Copyright © 1995 by Steven J. Milloy. All rights reserved. First edition. Published by the Cato Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20002. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 95-72177. International Standard Book Number: 0-9647463-2-8.
Chapter 1
Picking the Right Risk
Finding the right risk to "discover" is the critical first step. If you pick the right risk, its intrinsic characteristics will make most of the risk assessment process a mere formality. Pick the wrong risk and the only thing at risk is your career.
The risk should be unprovable.
The very existence of your risk must be unprovable by conventional scientific methods. After all, if it was provable, somebody else (like a real scientist), would already have done the work and your risk assessment wouldn't be necessary. A risk may be unprovable either because it doesn't actually exist or because the risk is too small to evaluate with science. In either case, fortunately for you, it's technically impossible to disprove such a risk.
For example, consider Superfund, the federal program to clean up hazardous waste sites. Sites are designated for clean-up where it is calculated that someone's chance of getting cancer from the site is 1 in 10,000 or more. This risk is so small that it could never be scientifically shown to exist. It would take a study with at least 500 million subjects — about two times the current U.S. population — to prove such a small risk exists. Even a 1 in 1,000 risk would require a study with five million subjects! (A typical study contains just a few hundred subjects; on rare occasions, a few thousand.)
Using an unprovable risk offers several advantages. First, you can never be proved wrong. This is very important. Of course, you can never be proved right either, but that's a small detail, one that really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. You just need to allege, not prove.
Second, an unprovable risk allows you to make outrageous assumptions about your risk, including the threshold assumption that your risk exists at all.
Some of the more famous unprovable cancer risks are dioxin, electromagnetic fields, hazardous waste sites, environmental tobacco smoke, household radon, chlorinated drinking water and pesticide residue in foods.
The risk should be ubiquitous.
Your risk should be one that lots of people, if not everyone, come in contact with or are "exposed" to on a regular basis. But it should be difficult to impossible to measure how much exposure there actually is. This allows you to make up how much exposure there is and how to measure it. More about this later.
For example, consider dioxin, which many have tried to link with cancer. Dioxin is a by-product of natural and man-made combustion processes involving chlorine. Natural processes include forest fires, volcanoes and compost heaps. Man-made processes include municipal,
hospital and hazardous waste incinerators, internal combustion engines, chemical manufacturing processes and residential wood burning.
As a result of these processes, dioxin is everywhere. It's in our air, it's in our food, it's in what we drink. In other words, it's unavoidable. It's virtually impossible to measure exactly how much dioxin we're all exposed to. But it's a lot.
In contrast, specific on-the-job risks or specific infectious diseases are not everywhere. They can be identified more easily and can be avoided by people. But they don't grab the public's attention.
Well-known ubiquitous cancer risks include electromagnetic fields, hazardous waste sites, environmental tobacco smoke, radon, chlorinated drinking water, and pesticides. You'll note that this is the same list of famous "unprovable" risks. This is why they're famous.
The risk should be intuitive to the public.
The right risk is one that is logical and intuitive to the general public. Industries that use smokestacks, dump wastewater into rivers or engage in other aesthetically unpleasant activities are sources of good risks. After all, it's obvious that the gunk coming out of the smokestack is harmful. Just think about those overhead electric power lines, you just know something bad is coming off them. With that kind of risk, the public doesn't even need to read your research. They knew it all along. You just got around to proving it "scientifically."
Naturally occurring radiation, that is, low levels of radiation from the earth and space (but not the sun!), is one risk that is not intuitive. This type of radiation is unavoidable. Yet public health types would have us believe even naturally occurring radiation puts us at risk of cancer. Well now, let's see if I've got this straight. It's natural. It's unavoidable. So tell me one more time — how is it harmful?
A good risk cannot be defended easily.
Whoever is responsible for the risk must be at a public relations disadvantage in defending itself against your accusations. This is easy where you're dealing with "obvious" risks, like those that are intuitive. Other good risks involve things that should be "pure and natural" but have been "contaminated" by man. Food and drinking water with pesticides, those blasts of diesel exhaust you get from buses, indoor air with tobacco smoke, carpet fumes and cleaning agents. If nothing else, no one likes these things whether or not they are actually health risks.
Human "vices," where it's easy to take the moral high ground (like smoking and drinking, for example), are also good. Government activities, especially anything to do with radiation or nuclear weapons production, are always good targets. The government can't defend itself; if it tries, your issue gets the added — and very juicy — benefit of being the subject of a government coverup.
Risks should be involuntary.
Ideally, your risk should be involuntary. The public perceives these risks to be thrust upon them without their choice or consent. A lawyer would say there's no "assumption of risk." Somebody else is doing something to them. Such risks invoke the outrage factor. Examples here include smokestack industries and electric power lines near homes and schools, pesticide "contamination" of food and water and second-hand tobacco smoke.
In stark contrast, the public tends to get less incensed about risks voluntarily encountered...overeating, driving too fast, smoking and drinking too much. Most of us take our health pretty seriously and we just don't like other people putting us in danger. It's okay if we speed on the interstate or carry around an extra 20 or 30 pounds. But heaven help someone else we perceive to be threatening us.
Reducing or eliminating the risk should involve no perceptible personal sacrifice.
Don't pick a risk that would require people to sacrifice something near and dear to them. That means fast food, sweets or artificial sweeteners, cellular telephones and the like. Even if there are real risks associated with such things, we value them too much to believe it's worth relinquishing them, even for our health. Recently someone actually tried to associate eating hot dogs with leukemia. Good luck with that one!
Pick risks that others are responsible for. It's the electric power companies that will have to bury those dangerous power lines. It's the chemical companies that have to find substitutes for chlorofluorcarbons (CFCs) threatening the ozone layer. It's the city that will have to pay for cleaning up that unsightly landfill. Somebody else will have to give up smoking indoors. These risks involve no tangible personal sacrifice and are easy for people to get indignant about.
Pick on the unsuspecting.
Lastly, pick on a risk that's novel. The public will be surprised; those responsible won't be ready to defend themselves. By the time a defense can be mounted and your study gets the sound thrashing it deserves, your newly won fame will have carried you on to bigger and better things. For instance, remember when the cellular telephone scare was launched on Larry King Live? The next day the stock prices of companies in the cellular telephone industry fell through the floor.
So you've picked your risk. Now what?
It's time to put it all together. The next few of chapters will show you how to use epidemiology, statistics and toxicology to make things happen.
Click here for Chapter 2: 2-4-6-8 What Can We Associate?
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Copyright © 1996 Steven J. Milloy. All rights reserved. Site developed and hosted by WestLake Solutions, Inc.