Trump Adviser Stephen Miller Championed Big Tobacco’s Alarming Lies | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/stephen-miller-tobacco-truther-lies
Two op-eds address the health effects of smoking tobacco and the “unrelenting health fascists” who regulate where one can smoke. In one piece that drastically minimizes the health risks of smoking, Miller, then a self-identified smoker, advances ideas that are patently false. Claiming “it is safer for college kids to smoke than to drive,” he overlooks a few key facts: Today, smoking kills 480,000 people in the United States each year, “more than AIDS, alcohol, car accidents, illegal drugs, murders and suicides combined.” While some college smokers may be able to quit long-term, most regular smokers who try to quit are not successful. In contrast, car crashes killed about 31,000 people in the U.S. in 2007, the year Miller wrote his opinion piece.
Miller relies on several articles published by the "renowned Cato Institute,” a libertarian think tank funded by corporations and wealthy conservatives. And guess what? The Cato Institute has received funding from major tobacco companies RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris. Miller cites a Cato article that even the conservative American Council on Science and Health called “unscientific and inflammatory.”