A former director at the tobacco giant Philip Morris International (PMI) was handed a role on an influential expert committee advising the UK government on cancer risks, the Observer can reveal.
Ruth Dempsey, the ex-director of scientific and regulatory affairs, spent 28 years at PMI before being appointed to the UK Committee on Carcinogenicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment (CoC).
The committee’s role is to provide ministers with independent advice. Yet since taking up the position in February 2020, Dempsey has continued to be paid by PMI for work including authoring a sponsored paper about regulatory strategies for heated tobacco products.
She also owns shares in the tobacco giant – whose products include Marlboro cigarettes and IQOS heated tobacco sticks – and receives a PMI pension. On social media she continues to engage with senior staff at the company, including liking LinkedIn posts for the chief communications officer and the vice-president of public affairs.
There is no suggestion that Dempsey has acted improperly or failed to declare her interests, which are listed in committee documents. She said she had always complied with the rules and that her contributions to the CoC were based on her scientific training and “decades of experience in the field”. She also said she was “no longer a representative of the tobacco industry” given she had retired and had disclosed details of her career and financial interests during the application process.
[…]
Prior to Dempsey’s appointment, the CoC was involved in reviews of both e-cigarettes and heated tobacco products, two of PMI’s product lines.Dempsey is believed to have been appointed to the committee following an evaluation and interview conducted by a three-person panel, including a Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) official, after stepping down from her full-time role with PMI to establish her own toxicology consultancy in the summer of 2019.
[…]
Dempsey said she was “very sorry if anyone feels that my presence on the committee is inappropriate”.When she joined she did not have any active consultancy agreements with PMI but said the two she has had since had been properly declared. She also declared potential conflicts of interest when topics arose “that could be related to work I was doing as a consultant to any company”.
“In the five years that I have been a member there has been no topic related to tobacco products. If there had been, I certainly would declare my conflict of interest and would always follow the guidance of the committee chair regarding participation,” she said. She added that she had “never passed confidential or privileged information to PMI, and would certainly never do so”.
Eh, if the structure as described (members list their interests and sit out where there is a conflict of interest) is working as intended then I don’t see why she can’t have a job giving opinions on the cancer risk of eggs or asbestos or whatever. She might even be positioned well to understand those risks.
But it absolutely stretches credulity that an org focusing on cancer has not had a discussion she needed to sit out of in five years. Which means either the structure is not working as described (bad), she’s lying out of her arse (worse), or this org is simply not having these incredibly important discussions (catastrophic).
The problem is if she’s giving advice on asbestos then fine but realistically that’s not what she’s giving advice on. We are aware that asbestos is cancerous and we’ve already banned it, so there’s not much more of a discussion that needs to be had.
The primary carcinogen that is still commercially available is tobacco products. There’s no reasonable way to believe that she isn’t consulting on the tobacco industry despite having invested interests, regardless of what “assurances” she gives, it doesn’t matter if she’s declared them, she still compromised there’s no way that you wouldn’t be compromised in that situation.
Because she’ll be well aware of what setting precedent does, and that becoming more strict on other fields and demanding accountability from them risks them becoming more strict on hers, and demanding accountability from her field, too.
The problem with these structures is that they rely on the word of capitalists, whose whole existence and interest is about making profit at any cost, to regulate themselves, so it’s not broken, it’s just had the curtain moved very slightly to reveal the tip of the iceberg of its deliberate inner workings.
Thinking about it logically.
Given the history of tobacco, and its long fight to deny the risk.
Honestly, from 2020 to today. Has anything new about its risk ever needed to be discussed.
Even the Tories are creating laws to try and prevent new smokers growing into the habit. Huge taxes are added to tobacco in the UK to (theoretically if not actually) help fund the NHS.
All this has been well known since the 80s. With advertising laws etc increased over that time.
Would an organisation like this genuinely need to discuss anything related to tobacco from the 2020s on.
Part of me assumes newer risks and scientific data would be the main need for an org like this to advise the government on.
I guess, but has there not been a conversation about vapes in that time? The risk profile is different but as far as I know cancer is still a concern?
I don’t know. No expert on vapes.
But would a history in the tobacco industry actually limit her right to discuss vapes. Unless she was actually involved in the development in some way. Or ended up with shares in vaping industories. Her past would not be a conflicting interest.
That’s what “heated tobacco products” means