I’m quoted at length in this Trenton Times piece on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is based in Princeton, NJ — also served by the paper.

The reporter called me on my cell phone as I was driving — something, ironically enough, that RWJF would likely find troubling. Perhaps it was due to the bad connection, but I wasn’t quoted entirely accurately, though I think my position is fairly clear from the article:

“Every study done with Robert Wood Johnson money seems to advocate more regulations, more taxes and more efforts to control how Americans behave, even in areas where the rest of the medical community seems to be moving in the opposite direction,” said Radley Balko, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington.

“For example, alcohol researchers not funded by Robert Wood Johnson have focused much of their recent work on studying the health benefits of regular, moderate drinking. In many cases, these studies have concluded that most Americans who do not currently drink should start,” Balko said.

“However,” he continued, “among the dozens and dozens of alcohol related studies that Robert Wood Johnson has funded during the past few years, I have yet to see any of them reach any conclusion other than this: too many Americans are drinking too much, too often.”

Critics like Balko rarely argue that RWJ is doing anything wrong by advocating policies it supports. Instead, they fault the organization for portraying itself inaccurately.

Instead of viewing RWJ as a research organization that takes policy positions when science supports them, Balko views RWJ as an advocacy group that takes a position and then finances studies designed to bolster that position.

“The organization has proved my point for me at two health conferences I have attended. At a conference in Boston, Robert Wood Johnson explicitly advised anti-alcohol groups that any studies or programs they funded should support whatever conclusions they had come to before undertaking the studies.

“Then, at a conference this summer, Robert Wood Johnson’s president said that although we still don’t understand the rapid rise in obesity, public health advocates should `act ahead of the science.’ That is hardly what you would expect to hear from a group that advertises itself as scientific and objective.”

A few clarifications:

1) It’s probably a bit strong to say that most medical studies say that Americans who don’t drink should start. They do say that a drink or two per day could save tens of thousands of lives per year.

2) I do think that RWJF is inaccurate to portray itself as a “public health foundation,” when it clearly has an agenda that goes beyond the legitimate applications of public health — which would be protection from communicable diseases and biological or chemical attacks. Or, put another way, to protect us from risks to which we don’t knowingly subject ourselves.

RWJF is behind almost all of the public smoking bans, as well as countless anti-alcohol initiatives at all levels of government. They also fund most of the anti-fat crusaders. That’s not public health. It’s using the state to protect us from ourselves and to limit our choices.

If all RWJF did was fund scientific studies on health and well-being, then published the results and encouraged Americans to make better choices, I’d have no problem with them.

My biggest criticism of RWJF — and I explicitly told the reporter this — is that they want to use the coercive power of government to influence those choices.

Well, that, and they’re agitating for taxpayer-funded universal health care.

3) I didn’t attend the anti-alcohol conference in Boston, but I do have the agenda and talking points from the event.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 19th, 2005 at 11:56 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.