Gary Friedman

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

Gary D. Friedman, M.D.

Biography

Dr. Gary D. Friedman was with the Kaiser-Permanente Medical Care Program in Oakland California in 1994.(L.A. Times 9/18/94) Friedman was one of the 44 scientists rated in the 1960s notes of a Council for Tobacco Research official for their benefit to the tobacco industry. According to the Los Angeles Times, Friedman stated,

I needed support for research back then ...The Council for Tobacco Research was very interested in how smokers differed from nonsmokers in health and mortality.(L.A.Times, 9/18/94)

Friedman worked with Carl C. Seltzer, a Harvard anthropologist, whom the Council for Tobacco Research also considered a favored scientist.(LAT 9/18/94) Friedman now says that at first he "compromised" with Seltzer on their early studies.(LA Times 9/18/94) After a further study convinced Friedman that "quitting smoking really seemed to do some good," Friedman says, Seltzer and the CTR "disassociated themselves" from those findings.(9/18/94) Friedman published his results in the New England Journal of Medicine in February 1979.(LA Times 9/18/94) Seltzer wrote to the New England Journal of Medicine: "These authors [including Friedman] conclude that stopping smoking appears to result in a substantial reduction in coronary mortality. I find the procedures used in their article to be questionable and the conclusions to be unjustified..."

Seltzer, now retired, insists that Friedman "wanted to continue getting money from the [[[Council for Tobacco Research]]] but didn't want me to have an equal say. His link to smoking and mortality was two or three times more than anybody in the country. Sure, they (Council for Tobacco Research) gave me and Harvard a lot of money...maybe a million or so. I was at it for a great many years. The council liked my research. I also showed there was no relationship between heart disease and smoking. And this business of secondary smoke, passive smoke, is absolute nonsense...nonsense. I don't care what the surgeon general says! What does the surgeon know! He only knows what he is told!"(L.A.Times 9/18/94).

Seltzer argued that many Council for Tobacco Research grants have little to do with smoking or are sometimes critical of it.(L.A.Times 9/18/94).

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