Clearing The Air

Thursday, August 17, 2006

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation .....a candid interview with its President

"The Foundation’s Tobacco-Control Strategy". This article from page 9 of the hyperlink is a self promotion piece by the Johnson & Johnson Company affiliate RWJF. And J & J is best known by regular readers as the manufacturer of Nicoderm and Nicoderm CQ.

Among the more notable quotes by the RWJF President in the article are:

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has played a major role over the past decade in initiatives to prevent .........tobacco use and to improve treatment efforts to help smokers quit.

Especially since RWJF's vested financial interest is in seeing that J & J continue to sell its Nicoderm smoking cessation products. (Smoking bans greatly aid those marketing efforts).

Our emphasis will be on efforts to educate the public and policy-makers about ........increasing the excise tax on tobacco products, increasing the proportion of people covered by smoke-free environments and promoting tobacco treatment coverage for people who are struggling to quit.

In other words, mandate our pharmaceutical nicotine product (Nicoderm) by providing funding to insure government legislation which bans the use of tobacco nicotine products

There have been rumors that the Foundation was getting out of tobacco control altogether. Would you address those concerns?

Over the next two years, we have $72 million of grantmaking targeted to tobacco control, with an additional $30 million in grants from 2006 through 2008. So we are not getting out of tobacco control.

Over the years .......our staff has developed strong ......relationaships with people throughout the world who are interested in and focused on tobacco-control issues.........creating linkages and introductions between people who have an interest and may not know how to get fully engaged......the importance of working together, using our combined intellectual, financial and other resources to continue to reduce ........tobacco use.

So there you have it, RWJF will continue to fund the exaggerations and lies by smoking ban activist organizations in a continued effort to insure its financial interests thrive. Even though American Cancer Society test results prove secondhand smoke is 25,000 times safer than OSHA air quality regulations.