Well said! But don’t start comparing tobacco money, unless you are willing to go the whole way with it. In that case, there was (and is) a huge push-back from the anti-tobacco lobby. And that one is just as much insider, if not moreso.
For example, the Office of Smoking and Health, lodged within the Centers for Disease Control. They are well-funded, and staffed at our own expense. I once saw the whiteboard in the conference room they had used to discuss the coming year’s strategies. I think it was Number 2 in the list: “Associate smoking with every possibly known disease.” Because, they’re the CDC. They can produce crap papers based on worse science, and hold a huge amount of unquestioning public trust that way.
And in the end, what you get is the result that ‘tobacco science’ and anti-tobacco science’ are pretty much the same things, promoted for pretty much the same reasons - because the results go in somebody’s pocket.
Granted, this is an example of what happens when the steps you outlined are actually partially successful. Any hint of a democratic process is shut down. Witness the anti-tobacco lobby’s efforts to shut down the e-cigs business on zero evidence of any harm…not to mention, the fact that there IS no tobacco in those products at all. Ultimately, they got shot down on that basis - but not for want of trying! And we still see the phony papers and articles coming out like clockwork in a bid to shut down potentially the best harm-reduction strategy yet. Now, they are claiming it’s because the tobacco companies have a major stake in that business - but that wasn’t so when they went after the e-cig business in the first place! So, its playing out precisely as your list predicted, except that in this case, an agency of the government itself is involved - and the citizenry is completely shut out of the process.
