America’s public health establishment, including big nonprofit organizations and many academics, is playing a shameful role in fighting our nation’s most important health scourge: cigarette smoking. Without exception, our health leaders have proven reluctant to help smokers quit; although three-quarters of smokers wish to do so, only one in twenty succeed in any given year.

The reasons for the officials’ dereliction in this area include a stubborn adherence to a worldview mired in the 20th century “tobacco wars.” But more important is their inexcusable willful blindness to, or complicity with, the intentional manipulation of science.