On April 22, the British Medical Journal and a new investigative publication, The Examination, funded by billionaire activist Michael Bloomberg, declared a victory. Their “investigation” had shut down a new continuing medical education program in smoking, tobacco and nicotine offered by the respected medical information provider Medscape. The course had been running for a few weeks and had proved popular with participants.
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So why close it down? Simple: The initiative had been funded at arms-length by a tobacco company, Phillip Morris International, which played no role in developing the content.
I chose this recent example because it illustrates a more general problem with activism. The pursuit of idealistic goals is not necessarily heroic and may not be benign. It can make matters worse with real-world costs for people and the environment. Let’s take three examples from outside the nicotine field to illustrate the point, then return to nicotine.
First, the green opposition to nuclear power. In their quest for an idealist vision of a 100 percent renewable system based mainly on solar and wind power, greens have opposed a proven, reliable, low-carbon form of electricity generation.
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Second, activists with an in-principle opposition to genetic engineering recently stopped the deployment of genetically modified golden rice, which is rich in Vitamin A, in the Philippines. Vitamin A deficiency is implicated in up to 500,000 cases of blindness in young children annually in Asia and Africa each year.
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Third, local and international nonprofit organizations lobbied tenaciously for Sri Lanka to switch its agricultural system to become exclusively organic, backed up by a ban on the use of agrichemicals. They got their way, but it did not go well.
