Definition--another tax.
How many "consumer products" have their own federal bureaucracy and enforcement agency they share with only 3 or 4 other "consumer products"?
The Detroit News
October 18, 1992
by Nickie McWhirter
Computer blows out smoking-related death figures with no real human facts.
I recently read that 435,000 Americans die every year from smoking-related illnesses. That sounds like a rock-hard, irrefutable fact, and pretty scary. How are such statistics determined? I phoned the American Lung Association's
Southfield office to find out.
No one there seemed to know. However, a friendly voice said most such number[s] come from the National Center for Health Statistics. That's a branch of the National Centers for Disease Control. The friendly voice provided a phone number in New York City.
Wrong number. The New York office collects only morbidity data, I was told. I needed mortality data. I was given another phone number to try. Wrong again.
Several bureaucratically misdirected calls later, I spoke with someone in Statistical Resources at NCHS. He said his office collect mortality data based on death certificates. Progress! Data is categorized by race, sex, age,geographic location, he said, but not smoking. Never. No progress.
He suggested I phone the Office of Smoking and Health, Rockville, Md., and provided a number. That phone had been disconnected. Was I discouraged? No! Ultimately, and several unfruitful phone calls later, I found a government
information operator in Washington, D.C., with a relatively new phone directory and a helpful attitude. She found a listing for the elusive Office of Smoking and Health, in Atlanta.
Bingo! Noel Barith, public information officer, said the 435,000 figure probably came from its computers. S&H generates lots of statistics concerning "smoking-related" stuff, he said. It's all done using a formula programmed into the computers. Really? Since I had already determined that no lifestyle data on individual patients and their medical histories is ever collected, how can the computer possibly decide deaths are smoking related? Barith didn't know. Maybe the person who devised this computer program knows. Barith promised to have a computer expert to return my call.
The next day, SAMMEC Operations Manager, Richard Lawton, phoned. SAMMEC, I learned, is the name of the computer program. Its initials stand for Smoking Attributed Morbidity, Mortality, and Economic Cost. The computer is fed raw
data and SAMMEC employs various complex mathematical formulas to determine how many people in various age groups, locations, and heaven knows what other categories are likely to get sick or die from what diseases and how many of these can be assumed to be smoking related.
Assumed? This is all guess work? Sort of. Lawto confirmed that no real people, living or dead, are studied, no doctors consulted, no environmental factors considered.
Lawton was absolutely lyrical about SAMMEC and its capabilities, however, provided one can feed it the appropriate SAFs. What are SAFs? "That's the smoking attributable fraction for each disease or group of people studied,"
he said.
It sounded like handicapping horses. Lawton began to explain how to arrive at an SAF, using an equation that reminded me a lot of Miss Foster's algebra class.
"Wait a minute!" I commanded. "I don't need to know that. I need to know if the SAFs and all the rest of this procedure and program yield valid, factual information.To know that we must know if sometime, somewhere, some human
being or human beings actually looked at records of other human beings, smokers and nonsmokers, talked to their doctors, gathered enough information from reality to begin to devise a mathematical formula that might be applied
to large groups of people much later, without ever needing to study those people, and could be expected to yield true facts within a reasonable margin of error? Who did that? Can you tell me, Mr. SAMMEC expert?"
Nice guy, Lawton, but he didn't have a clue. He said he thought the original work concerning real people, their deaths and evidence of smoking involvement was part of work done by a couple of epidemiologists, A.M. and D.E. Lilienfeld. It's all in a book titled Foundations of Epidemiology, published about 1980 by Oxford University Press, he said. SAMMEC came later, based on the Lilienfeld's work. Maybe. He wasn't sure.
I was unable to find the book, or the Lilienfelds.
So there you have it. Research shall continue, but so far it has only revealed that no one churning out statistics knows anything about smoking and its relationship, if any, to diseases and death. A computer knows everything, based on mystical formulas of unknown origin, context and reliability. Raw data in, startling statistics out. SAMMEC speaks, truth is revealed! Oh, brave new world.
Are there 435,000 smoking-related deaths per year in America? Maybe. I can tell you this with absolute certainty, however: No human beings are ever studied to find out.
Here in Germany...the Greens got the health cabinet position back six years ago, and up until the last election...they ran the health ministry. The Green's health minister got the revenue side of the government to agree that a significant double tax on smokes would be a good thing. The revenue guys...always eager to get more money...assumed that she knew what she was talking about.
So they raised the smokes tax a good bit. Twelve months later...right before phase two and the next rise...the revenue guys had a heart attack. In one year...the revenue off the smokes tax dropped $350 million. This created a huge meeting where debate was raised over if it was smart to go to the next higher tax rate. The Greens felt this was great...they were actually getting smokers to quit. So they wanted the second rise.
The revenue guys went out and talked to the customs folks. Funny thing. Huge rise over the past twelve months in German citizens crossing the Lux, the Polish, the Czech and the Austrian borders...buying four cartons of smokes each...each month. If you lived within 100 miles of the border...it simply made sense and was totally legal. Added to this legal effort by smokers...was the illegal effort. The customs folks had a huge increase in mass/bulk carton smuggling into Germany. There were teenage kids who were bringing in 40 cartons of non-taxed cartons. There were the Russian mafia. There were housewives who could pick up $50 a day in transporting 100 cartons across the border.
So whatever the Greens thought was happening with lesser smokers...really wasn't true. People just got to a taxation point where they decided to go avoid the tax. The revenue office refused to go into phase two...thinking that a further tax would just mean a larger group of people avoiding the tax. This is the reality of a modern civilization today...you don't have to obey the laws...if they are not realistic.