Richard Daynard and John Banzhaf: Food and Tobacco Control share people, tactics

My thanks to reader Magnetic01 who sent me a link last week about Tobacco Control’s plans for Singapore.

The March 2012 article from Tobacco-free Singapore concerns what seems to be an Asia-Pacific proposal for the moment:

The proposal to create a tobacco-free generation, by denying access to tobacco to those born from 2000 onwards, received strong support when it was presented at a meeting of the Human Rights and Tobacco Control Network (HRTCN) as part of the pre-conference activities associated with the World Conference on Tobacco Or Health (WCTOH) taking place here in Singapore.

It also gave me names to follow up on in Tobacco Control which you shall see in this week’s and future posts. Others are connected with those mentioned in the Singaporean article.

Interestingly, the same news about banning tobacco to those born in 2000 and after later appeared in July 2012 in an Australian newspaper The Age. (H/T: Angry Exile at Orphans of Liberty.) In the article, Cameron Nolan, the winner of the 2012 Australian Fabians Young Writers Competition, proposes the same for Australia. What appears to be an original idea comes second-hand.

Richard Daynard – from tobacco to food

In the Tobacco-free Singapore article we discover that Richard Daynard was one of the ‘distinguished guests’ supporting this proposal.

ActivistCash.com provides background on Daynard (emphases mine):

Fellow trial lawyers call Public Health Advocacy Institute (PHAI) board member Richard Daynard “greedy,” and “a bit more mercenary than people think he is.” He has been described by The American Lawyer as “a zealot, by any standard.” Known as the “intellectual godfather of tobacco litigation,” he’s now leading the charge to take away consumers’ food choices. Daynard told the New York Times in April, 2004 that PHAI “will file suits against the food industry within the year.”

“We’re not doing this to make trial lawyers rich,” Daynard insists, talking about obesity lawsuits. But Daynard received more than $1 million for his tobacco attack. When that million wasn’t enough, Daynard later sued two attorneys for a bigger share of tobacco litigation settlements, claiming he had a handshake agreement for five percent of a multi-billion-dollar windfall in legal fees. The Boston Globe reported in 2003 that he and his wife reinvested their tobacco ransom, using “some of the legal fees earned in that battle to fund the attack on obesity” …

Daynard co-authored an article with PHAI [Public Health Advocacy Institute] chairman Anthony Robbins extolling “public health professionals who know that overweight and eating habits are not principally a matter of personal choice.” But Daynard achieved his own physique the old fashioned way. When asked how he lost 25 pounds, he simply said: “I ate a lot less.”

Daynard has an 11-page curriculum vitae (resumé). He graduated from the highly-regarded Bronx High School of Science and won a prestigious Regents Scholarship to Columbia University.  We do not know in what he earned his summa cum laude Bachelors degree, however, he was later a Faculty Fellow in Columbia’s Sociology Department between 1968 and 1970.

Daynard attended Harvard Law School and obtained his JD in 1967. After his aforementioned stint in Columbia’s Sociology Department, he returned to Boston, where he earned a Ph.D. in Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. He combined his Ph.D. study with career employment, as it took him ten years to finish his degree.

Looking at the time during which he studied (late 1960s – early 1970s) and his subjects of study — Sociology and Urban Studies and Planning — it would not be a stretch to conclude that Daynard is left-of-centre, to say the least.

Daynard worked for Boston’s Northeastern University School of Law from 1972 to 2006. He served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs between 2004 and 2006.

It is interesting to note that Daynard was an instructor in Psychiatry at Tufts University (north of Boston) between 1976 and 1989. One must have a medical degree in order to practice psychiatry. What qualifies someone who taught Sociology and has degrees in Urban Studies and Planning to teach Psychiatry for 13 years when this medical discipline involves prescribing drugs for mentally disturbed patients?

Pages 2 through 11 of Daynard’s CV are almost exclusively related to Tobacco Control. Among the highlights are the following:

– Principal Investigator, Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute, 2005 – 2008 (p. 3)

– Co-principal Investigator, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Public Health Preparedness for Legislative and Regulatory Initiatives, 2008-2009 (p. 3)

– Principal Investigator, National Cancer Institute, Use of Personal Responsibility Rhetoric to Impede Public Health Measures, 2009-2014 (p. 3)

– Wrote model for Massachusetts ordinances banning smoking in public places, 1975 (p. 4)

Therefore, it is apparent from this small sampling that Daynard is well connected. Tobacco Control knows him well, even if we do not. Daynard has written and spoken extensively against tobacco in many countries around the world.

