Mike Pence claimed “smoking doesn’t kill” as late as 2000

Mike Pence, the governor of Indiana and Donald Trump’s running mate, is nobody’s idea of a moderate. This is, after all, the guy who signed a bill into law mandating funerals for aborted fetuses and who compared the Supreme Court’s ruling on Obamacare to the 9/11 attacks.

But perhaps his most dangerous stance has to do with tobacco. In a 2000 op-ed, posted on his personal webpage and unearthed by BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski, Pence brazenly declared, “Smoking does not kill”:

Time for a quick reality check. Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill. In fact, 2 out of every three smokers does not die from a smoking related illness and 9 out of ten smokers do not contract lung cancer. This is not to say that smoking is good for you... news flash: smoking is not good for you. If you are reading this article through the blue haze of cigarette smoke you should quit.

This paragraph is a veritable maze of contradictions. First, Pence asserts that smoking doesn’t kill. To back this up, he bafflingly concedes that a huge fraction of smokers — one in three! — die from smoking-related illnesses, a fact that a casual observer could be forgiven for interpreting as proof that smoking does, in fact, kill, and kills a lot of people at that. (Only one problem: Subsequent research has found that two out of three smokers die from a smoking-related illness — not one in three, as Pence insisted.)

“This is not to say that smoking is good for you.... news flash: smoking is not good for you,” Pence adds. But wait — I thought smoking didn’t kill? If smoking has other, nonlethal health outcomes, Pence does not mention them in this piece. He proceeds, instead, to argue that the evils of tobacco do not compare in scale to the evils of big government.

This wasn’t the only place where Pence denied basic science on tobacco and lung diseases. Kaczynski and Christopher Massie uncovered an early op-ed Pence wrote in 1997, when he was a conservative talk radio host, defending tobacco companies then facing a slew of lawsuits from states trying to recoup medical expenses incurred due to their products. The whole piece is premised on Pence’s sarcastic suggestion that states, using the same logic, should sue candy companies:

Seriously, lung cancer claims too many lives but the numbers are inconsequential compared to the death toll related to heart disease. According to recent numbers, heart disease is still the number one killer in the world. What is the main cause of heart disease? Obesity. What single product, when used properly, contributes more to obesity than any other product in America? Candy!

There is so much wrong here it’s hard to know where to start. About a third of deaths from heart disease are directly attributable to smoking, and about 33,000 nonsmokers die every year due to heart disease caused by secondhand smoke exposure. The prevalence of heart disease is an example of the destruction wrought by smoking, not a refutation of it. Candy, by contrast, appears to not be a significant driver of obesity at all; people who eat candy regularly are actually less likely to be overweight or obese. That’s probably not causal (candy doesn’t make you thin, certainly) but it suggests it’s not what’s behind the crisis.

Pence’s history of promoting tobacco companies and denigrating public health campaigns against smoking came back to bite him in his 2000 congressional race. His opponent, Bob Rock, raised it in a debate. Pence responded, per a local news report Kaczyinski unearthed, by saying that “the article was taken out of context and that while there is no direct ‘scientific causal link medically identifying’ a link between smoking and lung cancer that was not the point of writing it.”

So when directly questioned in a debate, Pence doubled down on the totally erroneous assertion that there isn’t evidence that smoking causes lung cancer. This is truly remarkable science denialism.

Pence has been mostly quiet about the science behind tobacco’s effects since, but as Mother Jones’s Pema Levy notes, he was one of a relatively small number of Congress members to vote against 2009’s Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which allowed the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco products.

As governor of Indiana, a state with the seventh-highest smoking rate in the country, Pence has repeatedly taken pro-smoking positions, ThinkProgress’s Josh Israel finds. He slashed funding for the Indiana Tobacco Prevention and Cessation office, and rejected a proposal from Republican legislators to raise cigarette taxes to fund transportation.

Perhaps counter to Pence’s actions, the US is making tremendous progress against tobacco. Smoking rates are steadily on the decline. As of 2014, only 16.8 percent of adults smoked, down from more than 30 percent three decades earlier. But that change was largely due to tobacco control policies and public health efforts: stuff like cigarette taxes, bans on smoking in bars and restaurants, PSAs, FDA regulations, and so on. If we want to snuff out smoking altogether, those policies need to continue and be expanded.

There’s just no indication that Pence has any interest in doing that. Indeed, it appears likely that he’d push US policy in this area in a direction that leads to more smoking-related deaths rather than fewer.