Many issues affect use of private property, our economy, and how much we are taxed. Here is a review of the top dirty dozen issues that were prominent in 2004 and will continue throughout 2005. It may seem overwhelming that there are so many issues to fight; after all, we can’t do everything. But each of us can do one thing. Pick your fight and do your one thing.

Pima County’s grand scheme for a Habitat Conservation Plan has not been in the news much lately, but it is grinding along. The county is completing yet another version of its biological fantasy to control land use. Meanwhile, the Fish & Wildlife Service is writing an Environmental Impact Statement.

These documents are scheduled to come together for formal submission to FWS in the late summer of 2005, after which there will be another round of public comment.

Five years in the making, Pima County’s plan is a scheme rapidly losing its rationale. The initial excuse for devising the scheme, was the listing, in 1997, of the Southern Arizona population of the Cactus ferruginous pygmy owl as endangered. More recent legal and scientific challenges, however, will probably result in delisting.

Another keystone species in the county’s plan is the Lesser long-nosed bat which was listed as endangered in 1988, based largely on the work of one biologist.

More recent examination shows the initial study was profoundly flawed, and that the bat is abundant. It, too, should be delisted. The third major leg of the county’s scheme rests on the Pima pineapple cactus which was listed as endangered in 1993. Again, more recent study questions that this cactus is actually a separate species. 

Its status as an endangered species is in jeopardy. If things progress as property rights advocates hope, the county will be left with few ESA problems to solve and the rationale for their plan will dissolve.

The Endangered Species Act is probably the most pernicious policy affecting property rights, the law

most wasteful of money and other resources, and the law least effective toward its stated purpose. Given the political climate, the next two years promise the best chance for meaningful reform.

1) Listings should be based on adequate, peer-reviewed scientific data, not merely the best available data.

The FWS says “critical habitat designation provides little or no conservation benefit despite the great cost to put it in place.”

4) If listing produces a demonstrable “taking” of private property rights or value, then the land owner

Ensuring an adequate water supply in the arid West is a contentious issue. I will limit this comment to purely local issues.

By the year 2050, the population of Pima County, and the area served by Tucson Water, is expected to double, and annual total water demand will grow from 128,521 acre-feet in 2000 to 253,000 acre-feet in 2050.

Tucson Water has a rational plan of how to meet the demand, but we residents will need to make some decisions regarding how we will use our supply from the Central Arizona Project, how much total dissolved solids (saltiness) we can tolerate, and how we will use the ever increasing effluent from the sewer plants.

Meanwhile, Pima County seems off in Never-Never land. The Pima County flood control district, together

with the Corps of Engineers, proposes some terraforming along our dry washes. They propose planting

trees along 32 miles of the dry Santa Cruz and Rillito “Rivers” at a cost of almost $400 million with an

annual maintenance cost of nearly $8 million dollars. The proposed projects would use over 8,000 acre-feet of water, enough to supply more than 60,000 average Tucson residences.

There will be a $142 million city water bond election in May.

Yes, the climate is changing. The climate is always changing and it is warmer now than when it was cooler. The climate debate isn’t so much about temperature as it is about production and use of energy. There is still no proof that man-made CO2 is causing unusual warming. There is no proof that CO2 is the cause of warming rather than its result.

The major greenhouse gas is water vapor. CO2 comprises less than 2% of greenhouse gases. Of that 2%, humans produce about 3% which means that humans produce about 0.06% of greenhouse gas as CO2 (0.02x0.03= 0.0006). This is an insignificant number.

Now that Russia has signed on to the Kyoto treaty, it will go into effect in February. But there are still 160 countries, including the U.S., Australia, China, India, and Brazil, that have rightly not signed on. But even if they did, the U.N. IPCC calculates the total effect of Kyoto would be a difference of only 0.19NC by the end of this century. The cost of this slight decrease in the rise of temperature is tremendous, about $1000 to $4000 annually for every U.S. family and a decrease in U.S. GDP by about $200 billion annually.

The climate debate is about money, not the environment. Since the collapse of the Russian economy, their production has fallen below the 1990 levels of CO2 to which they would have been held, so Russia has credits to sell. Certain European countries think that by limiting the U.S. to 1990 levels of CO2 production, they will gain a competitive advantage.

But the EU already has dissension in its ranks. Italy, a signatory to Kyoto, announced that they will not continue beyond 2012. And then there are the lawsuits by certain countries and groups against the industrial countries, suits claiming some imagined damage. (See article later in this newsletter.)

When Arizona became a state, the federal government ceded land to the state to be held in trust for the benefit of schools. According to the AZ constitution and Enabling Act, state trust land could be sold, unencumbered, to the highest and best bidder.

Along came the Arizona Preserve Initiative (API) which allowed the state land department to designate certain lands for conservation. Fine, but by placing the encumbrance of a conservation easement on state land, as a condition of sale, the state broke the law, because that encumbrance, in effect, eliminated competitive bidding, thus depriving the school trust of revenue they would have otherwise received. People for the West called them on that. The state Attorney General agreed, so the practice was stopped, at least for now. GangGreen and others are attempting to amend the Arizona constitution to allow cheating the schools to become legal. An election may be held as early as May, 2005. Be aware.

