One of the incredibly great accomplishments of the settlement reached by state Attorneys General in their massive lawsuit against Big Tobacco (recently highlighted in CJ&D’s new report) was the disbanding of the Council for Tobacco Research, which wasn’t really a research council at all but rather “worked at ‘promoting cigarettes.’”
Well, now it seems Big Tobacco has a new group – the Weill Cornell Medical College! Weill took money from a foundation funded by Ligget Group (which makes cigarettes like Liggett Select, Eve, Grand Prix, Quest and Pyramid) to sponsor a research project that (no surprise), ended up “jolt[ing] the cancer world” by “saying that 80 percent of lung cancer deaths could be prevented through widespread use of CT scans." According to the New York Times, today:
Time for another lawsuit?Dr. Jerome Kassirer, a former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine and the author of a book about conflicts of interest, said he believed that Weill Cornell had created the foundation to hide its receipt of money from a cigarette company. “You have to ask yourself the question, ‘Why did the tobacco company want to support her research?’ ” Dr. Kassirer said. “They want to show that lung cancer is not so bad as everybody thinks because screening can save people; and that’s outrageous.”
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