The federal panel helping craft tobacco regulation includes scientists in the pay of drug makers who make smoking-cessation drugs — including one who holds a patent for a nicotine chewing gum. Considering that the products they are helping to regulate include Camel Orbs, which are like tobacco-nicotine breath mints, the nicotine-gum financial interests of the panel members seems pretty relevant. I wrote on this a month back, and a left-leaning ethics group has called for an investigation.
In this context, Jacob Sullum at Reason magazine — who is anti- anti-smoking — posits that conflicts of interest don’t really matter that much.
(Another Reason writer, Radley Balko, also downplayed the importance of funding conflicts regarding a study, paid for by lesbian advocacy groups, suggesting that Kids of lesbians have fewer behavioral problems.)
This strikes a nerve with me, because much of what I do involves exposing conflicts of interest. I think Sullum is correct that experts’ ideological and often unthinking predisposition towards big government is the most important bias involved here. But I think Sullum doesn’t quite characterize the opposing view fairly here: “the implication that people … take the positions they do because of their financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry.”
I think conflicts of interest are rarely about bribery or outright self-serving corruption. They are subtler — often subconscious or indirect. The scientists are simply more familiar with the drug industry’s argument than in the tobacco industry’s argument — and thus they are more sympathetic to the drug industry. Getting paid by someone often puts a warm and fuzzy feeling in your heart when you think of them, and so the bias can be entirely emotional and subconscious.
