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Heavy Reading

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This book is an examination of campaigns by industry to thwart attempts of government, especially the United States government, to protect the health of workers and citizens. Michaels has had a long history in public health working in both the public and academic sectors. In this book, he traces the history of numerous cases of industries that have escaped safety regulations and the dire consequences of their actions. Michaels observes that industries trying to escape regulation commonly do so by raising the flag of uncertainty. That is, they take advantage of the fact that it is logically impossible to prove an effect conclusively, but rather, all science can do is provide evidence that strongly suggests connections between cause and effect. This has allowed the tobacco industry to fight and delay warnings about the health risks of tobacco smoking. It also has also slowed down response to the climate change crisis, as contributing industries claim we must wait for more evidence before we take any action. He notes that industry often manages to establish doubt concerning the findings of scientific research through media reports that cite conflicting opinions on the topic. However, these media reports do not look into the sources and funding of the conflicting opinions; they contrast volumes of evidence found by independent and publicly funded research with "research" funded by industry or created by industry think tanks. The text of the book is extremely dense, with extensive references cited in endnotes. Michaels does an admirable job of explaining how the efforts of industry to undermine sound science are made to sound credible, through trade supported "peer-reviewed" journals and think tanks. He argues that because industries have been so successful at evading regulation, litigation is often the only recourse in the present system, and thus, the ability of citizens to seek damages in the courts for injuries must be protected against the industry-led campaign for "tort reform". The book provides valuable information for those seeking a deeper understanding of the extent of the control industry has managed to wrest from the government and other agencies that are supposed to be looking out for public health. On disinformation provided by industry and the conservative politicians owned by them, Michaels quotes Lily Tomlin "No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up."

BIDDNESS

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BUSINESS. THE BIG. THE SMALL. IF THEY CAN'T SELL IT TO YOU THEY WILL DUMP IT ON YOU! AND THEY USE YOUR GOVERNMENT TO DO IT. OVER AND OVER. I THINK IT'S TIME (PAST TIME) TO SEPARATE GOVERNMENT AND BUSINESS. JUST AS WE HAVE SEPARATED CHURCH AND STATE. NO MORE "INQUISITIONS" AND WAY LESS PHILOSOPHICAL BS. SOCIETY IS MUCH SAFER. LIFE IS BETTER... THE BUSH YEARS HAVE BEEN A DISASTER. "FREE TRADE". "FREE MARKETS". "TORT REFORM". "PRIVATIZE". "DE-REGULATE". "WAR". ALL PARTS OF A PROGRAM TO LOOT AMERICA AND AMERICANS. WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE! GET THEM OUT AND KEEP THEM OUT OF GOVERNMENT! GET A COPY OF YOUR CONSTITUTION AND BILL OF RIGHTS AND READ IT. NOWHERE DOES IT SAY BUSINESS IS THE GOVERNMENT. YOU ARE... QUIT BELIEVING THE SKIN HEAD BLATHER ON FOX AND "TALK" RADIO. THAT "TALK" IS BIG BUSINESS FUNDED AND APPROVED. THEY WANT YOU STUPID AND MISINFORMED. WHEN YOU DON'T KNOW YOU ARE EASY TO CHEAT! GET "DOUBT IS THEIR PRODUCT". READ IT AND KNOW.

Detailed expose with real solutions

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David Michaels has traveled the honorable path of scientific muckracking, peeling back the lies and distortions that have killed millions in the U.S. for the greater good of shareholder profit. The great improvement of his book, "Doubt is their Product," is that it also lines out a series of concrete solutions with proven examples of ways that agencies can retake the high ground. This book has an important inspirational component and a get-to-work component that activists can use to make the workplace and environment safer. Michaels counsels us on practical means such as ending court sanctioned secrecy, allowing injured workers to sue their employees, develop better compensation systems, and ending pre-emption that harms public policy and public health. The book includes a crucial chapter on concrete ways to improve the regulatory system so that it protects the majority rather than serving as a shield, flack, and apologist for corporate profits. This is a must read for any law school course on administrative law, and for any college course on modern government. Its discussion of the asbestos industry--creator of the global mesothelioma scourge--is particularly apropos. Best of all, the book is well written, thoroughly researched, and righteous while being coolly objective.

This year most important book for environment-, health-, and safey people.

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"Doubt is their product" by David Michaelis, is one of those rare books you really try hard to convince people to read, and if they don't want to buy it - you give them the book. I'm working as an occupational hygienist in a Norwegian labor union. The book has been a tremendous help to understand how the product defence system works and how they are selling doubt. To me the book is the most important book I've read for a long time. The book should be required reading for all professionals and students within the environment, healt and safety domain.

