Blowing Smoke Rings

Three weeks ago, while looking for something else, I came across one of the most extraordinary documents I have ever read. It relates to an organization called Arise, which stands for Associates for Research into the Science of Enjoyment. Though largely forgotten today, in the 1990s it was one of the world's most influential public health groups. First, I should explain what it claimed to stand for.

Arise was founded in 1988 and seems to have been active until 2004. It described itself as "a worldwide association of eminent scientists who act as independent commentators." Its purpose, these eminent scientists claimed, was to show how "everyday pleasures, such as eating chocolate, smoking, drinking tea, coffee and alcohol, contribute to the quality of life."

It maintained that there were good reasons for dropping our inhibitions and indulging ourselves. "Scientific studies show that enjoying the simple pleasures in life, without feeling guilty, can reduce stress and increase resistance to disease. … Conversely, guilt can increase stress and undermine the immune system … This can lead to, for instance, forgetfulness, eating disorders, heart problems or brain damage."

The "health police," as Arise sometimes called them, could be causing more harm than good.

Arise received an astonishing amount of coverage. Between September 1993 and March 1994, for example, it generated 195 newspaper articles and radio and television interviews, in places like the Wall Street Journal, the International Herald Tribune, the Independent, the Evening Standard, El Pais, La Repubblica, RAI and the BBC. Much of this coverage resulted from a Mori poll, called "Naughty but Nice," that Arise claimed to have commissioned, into the guilty pleasures people enjoyed most.

Here is a typical example (this one was written by Reuters):

"Puritanical health workers who dictate whether people should smoke or drink alcohol and coffee are trying to ruin the quality of life, a group of academics said. 'Many of us hold the view that it is a person's right to enjoy these pleasures,' said David Warburton, a professor of pharmacology at Reading University in England. 'Much of health promotion is based on misinformation. It is politically driven.'"

The Today program gave David Warburton an uncontested interview in the prime spot -- at 8:20 a.m. He extolled the calming properties of cigarettes and poured scorn on public health messages. Arise was also featured three times in the Guardian. Coverage like this continued until October 2004, when the Times repeated Arise's claim that we should stop "worrying about often ill-founded health scares" and "listen to our bodies, which naturally seek to protect themselves from disease by doing the things we enjoy." In hundreds of articles and transcripts covering its assertions, I have found just one instance of a journalist -- Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian -- questioning either Arise's science or the motivation of the scientists.

The man who claimed to run the group, Warburton, was head of psychopharmacology at the University of Reading. During the period in which Arise was active, he published at least a dozen articles on nicotine in the academic press. In 1989, in The Psychologist, he mocked the finding by the U.S. surgeon-general that nicotine is addictive. Most of his articles were published in the journal Psychopharmacology, of which he was a senior editor. They maintained that nicotine improved both attention and memory. I have read seven of these papers. On none of them could I find a declaration of financial interests, except for two grants from the Wellcome Trust.

In 1998, as part of a settlement of a class action against the tobacco companies in the United States, the firms were obliged to place their internal documents in a public archive. Among them is the one I came across last month. It is a memo from an executive in the corporate services department of Philip Morris -- the world's largest tobacco company -- to one of her colleagues. The title is "Arise 1994-95 Activities and Funding."