David M. Warburton

David M. Warburton
A British psychologist (a professor of Psychology and Psychpharmacology at Reading University, UK) who was a recognised expert on nicotine until he retired in 2003. He also created and ran ARISE (Associates for Research In the Science of Enjoyment)''' -- a group of scientists who studied the value of pleasure.

They grouped tobacco with less harmful products like chocolate, coffee and perfume, describing them as substances which "give us pleasure and enhance the quality of our lives.".

Warburton was the editor of the academic monthly Psychopharmacology Journal, and he long maintained that nicotine wasn't addictive. He was supported in this assertion by two other prominent English scientists: the famous behavioural psychologist Hans Eysenck and the toxicologist Francis J. C. Roe, both of whom were in the pay of the tobacco industry for decades, and both of whom were prominent repudiators of the science used by regulators and activists to attack smoking.

Warburton himself is an occasional smoker.

Activities and ideas

 * In a 1989 bulletin of the British Psychological Society he argued that nicotine isn't addictive because its effects are different from those of drugs or alcohol. For example, it doesn't give a "strong, pleasurable thrill," he wrote.
 * In 1988, he presented his views to New Zealand's Department of Health, which concluded that nicotine is addictive.
 * He participated in the 1988 Surgeon General's Report that deemed nicotine addictive, submitting a paper on tobacco's effect on human performance, his research specialty. (Comment: This paper may only have been written as a critique for the British tobacco industry)
 * In an article: Tobacco Dream Team: Experts Who Insists Nicotine Isn't Addictive, Wall Street Journal, 23 March 1995 he espouses nicotine's mood-elevating effects but doesn't recognise its depressing effects.
 * In 2001 Professor Warburton released a study showing that people are intimidated by television chefs, who, he claimed, increase pressure on regular people to produce excellent dishes at dinner parties. Warburton concluded that these fears were causing a new syndrome to emerge that he called "Kitchen Performance Anxiety," or KPA. The physical symptoms of KPA included mental blocks during cooking, a rapid heart rate, difficulty in breathing, nausea, and headaches. BBC did a news report on KPA . Not unexpectedly, Warburton's study was commissioned by the makers of the wine Piat d'Or wine.

History
Warburton was known to British tobacco industry as a researcher into the mental effects of nicotine from 1976 (or possibly before. In this year he published a study on the value of nicotine in improving visual performance, and from then on he recieved grants for his nicotine research..

By the early 1980s, his study showing the beneficial effects of nicotine as an aid to concentration was widely promoted by the industry and well quoted in the scientific literature, and his "Functional" model emphasised the usefulness of nicotine and the pleasurable aspects of smoking. He also looked for possible beneficial effects of smoking to ward off age-related problems like Altzheimer's disease, (a tobacco-inspired theory at that time)

This was legitimate science, and his consulting work to the industry breached no ethical standards, despite his rather unconventional opinions.The state of knowledge at the time justified this work; the tobacco industry was attempting to understand the biological actions of the components of tobacco smoke.

The fact that the industry could slant these findings to their benefit should not reflect on Warburton. However he also advised the UK's Tobacco Advisory Council (formerly the Tobacco Research Council) on matters more related to scientists, than to the science -- and provided them with a critical evaluation and criticism on the research of other scientists. Some of this work elevated his relationship to the companies from a science-advisor, to that of a " trusted colleague."

Addiction theories
By 1984 he was consulting extensively with the Carreras-Rothmans company on nicotine and addiction. It is significant that Rothmans believed that the industry had a "sensitive addiction issue" when it came to nicotine, while Warburton continued to maintain that it wasn't addictive -- just pleasurable. 

This coincided with Hans Eysenck's views to a degree. Eysenck divided people into Introverts and Extroverts, then explained anomalies by reclassifying some Introverts as Latent Extroverts (and vice versa). Such theories can, of course, explain anything. Eysenck and Warburton were in the process of jointly developing a 'motivational' theory of smoking which was to prove useful in explaining the smoker's "habitual" behaviour while rejecting any idea that nicotine could be "addictive". This view was the firmly held by the tobacco companies in public also.

Later the ideas of Eysenck and Warburton diverged, with Eysenck emphasising the genetic propensity of some people both to smoke and to get lung cancer (the constitutional hypothesis), while Warburton focused on the importance of physical arousal and the functional value smokers got out of the nicotine surge. He didn't deny ... but simply ignored ... the lung-cancer/heart attack problems, seemingly believing that the beneficial effects outweighed the dangers.

For the tobacco industry, any admission of addictive would have invited instant government regulation of nicotine as a drug, so the industry had to maintain the fiction that smokers choose to smoke ... and this made smoking a human rights issue.

By mid-1984 Warburton was writing articles and preparing studies for the general tobacco industry's scientific PR efforts, and clearly he was now beginning to step over the scientific line and into the world of the public relations practitioner. In 1988 he wrote a detailed criticism of the US Surgeon Generals' report, which the industry circulated widely, and Philip Morris staff recommended using his quotes on addiction, rather than those of any US scientists. 

The end of nicotine research funding
Between 1984 and 1990 anti-smoking attitudes hardened and the emphasis on the harm to the health of smokers was refocussed onto non-smokers. The defence that smokers had a "choice" whether to smoke or not, didn't carry over into the rights of non-smokers to breathe clean air in public places. Environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) or "passive moking" was now the main issue.

