inclined to believe him about PM.

But even if he was dead wrong about his research, firing him for it, and for pointing out that the SPH was involved in some of the policy fraud on the subject, was the highest of crimes in the academic context.  Actually, I will amend that to second-highest -- see below.  It was also incredibly moronic.

To quote from the above-linked post from the legal foundation:

"The facts of this case are astounding," said David French, Senior Counsel of the ACLJ. "UCLA terminated a professor after 35 years of service simply because he exposed the truth about an activist scientific agenda that was not only based in fraud but violated California law for the sake of imposing expensive new environmental regulations on California businesses.  UCLA's actions were so extreme that its own Academic Freedom Committee unanimously expressed its concern about the case."

Astounding, indeed.  You can read the rest of the story at the link, so I will take it in a personal direction here, and ask:

How f---ing moronic must the people at UCLA SPH be?????

Seriously!

They not only fired him with nothing resembling a good excuse (among their rotating claims was that his research on PM did not fit the mission of his unit -- huh?? -- others were doing similar work, so it was just the results they did not like).  The administration, agents of the state of California, fired him right after he blew the whistle on government wrong-doing, so it triggers whistle-blower protections.  And the suit says that they even looted his research grants. 

I find it difficult to believe that anyone who thought this was a good idea is capable of, say, operating an elevator.

As my regular readers know, I was driven from my last academic position by a calculated concerted campaign of efforts to censor my THR research and make my life unpleasant -- and that of my students (yes, they attacked my students) and supporters.  (Note: In common language, one might use the term "harassment" to summarize such behavior, but my lawyer informed me that to use that word is to make a legal claim, and since my settlement with the university prevents me from making legal claims against them about this behavior, I am not supposed to use the word -- a bit tricky for us non-lawyers who just use words to mean what they mean, but I will try.)

The people I was dealing with at University of Alberta School of Public Health were serious dimwits.  Basically, the department had entered the 21st century as a fourth-rate backwater with a couple of good people.  But then a new chair had turned it to at least a second-tier -- and rising -- department with new hires, one of whom was me.  But thanks to some really bad decisions by the administration, as part of turning the department into a "Faculty" (as they call a School in Canada), the deadwood that had dominated that fourth-rate department managed to gain control again, and drove away all of the good people.  Indeed, I hung in until I was the almost the last remaining faculty member who had any hope of getting a job somewhere else (one or two of my highly-productive colleagues inexplicably decided they wanted to stay there).  They were desperately hiring anyone they could to meet the minimum requirements for an SPH -- their own recent graduates; people living in the city who had been desperately wanting an academic job for decades, ever since their spouse forced them to live there; etc.  So the main reason for my leaving was that it had become painfully embarrassing to be part of that department.

But set that aside a moment and consider what they did to hara....  um, I mean give me a hard time into leaving, eventually successfully.  And keep in mind that Enstrom was close to retirement and I am not sure he taught at all, unlike me, so it would have been much easier to quietly marginalize him so that he was irrelevant until he left.  It would not take a lot of brains to figure this out.  Consider, for example, the first Dean of the University of Alberta SPH, who insisted that he could veto what literature I spent my grant money on because he had a right to tell me what I could and could not read as part of my research.  I am not kidding!  (That, by the way, is the one academic crime I have ever seen -- albeit committed by a non-academic, since the guy was just a hack politician warming the chair for a while -- that is actually worse than attempting to censor research results.)  And he was not even the worst of them.  One of the other administrators flatly admitted, in front of witnesses, that their attacks on me were entirely about them not liking the results of my research, and if I changed what I was reporting they would relent.

But even these morons managed to avoid getting sued.  They cut off all support for me and my students, including my salary (I existed entirely on my external grants), intimidated students into not working with me, quietly allied themselves with external attackers (anti-tobacco industry people) to interfere with all of my community initiatives,  kept the human subjects ethics committee from approving any of our work, etc.  They generally made it quite pointless to bother to be there anymore.  Of course, their master stroke was making University of Alberta Public Health suck so badly that I was mortified about staying any longer (the last time I taught there, a class for students in their last of four semesters, the feedback from the students was "this is the first material we have been presented with in the entire program that seems useful").  I think that perhaps they did not scuttle the School just to get rid of me -- the rumor I recall about whywas that the Alberta government needed a do-nothing public health program so that they could point to it and say "see, they have not reported any health harm coming from our turning the whole province into an oil patch".

Well, I suppose they did try to fire me, which might have gotten them sued had they actually been able to do it.  But ultimately the central administration of the university was clever enough to offer me a position in another department of my choice (which I did not take -- you would never want to be a professor in a department that did not actively want you to be there) and then to golden-handshake me to resign.  They did not try to loot my grants or anything so blatant, and they may have even topped off my grants a bit at the end to keep my staff paid until my departure date.  Wanting to get out anyway, this let me leave in triumph and figure suing was not worth the effort.  Yes, it cost them some money, but not as much as the Enstrom lawsuit which seems like a sure loser for the university, and it did not come with any of the embarrassment of academic censure and front-page newspaper articles.

Perhaps, though, Jim's situation offers some benefits to the world that my exit did not.  It is a bit unfair to him, but I kind of hope they let it go to trial rather than settling.  The resulting publicity and embarrassment might create some impetus for SPHs to try to live up to the standards of the universities they are part of, rather than continuing their slump toward the standards of "public health" activism.