Peter L. Berger

This article is part of the Tobacco portal on Sourcewatch funded from 2006 - 2009 by the American Legacy Foundation.

Dr. Peter L. Berger was a professor of Sociology at Rutgers University and later at Boston College. He served as a Tobacco Institute consultant. While at Boston College Berger, quoted in tobacco industry newsletter "The Tobacco Observer," described tobacco control proponents as "fanatical."(E. Whelan 1984) Berger attended Philip Morris executive meetings and participated in the multinational tobacco industry's Social Costs/Social Values Project, created to refute the social costs theory of smoking and to help reverse declining social acceptability of smoking. He was a contributing author to the industry-financed book Smoking and Society, edited by another tobacco industry consultant, Robert Tollison.

Biography

Peter L. Berger is an academic social philosopher and sociologist who served as a consultant to the tobacco industry starting with the industry's original 1979 Social Costs/Social Values Project (SC/SV).[1] According to a 1980 International Committee on Smoking Issues/Social Acceptability Working Party (ICOSI/SAWP) progress report, Berger’s primary assignment was "to demonstrate clearly that anti-smoking activists have a special agenda which serves their own purposes, but not necessarily the majority of nonsmokers."[2]

Berger assisted the industry by developing non-health based arguments in defense of tobacco. He specifically developed the argument that the anti-smoking movement is a class struggle of the richer, more educated groups against the poorer and less-educated groups, that public health advocates are elitists who are driven by quasi-religious, messianic urges and seek to punish non-believers (smokers) through the application of taxes and fines.[3]

Berger contributed a chapter to Robert Tollison’s industry-commissioned book, Smoking and Society, in which he (Berger) did disclose his affiliation with the industry. In his chapter, titled "A Sociological View of the Antismoking Phenomenon," Berger described the anti-smoking movement as a "health cult" in which doctors were the "priests" and hospitals the "sanctuaries."[Tollison, R D (editor), 1986. Smoking and Society: Lexington Books.] By 1988, Berger was listed as a participant in the tobacco industry’s ETS (Environmental Tobacco Smoke) Consultant Project.[4]

Ideology and Activities

Bergers received grants paid through the tobacco industry's "Special Account #4", operated by lawyers, which was designed to hide any payments and block courtroom disclosure. [5]

Berger associated with:

• The Manhattan Institute which houses Peter Huber, John Olson and others.
• Social Affairs Unit from the UK with Digby Anderson.
• Arron Wildavsky [6]
• Petr Strabenek of Trinity College, Dublin
• Irving Kristol the guru of the neo-con movement.
• Robert Tollison
• American Enterprise Institute (AEI) [7]

He also appeared in a "denial" film for Philip Morris [8] and reported back to the Philip Morris on the World Health Organizations's 5th World Conference on Smoking and Health in Winnipeg, and he said:

" I understood my assignment to be an overall assessment of the conference, with special emphasis on institutional dynamics [ie. how well the anti-smokers were organized] and ideological themes, using my report on the Stockholm conference (1979) as a "base line."

He then reveals that "the conference was exhaustively monitored by industry observers..." indicating that he was personally acquainted with most of the 50 or so tobacco staff who infiltrated the main meetings and the various work-group sessions.

His article on smoking regulation reveals a strong conservative ideology, and he says that

"the Clinton health plan represents the most ambitious power grab yet in the short history of this rising class [which he defines as the "knowledge elite"].[9]

He viewed his task as being to psychoanalyze anti-tobacco forces and impute motives to various public health forces such as WHO, government regulators and anti-smoking groups, which were lumped together as "bureaucratic interests", and he also sees the "ideological linkage in the case of women is with feminism."

Questioning the motives and trying to discern some underlying psychosis of people in the anti-smoking movement gave Berger his tobacco raison d'etre [10]

He was also recruited for:

• Libertad for a junket to Australia with Bernard Levin and R. Emmett Tyrell Jr. [11]
• For an ICOSI project [12]

Current employment

As of September 2005 Peter Berger was a professor of sociology and theology at the College of Arts and Sciences and School of Theology at Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts. A description of his professional accomplishments (listed under the staff description section of Boston University’s web site) lists the institutions where Berger has taught, the books he has written and the awards he has received, but contains no mention Berger’s past affiliations with the tobacco industry, nor any of the work he has done on their behalf.[13]

Contact

Peter L. Berger
c/o Boston University
School of Theology
745 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02215

Phone
The School of Theology's main phone number is 617-353-3050.

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