Victor DeNoble and his partner Paul Mele had been employed for years by Philip Morris USA in their Richmond Research Laboratories as inhouse scientists doing much the same work as Warburton, and with greater attention on the real problems of addiction. But increasingly, they found they were denied the right to publish any of their research findings and DeNoble was forced to withdraw at least one paper from publication at the last minute through concerns by the company lawyers.

Then abruptly in 1984, they were flown to New York to be told that their laboratory was to close down -- without explanation, and virtually overnight. Existing studies were simply abandoned and the mice destroyed; their laboratory records were seized by the lawyers and they were without jobs. The decision had been made by the Committee of Counsel (under a cooperative agreement between the companies) that any animal research that might establish the addictive qualities of nicotine were far too risky to contemplate. .

Between 1985 and 1988, Denoble and Mele, now independent scientists, tried to get some of their papers on addiction published, but they were bound by old confidentially agreements and Philip Morris refused permission. They persisted and were regularly threatened by company lawyers.

Generally, between 1984 and 1990, addiction research ground to a halt everywhere in the USA, and slightly later in Europe, as the industry realised that this was an insoluble problem in terms of the pharmacology, and that ETS was far more threatening politically.

ARISE
The creation of ARISE (Associates for Research In the Science of Enjoyment) was a stoke of genius for nicotine research specialists looking for a new and lucrative career. So it is probably no coincidental that in 1989, David Warburton switched his career emphasis from experimental research, to organising and running his own scientific society. He remained at Reading University, but now the grants made to him at the University were for a different purpose.

In January 1987, Rothmans had organised a meeting between Warburton and Sharon Boyse and Ray Thornton who ran the "Smoking Issues" (PR) division of British American Tobacco (BAT). The industry baton for the control of Warburton was passed from Rothmans to BAT, and from genuine nicotine research to propaganda.

Sharon Boyse was interested in doing more research to emphasise the beneficial side of nicotine, and on Warburton's advice she approached Ian Hindmarch from the Human Pyschopharmacology Research Unit at Leeds University. Hindmarch accepted the invitation to apply for a grant, and the nucleus of the new ARISE group was born

Sharon Boyse's only concerns were with the ridiculous position the scientists (and the industry) were forced to take on questions of "addiction". 

Philip Morris also saw Warburton as a valuable scientist to have on side. In a memo outlining the European requirements for Whitecoats, one executive wrote:
 * "PM should invest much more in consultants: who can, either be very vocal (the Witorsch type) or respected among their peers (the Warburton type). Of least use are those consultants who have already been identified with the tobacco industry."

The first conference (later listed as an ARISE function) was held in Florence, Italy, during 1989. It was initially supported by RJ Reynolds, British American Tobacco, and possibly Philip Morris. Warburton appears to have convened this conference alone.

But the tobacco companies could see the publicity benefits of these conferences, and on the 12th and 13th of July 1990, Warburton, Hindmarch and five other well-known tobacco-funded nicotine scientists were paid to meet in Zurich, and they agreed to formally establish the new group. (See ARISE for further details)

Initially this was a one-man show, run out of Warburton's office in the Psychology Department at Reading University with only the part time services of one secretary. Later, a full-time secretariat was established at the London headquarters of PR company Fishburn Hedges. .

Addiction
Thousands of pages of scientific research reports have been wasted on the question: ''"Are cigarettes addictive?" (or, "Is nicotine addictive?")'' Yet anyone who has ever smoked and tried to give up, knows the answer.

This is one of those scientific word-games that academic often play -- especially when a redefinition of a term has the potential to generate income from companies which don't want to wear the addiction brand. 

ARISE chose to blend studies on "addictive" tea and coffee, with "non-addictive" nicotine. And this new innocuous definition also provided a rationalisation useful for academics trying to maintain a semblance of public status, and smokers in a state of denial.

Of course it is not a question of science but of lexicological distinctions. Terms like addiction can be applied to anything from minor habits ("addicted to fresh air and exercise"), through "dependent behaviors", to unsupressable cravings associated with deprivation, neurotic behaviour, and on to essentials-for-personal-survival.

It might appear that this is just a dependency continuum, but the first is merely sensory; others are probably psychological within the normal range extending into the abnormal; while the general medical use of the term implies both psychological and physiological changes in the brain which require chemical reinforcement to give relief and restore the subject to some degree of normalcy.

The word "addiction" was so sensitive that Philip Morris had a blanket ban on it being written, even in memos, without "alleged" preceeding it. The problem the tobacco industry faced with admitting addiction is that it would destroy their "human rights" defense -- that people had the right to choose ... even if smoking was harmful to their health.

Addicts, by any common-sense definition, can't choose.

External resources

 * George Monbiot, "Exposed: the secret corporate funding behind health research: Academics and the media have failed dismally to ask the crucial question of scientists' claims: who is paying you?", The Guardian, February 7, 2006.
 * Spoil yourself Scrooge Newspaper article, Dec. 20, 1993, on Fishburn Hedges letterhead
 * A 1994 report on the global success of the ARISE propaganda.
 * WHO report on Tobacco Company Strategies to Undermine Tobacco Control Activities

search_term=David Warburton Also search on David Warburton in the British American Tobacco Document Archive.