In October 2010, he gave a lecture at the University of California San Francisco’s Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. Attendance was mandatory for all Fellows:

Richard Daynard presents the following three topics; (1) tobacco litigation & the overall tobacco control strategy; 2) his project to bring women’s and children’s rights advocates and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) into the tobacco control effort, by showing how tobacco control is a pressing women’s and children’s rights issue; and (3) his project to phase out smoked tobacco, which in its US form is a project to persuade the FDA to reduce nicotine levels in smoked products below addictive levels.

Over the past decade, Daynard has been repurposing his knowledge and experience from Tobacco Control to Food Control. In 2006, this item about junk food in American schools appeared in Wikinews:

Last week’s announcement that most soda manufacturers will stop selling their sugary products in U.S. schools did not mention that avoiding lawsuits was part of the motivation for the self-imposed ban. Some of those who threatened legal action to stop the soda sales are patting themselves on the back over the agreement, while lamenting that the deal did not go far enough, and now plan to press for more restrictions.

Richard Daynard, a law professor and president of the Public Health Advocacy Institute, which threatened the soft-drink industry with lawsuits, said in an institute press release, “The industry agreement with the Clinton Foundation and American Heart Association comes after sustained pressure from potential litigation and negotiations with public health groups and their lawyers. It is a credit to the role of litigation and the legal system as a component of effective public health strategy.”

“This agreement demonstrates the potential of public health litigation to help control the obesity epidemic,” he said.

Daynard’s course syllabus at Northeastern for Interdisciplinary Approaches to Policy and Advocacy is comprised of materials which:

including concepts of social justice, will be considered. The use of studies from different disciplines for policymaking and advocacy with respect to tobacco control and obesity prevention will provide illustrative examples.

These are just a few of the titles from other authors and topics from the course:

– Anne Marie Thow, et al. ”The effect of fiscal policy on diet, obesity and chronic disease: a systematic review”

– Study – Price increase & cigarettes – TBD

– Matthew C. Farrelly, et al. “The Impact of Tobacco Control Programs on Adult Smoking”

– Donley T. Studler, “U.S. Tobacco Control: Public Health, Political Economy or Morality Policy?”

– The Public Health Advocacy Institute, “A Time for Action: Policy Recommendations from PHAI’s Fifth Conference on Public Health, Law and Obesity”

– Jamie F. Chriqui, et al. “What Gets Measured, Gets Changed : Evaluating Law and Policy for Maximum Impact”

Public Health Advocacy Institute (PHAI)

ActivistCash.com tells us that Daynard is still on the board of Public Health Advocacy Institute (PHAI). It describes PHAI as:

a lawsuit lounge where food cops and trial lawyers swap strategies to litigate away consumers’ food choices.

Located in Boston with a board composed of faculty members from the Northeastern University School of Law and Tufts University School of Medicine, PHAI’s goal is to attack food makers through lawsuits. Along the way, it is creating the next huge payday for trial lawyers, who are trying to demonize popular foods by using their template for attacking tobacco.

In addition to publishing papers laying out a game plan for fat lawsuits against food makers, PHAI’s main contributions to America’s growing anti-obesity jihad are its conferences, euphemistically titled “Legal Approaches to the Obesity Epidemic.” PHAI’s first conference, held in June 2003, was “intended to encourage and support litigation against the food industry.” The second conference, held in September 2004, was similarly motivated. Richard Daynard, director of PHAI’s Obesity and Law project, bragged to the New York Times in April 2004 that PHAI itself “will file suits against the food industry within the year.”

Shortly following its inaugural litigation-pushing confab, PHAI threatened eight large food companies with legal action. The group demanded food makers do the impossible — or else. To prevent costly lawsuits, PHAI warned, companies would have to prove that their actions had actually reduced obesity across the entire U.S. population by affecting Americans’ “buying and consumption of fat, total calories, and other contributions to obesity.” Food companies, in other words, could only get off the lawsuit hook by forcing consumers to change their behavior. What those consumers actually wanted was of no consequence …

Who are the people behind PHAI? The group’s chairman, Anthony Robbins, told the Boston Globe that “Public health is more like police work than it is about medical care“ … Board member Mindy Lubber runs an investment firm tied to the Ralph Nader-founded state Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs). Another board member — PHAI’s former executive director, Ben Kelley — was instrumental in perpetrating what the Los Angeles Times called “the biggest TV scam since the Quiz Scandals” when he ran a front group for trial lawyers looking to sue automakers. And PHAI “managing attorney” Jason Smith is a board member of the Massachusetts chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, a radical group that named cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal as an honorary “national vice president” in 1995.

