WARNING: This site deals only with the corporate corruption of science, and makes no inference about the motives or activities of individuals involved.
    There are many reasons why individuals become embroiled in corporate corruption activities - from political zealotry to over-enthusiastic activism; from gullibility to greed.
    Please read the OVERVIEW carefully, and make up your own mind.

OPINION ONLY

Michael Marlow worked for the tobacco industry, and was associated with their network of Public Choice economists.

While he performed services for Philip Morris, he was never formally listed as a member of the cash-for-comments economists network which was set up by Professor Robert Tollison with the lobbyist and consultant to the Tobacco Institute, James Savarese. The network's purpose was to provide propaganda and lobbying services to the tobacco industry in all 50 US States, utilizing trusted and prominent academic economists at the local universities. It was:

• Funded and controlled by the Tobacco Institute.
  
• Organised and influenced by the Center for the Study of Public Choice at George Mason University, and the Public Choice Society (neo-con economists).
  
• Operated on a day-to-day basis through Ogilvy & Mather, and then by James Savarese & Associates a lobby firm based in Washington.

• Tobacco Institute staff — Peter Sparber, Susan Stuntz, Carol Hyrcaj, Fred Panzer, Jeff Ross and Calvin George.
  
• Economist organizers — Robert Tollison, William Shughart, Dwight Lee, Richard Wagner, Gary Anderson, Robert Ekelund, Henry Butler
  
• Organizers from the GMU Center — Anna Tollison (wife of Robert), Elizabeth Masaitis, Carol Robert
  
• Organizers from Savarese & Assoc. — Jim Savarese, Leslie Dalton, Kelleigh Varnum
• Organisers from Ogilvy & Mather— Richard Marcus, Marcia Silverman, Patricia Milita

• Write op-ed articles for their local newspapers (after they had first been sub-edited and legally cleared by the Tobacco Institute). This earned them $2—3,000.
  
• Appear as 'independent' witnesses at local ordinance hearings, or at State or Federal legislative hearings.
  
• Make public statements to the broadcast or print media, or write letters to the editor supporting the tobacco industry's position [but concealing their connections]
  
• Make submissions to academic/scientific conferences. This could earn them $5,000.
  
• Write letters to their Congressmen; these letters had often been rough-drafted by the tobacco industry.

Some payments were laundered through Savarese & Associates, and some seem to have passed through the Center for the Study of Public Choice. Other means of hiding the sources of payment were probably via tobacco industry lawyers.

• See a detailed list of all known cash-for-comment economists.
• Also see the Tobacco Institute's original 1984 plan
• This is one of the early letters of instruction

Some key documents

• Prof of Economics, Californian State Polytechnic University - San Luis, Obispo

1994 Aug: See the full outline of his involvement in creating the fake Alexis de Tocqueville ETS/EPA report written by S Fred Singer and Kent Jeffreys, secretly for the Tobacco Institute.

1992 June 15: William J Boyse and Michael L Marlow have conducted a study into "The Economics of Smoking Bans" and they want the funding to turn this into a book. Their study has all the appearances of being genuine research (unlike most of the funding proposals the tobacco industry received from its regular supporters).

The empirical focus of our study, in the sense of the original data collection, is on the City of San Luis Obispo, California, the first city to impose and then maintain an outright ban on smoking in all public places.

    The City imposed a ban on smoking in all enclosed public places late in the summer of 1990. Since then several communities ranging from Los Angeles to San Francisco have taken similar action. There are several distinguishing advantages to empirically investigating the experience of San Luis Obispo.

We wouldn't want to touch this, would we?

"Because non-smokers no longer must breathe second-hand smoke they experience gains in well being."

[There's something delightfully naive about academic economists thinking that the tobacco industry wanted genuine research of this kind]

This is in response to the proposal on "The Economics of Smoking Bans," submitted last June by William Boyes and Michael Marlow via Bob Tollison.

    In consultation with our State Activities Division, we have decided not to pursue this proposal. The preliminary data do not seem compelling enough from our point of view, and the proposal places what we believe is an inappropriate focus on health-related issues

    If you believe it would be worth continuing to pursue — that there may be some way to modify the Boyes/Marlow proposal or develop a proposal for a different study that would provide data that would be useful to us — I suggest that we sit down with the State Activities folks to get a better idea of what they're looking for.

1995: "The Economic Effects of Smoking Laws on Bars and Taverns" by Michael L Marlow of California Polytechniquc State University, San Luis Obispo,

    The paper openly admits that the study was done for Philip Morris Management Corporation. Naturally it finds what it was commissioned to find.
[In virtually every case, experience showed that his findings were totally wrong]:

• The vast majority of restaurant owners believe that customers and employees are satisfied with smoking policies
• Evidence strongly supports the hypothesis that some firm lose, some gain, and still others are unaffected by smoking laws.
• While smoking laws exert differential effects, the majority of bars and taverns expect negative effects on profits and employment Over 82% of owners of bars and taverns predict that a restrictive smoking law will cause overall revenues to fall, while only about 2% predict that overall revenues will rise.
• Net losses of 272,293 restaurant jobs, which corresponds to 9% of total jobs in this industry, follows from extrapolation of survey data. Net losses of 134,929 workers in the bar and tavern industry, or 44% of total jobs in this industry, follows from extrapolation of survey data. These numbers suggest that, as percentages of total work forces, net losses are expected to be roughly five-times higher in the bar and tavern industry than for the restaurant industry.

CONTRIBUTORS:srs2 KRS8 dlo2