Industry gives us cargo-cult science

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If we believe David Michaels, industry charlatans all learned from the tobacco industry 50 years ago. The industries that rely on doubt have been blossoming ever since: beryllium (did you know that there was a beryllium industry? I did not), asbestos, and popcorn, among others. Yes, popcorn. Were you aware that there is a condition called "popcorn lung" (officially bronchiolitis obliterans)? I was not. It's called that because one of the main ways to contract it is by working in a factory that manufactures one of the ingredients -- namely diacetyl -- for the butter flavoring in popcorn. Every time you open a steaming bag of butter-flavored microwave popcorn, you are inhaling a bit of this chemical. The more of it you eat, the more likely you are to contract a devastating lung ailment. (And this isn't the sort of disease that you'd only get by eating an implausibly large quantity of popcorn. Real popcorn consumers have actually acquired it.) The agency responsible for protecting workers from this sort of hazard is OSHA. The one responsible for protecting food consumers is the FDA. This division of labor comes in for some well-deserved scorn in Doubt Is Their Product; it has left the government fairly impotent to respond to threats against the public health. This book could be read alongside Marion Nestle's Food Politics and What To Eat as a single thread about the assault on helpful government regulation. In their nonstop fight against that sort of regulation, companies have pulled out all the stops to inject systematic doubt into the public discussion. The most pernicious of these, it seems to me, is the creation of sham peer-reviewed journals. Peer review is a negative process: if you can't pass peer review, your ideas are unlikely to have merit (though there are cases, says Michaels, where brilliant scientists -- future Nobelists -- have been denied peer approval). Passing peer review doesn't mean that your ideas are any good. Something similar applies to the references you give a potential employer: if you can't find anyone in the world to say something nice about you, that is a warning sign. If three people will say good things about you, that doesn't mean that you're going to be a good employee. The public doesn't understand this distinction, and doesn't know which journals have any respect within the field. So regulated industries have dutifully gone and created journals that will say whatever they're paid to say -- just as the creationists have done. The news reports then compile, say, a "list of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming" as though scientific consensus were decided by majority vote among equals. If there's the slightest bit of doubt about, say, the cause of a disease, industry pounces and insists that more research is necessary. More research will always be necessary: science never attains the truth, only better and better approximations to the truth. The situation is complicated in public health by scientists' inability to conduct controlled experiments: it is immoral to subject patients to a potentially crippling disease. So scientists are forced to make educated guesses: this population -- of popcorn-factory workers, say -- has probably been subjected to thus-and-such a daily dosage of diacetyl for thus-and-so many years, whereas this other group of workers in the same factory has had less exposure. Meanwhile, people living near the factory but not working in it almost never experience popcorn lung. Hence we make the educated guess that the additional cases of bronchiolitis obliterans are due to diacetyl exposure within the factory. Having reached a tentative conclusion about what's making people sick, we have some options. We can mandate that factories use a different chemical. Does industry have other, safer alternatives? Presumably it does, but those alternatives are more expensive; otherwise it would already be using them. If industry were forced to use safer alternatives, would economies of scale drive the price down to the point that consumers wouldn't notice? That approach seems ethically sterile to me. It seems better to start with the assumption that no one should get sick at work. Being ethical about this means, in many cases, taking Paul Farmer's "preferential option for the poor" seriously. You'd probably find that most people getting sick at work are not wealthy; hedge-fund managers and computer scientists aren't coming into daily contact with beryllium; even if they are, wealthier folks can insist on workplace-safety measures in a way that the poor cannot. I'd wager that workplace safety is another front in the fight for distributive justice. Michaels is a former Department of Energy official whose work centered on the safety of nuclear plants. As such, he has a somewhat reflexive faith in the power of regulation. To me it rang hollow: one regulation will limit diacetyl, another will limit beryllium, another will prevent factory workers from acquiring repetitive-strain disorders -- but will any real problems be solved? Companies' desire and ability to game the system is virtually limitless. When they lose the regulatory war, they invent a public-relations campaign to convince Americans that tort reform is necessary. They demonize "trial lawyers" (lawyers who write briefs and stay out of the courtroom are off the hook, as are lawyers who resolve cases before they reach the court). They challenge the very epistemology of the scientific revolution. If worse comes to worst, they move production of noxious chemicals to countries with lower environmental and health standards. What I'm getting at is that we have a much more systemic problem on our hands. I applaud regulation where it helps, but I do wonder if it's tinkering at the edges of a massive problem that lies at the heart of our society. We need regulation; we also need education to explain to Americans what science is. We need Americans to believe that we owe much to the least fortunate among us. Until that message gets through, we'll have to content ourselves with putting out little brushfires while the forest burns.