This may sound like a motley crew of unlikely tort warriors. But at the end of PHAI’s 2003 conference, the group formed five committees — including one to promote obesity lawsuits among major law firms. In other words, PHAI was going lawyer shopping.

Tobacco Control’s John Banzhaf and other PHAI connections

It will come as a disappointment to those of us who enjoy our comfort meals, snacks and soft drinks to find out that PHAI have enlisted Tobacco Control’s heavy hitters. Never doubt for a second that anti-tobacco tactics and people are being used to undermine your personal food choices. One of these masterminds is John Banzhaf, who founded ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) in 1967. Today, ASH is an international organisation which survives largely off of taxpayers’ money.

As with Stanton Glantz, there appears to be an interesting anomaly here, as Banzhaf also made the move from Engineering to Tobacco Control. Similarly, Daynard seems to be qualified to teach Psychiatry although he has a background in the Humanities. We’ll see more of these anomalies in future posts on the topic.

More from ActivistCash.com:

PHAI wouldn’t have much of a conference on obesity lawsuits without George Washington University law professor John Banzhaf, who claimed at the 2004 conference that he started the fast-food lawsuit movement when a reporter called him in 2002 and he prattled on about supposed similarities to tobacco cases. Banzhaf — who served as a legal advisor to fast-food plaintiffs in 2002 and 2003 — justified his position at the 2003 National Food Policy Conference, held by the Consumer Federation of America. At that event, Banzhaf railed: “I can’t sue to make people exercise more … But we can do something about fast food.”

While the public overwhelmingly opposes blaming restaurants and food companies for the nation’s weight, Banzhaf warned New York Daily News readers: “Somewhere there is going to be a judge and a jury that will buy this, and once we get the first verdict, as we did with tobacco, it will open the floodgates.” At the 2004 PHAI conference he reiterated: “When lawyers see how lucrative these are they will all join in.” He also insisted to CBS Sunday Morning: “We’re going to sue them and sue them and sue them.”

In true ambulance-chasing fashion, Banzhaf even broached the notion of suing doctors for not trimming down their patients. At the 2003 conference, he asked: “Can physicians who do not advise overweight or obese or morbidly obese patients to lose weight, to take reasonable efforts to help them do so, might ought [sic] to be subject to malpractice action?” He made the exact same point at the 2004 conference, saying simply: “Let’s sue some doctors.”

Banzhaf’s target list is long. At one point during the 2003 conference proceedings, PHAI director Anthony Robbins interrupted Banzhaf to question whether he really advocated a system that could pit “fat people” against “thin people.” Banzhaf’s reply? “Absolutely.”

Parents are also in Banzhaf’s crosshairs. He suggested to the 2004 conference participants that they “go after parents with TVs in their [kids’] rooms.” Parents who allow children to become obese, Banzhaf insisted, should be disadvantaged in custody cases, just as a parent’s smoking habits have been included in some custody agreements.

The wacky legal theories don’t stop there. Banzhaf has threatened to sue the Seattle School Board — and individual school board members — for making soft drinks available to teenagers in school. He raised the possibility again at PHAI’s 2004 conference. He has also discussed going after milk producers because the famous “Got Milk?” ads don’t always mention the benefits of skim milk …

At the 2004 PHAI confab, the assembled food cops discussed Banzhaf’s favorite question in a session titled “Are Some Foods Addictive?” Just two days before the 2003 conference, he sent letters to six fast-food chains demanding that they display “warning” notices about the allegedly “addictive” nature of fatty foods. Otherwise, he said, they could expect a big fat lawsuit. Banzhaf even claimed that fast food “can act on the brain the same way as nicotine or heroin.”

Apparently some at PHAI take Banzhaf’s farcical notion seriously. In an article accompanying the 2004 conference, Daynard and his co-authors complained of supposedly “addictive high calorie sodas.”

A primary source of the “food addiction” theory is the misnamed Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), the medical front-group for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. PCRM president Neal Barnard’s contribution to the cause is an aggressive effort to convince an unsuspecting public that meat, cheese, and chocolate are “addictive.” Barnard told a 2003 FDA panel that cheese is merely “dairy crack … the purest form of the drug [milk].“ Barnard’s name also appears four times in the plaintiff’s brief as an “expert” source in one of the obesity cases Banzhaf advised.

