It has long been accepted that cigarette smoking causes serious disease and death, and public policy has focused on reducing tobacco use. In the US, the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has had regulatory jurisdiction over tobacco products since 2009 and is committed to an evidence-based approach for regulatory decision making anchored by sound science. In an effort to generate much more data about tobacco science, the FDA has established an interagency partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is making available billions of research dollars to study priority questions about tobacco science to inform FDA regulations. This new funding should attract many new researchers, creating a larger and more diverse, transparent and results-orientated tobacco science community. The FDA has set an example in acknowledging tobacco manufacturers both as an important stakeholder and as a potential source of valuable scientific expertise. Perhaps as a result, there is a general increase in scientific publications resulting from research undertaken by tobacco industry scientists. Additionally, most tobacco manufacturers are even more committed to developing products substantially less risky than cigarettes, and the science to evaluate the potential of such products to promote harm reduction. At the same time there is an increase in the number of scientific journals introducing blanket bans on publishing science from tobacco manufacturers, with the British Medical Journal being a recent example. This paper looks at the ethical dilemmas surrounding scientific censorship and the role of peer review in protecting scientific integrity.

Communicating controversial science: The case of tobacco harm reduction and the ethics of blanket censorship

248th National Meeting (2014)

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