Tobacco Documents Online

This decision reveals SAMMEC II methodology for what it is -- politics based on questionable science. The authors apparently have decided what results they want, and they are willing to adjust calculations to ensure that they find what they are looking for. The most serious flaw in estimating indirect morbidity costs (lost income due to illness and disability) again pertains to the use of biased relative rates. As Table 10 shows, SAMMEC II uses relative rates which report about 30 percent more work-loss days for smokers than for nonsmokers. These rates are developed from productivity loss estimates by Rice et al. (1986), which were similar to those reported in Rice and Hodgson (1985). The latter study claims that smoking causes smokers to experience 32 percent more work loss than nonsmokers. SAMMEC II, in line with these studies and, indeed, employing their results, attributes the entire difference in absenteeism rates between smokers and nonsmokers to smoking. Research studies such as those by Leigh (1986) and Allen (1981a, 1981b), which do consider the effect of significant factors, fail to account for potential interdependencies between smoking characteristics and other behavior. Even the popular press links smoking with other lifestyle choices such as drinking, breakfast consumption, hours of sleep and exercise (see, for example, Otten 1988). (See also Attachment A, Section I.) The results obtained by SAMMEC II based on productivity studies of Rice et al., as a recent study shows, may be inaccurate and unscientific. These work-loss studies employ only a simple means difference test as a statistical basis for their deductions. Thus, they are incapable of determining whether absence rates are influenced by smoking since they cannot account for factors common to smokers as a group. However, a paper directly relevant to 32 TIMN 445068

V. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS SAMMEC II software and the logic underpinning it are not simply faulty. As noted earlier in this paper, SAMMEC's political aims were to enlist government and "goodwill" not-for-profit entities to develop exaggerated and unreliable estimates of the "social costs" of smoking. SAMMEC II developers violated fundamental and long-recognized social and economic principles of cost-benefit analysis by loosely interpreting costs and then by complete elimination of benefits from the calculation. First, it is highly questionable to argue that any "social costs" could apply to smoking. If any such "costs" do exist, all consequences of individual behavior are p •nvate costs in any reasoned calculation of "costs." This means that if there are any lost earnings due to illness or "premature" death plus all medical expenses, they would be borne by and must be attributed to individuals. This principle has been given scientific status in all competent studies of costs and benefits. But even SAMMEC's authors readily admit that -- on SAMMEC's own grounds, i.e., on calculating costs as "social costs" -- any "social costs" of smoking may be non-existent or negligible when all costs of the health care system are taken into account. As they argue, the "net economic effect of cigarette smoking in future scenarios is speculative" and "movement toward a nonsmoking society may be recessionarv in the long term" (SNR, p. 8, [emphasis ours]). 34 TIMN 445069