PCRM sent its top legal counsel, Mindy Kursban, to the inaugural PHAI meeting and nutritionist Amy Joy Lanou to the 2004 gathering. Former PCRM analyst and 2004 PHAI speaker Michele Simon has also endorsed the addictive foods farce.

The ‘master script’

ActivistCash gives us an insider view as to how Banzhaf, Daynard and their affiliated organisations plan to steer Food Control’s fight:

At the end of PHAI’s 2003 conference, board member Richard Daynard insisted that the movement needed a “master script,” and he stressed that lawsuits might fail without broader support. He suggested a combination of grassroots organizing, boycotts, and shareholder activism, all tied together with celebrity spokespersons. “Political will is everything,” Daynard told Seed Magazine. “The majority of judges and jurors are also parents.”

Part of PHAI’s public-relations strategy is to apply the tactics that made Daynard and Banzhaf successful in suing tobacco companies, including the creation of groups like PHAI. As recently as November 2003, phone calls to a number distributed during PHAI’s first conference were directed to a recorded message from the Tobacco Control Resource Center — a parallel organization run by Daynard …

Daynard and Robbins co-authored an article called “Food Litigation: Lessons From the Tobacco Wars,” in which they write: “In the absence of proof that particular food industry practices cause obesity, suits seeking compensation for obesity-related injury are unlikely to succeed.” For most people, that would mean “case closed” — but not for greedy trial lawyers and control-starved public-health zealots ...

You cannot be trusted to make your own decisions

When smokers have criticised ‘experts’ and lobby groups for depriving them of personal choice, non-smokers have often responded by saying that smokers are selfish complainers and that food and drink consumption hurts no one but the individual consumer.

However, as smokers have warned for several years now, the people behind what I call ingestion movements almost always elevate one group at the expense of another until it’s that group’s turn. Therefore, in arguments for tobacco bans, they said, ‘This has nothing to do with obesity or alcohol which affect only the person eating or drinking. This is about secondhand smoke which kills people.’

Yet, now that tobacco is restricted and denormalised nearly everywhere in the Western world, the authoritarians can turn their attention to food and drink. This is exactly what started happening a decade ago, as ActivistCash relates:

PHAI supporters don’t believe that consumers are smart enough to make their own food decisions. PHAI director James Hyde told conference attendees that personal responsibility is a “myth.” Robbins seems to believe that human beings have no more decision-making ability than animals, telling the Rutland Herald in 2003: “We’re being fattened like a herd.” In a 2003 article in Poverty & Race, Robbins, Daynard and PHAI director Wendy Parmet extol “public health professionals who know that overweight and eating habits are not principally a matter of personal choice.” (When asked by a reporter in 2003 how he lost 25 pounds, Daynard simply said: “I ate a lot less.”)

PHAI’s invited speakers sing the same anti-personal responsibility tune. “With so many mothers working,” Philip James told PHAI trial sharks, “I think maybe we need to highlight the role of the ‘Nanny State.'” James, a 2003 and 2004 speaker and head of the International Obesity Task Force (IOTF), would replace parents with big government. Complaining to news outlets about “high-pressure marketing” to children, he claimed that “the idea that you can have a modified system, or that parents should control it, is nonsense.”

In an article accompanying the 2004 conference, James and his IOTF colleagues Neville Rigby and Shiriki Kumanyika argued: “This ‘personal responsibility’ approach has … clearly failed.”

Scheduled 2004 PHAI speaker Margo Wootan (who canceled at the last minute) urged a different public-health conference to “move beyond personal responsibility.” PHAI speakers Marion Nestle and Kelly “Big Brother” Brownell declared in TIME magazine that “personal responsibility is a trap” and “a failed experiment.” And, of course, there’s always Banzhaf, who whined in 2003: “All these platitudes about, ‘people should eat less,’ ‘responsibility,’ all this crap!”

From this, what can we conclude?

Tobacco and Food Control are —

– Leftists lining their pockets via multi-million dollar lawsuits

– Actively working towards an authoritarian, totalitarian society

– Consciously antagonising people into opposing groups which loathe each other

– Convincing legislators and media that Westerners are no longer capable of leading their own lives responsibly

– Destroying the family unit and bringing in the state as ‘nanny’ for adults and ‘parent’ for our children

Honestly, if you still think these guys and gals are conservatives, libertarians or interested in health, please read and reread these posts and research a bit more independently.

There was a time not so long ago when the words ‘public health’ meant potable water and protection from contagious diseases like cholera.

It is incumbent for us to make our family, friends and neighbours aware of this scam. These people are not interested in us, only in their personal power and fortunes gained at our expense.