A new NHA has been proposed for Southern Arizona, the Santa Cruz Valley NHA. This NHA would encompass 3,325 square miles, an area twice as large as Rhode Island. It follows the Santa Cruz River from the Mexican border to Pinal County. Within its proposed borders are the City of Tucson, Sahuarita,

Green Valley and Nogales; much of the developable lands in Pima County; ranch lands, several major copper mines, and most of the remaining mineral-rich land in Pima County. The eastern boundary of the “study area” follows the spine of the Huachuca, Whetstone, Rincon, and Santa Catalina Mountains. The western boundary follows the Tumacacori, Sierrita, and Tucson Mountains.

This proposal comes from the Center for Desert Archaeology. They hope to become the “Local Coordinating Entity” which would provide $1 million per year for up to 15 years. National Heritage Areas are administered by the National Park Service, an agency notoriously hostile to private property rights.

Gang Green continues to file hundreds of lawsuits lest we cut a tree. That, drought, fire, bark beetles, and mismanagement, have left our forests in poor shape.

Maybe that will change. In late December, the Bush Administration issued new Forest Planning Regulations that will help simplify and streamline implementation of the 1976 National Forest Management Act (NFMA), The law that directs management plans to be developed and implemented for all national forests (over 120 of them) every fifteen years. The action will also rescind the previous rule as well as create a new Categorical Exclusion under NEPA, for adopting, revising and amending forest plans. The new rules will give local managers of national forests more leeway in opening up the public lands to logging, mining and other commercial pursuits without time-consuming environmental reviews.

Renewable energy is now politically correct, and may sound like a free lunch, but in reality it is uneconomic

While renewable energy sources may have some local application, it is unrealistic to hope to produce 20% of our electricity by these methods, a proposed by John Kerry. They simply cannot complete with fossil fuels. The supply of coal and natural gas in North America is vast. Unless these resources are regulated out of economic existence, renewable energy sources will not become a large-scale viable alternative.

We need to be realistic, and develop domestic sources of oil and gas to ease our dependency on the Middle East.

We could, of course, use much less oil to produce electricity, if only we could get over our fear of fission. Next to hydroelectric production, nuclear energy is probably the safest, most efficient method of electricity production, but, again, this rational course is constantly blocked by environmentalists and public hysteria

The Congressional mandated moratorium on granting mining patents should be vacated. Meanwhile, the BLM is working through its inventory of grand fathered mining patent applications.

Permitting of mining operations needs to be streamlined. It still takes years to permit a new mine, something that encourages mining companies to go over seas.

A more sensible approach to the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) is needed. Currently, excavated waste rock, piled beside the hole is counted as a toxic release, thereby making mining operations polluters.

Ironically, this same material is a popular landscape medium and is used as ground cover in both residential and municipal building sites.

Changes are needed in the law to allow mines in closure to leave the infrastructure behind for another use, rather than the entire site be cleared and reclaimed as now required.

There are still rumblings about charging a royalty on mining operations. While the mining industry is not opposed to such a fee, if applied, it must not render operations uneconomic.

Small and recreational miners are still being hassled by the requirements to file a notice of intent to operate or a plan of operations. Previously, if an operation disturbed less than 5 acres, no notice was required.

Currently, on Forest Service land, the requirement to file is left up to the local forest range if he determines that there is “significant” surface disturbance.

One of the greatest threats to the future of ranching is the pending "Arizona Voluntary Grazing Buyout Act.” Under current law, any transfer of ownership of a grazing lease or permit requires the original owner to waive the lease to the Secretary of the Interior who reassigned it to the new owner. Under the proposed Act, however, these leases would be retired. This would eventually eliminate public lands ranching.

Increasingly, municipalities are using the power of eminent domain to condemn private property and then

turning that property over to another private entity that may produce more revenue for the city.

The campaign against “invasive species” is a plot to rid the country of worrisome weeds and animals that are not “native” to where they now occur. It’s a plot to return the continent to an imagined utopian state that is alleged to have existed in pre-Columbian times. Under an “invasive species” regime, certain plants and animals are politically correct, others aren’t. Please note that most of the animals and plants which produce our food, are exotic to this continent. This campaign has the potential to become as invasive and dangerous to property rights as the Endangered Species Act.

On December 15, 2004, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) petitioned U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the Tucson Shovel-nosed Snake (Chionactis occipitalis klauberi) as Threatened or Endangered pursuant to the Endangered Species Act, and to designate nearly 1.3 million acres as Critical Habitat. CBD requested the listing, in part, to fund research. The petition unwittingly highlights needed revisions to ESA. Foremost, we need to base listings on valid and adequate prior research, eliminating pointless listings and lawsuits.

The shovel-nosed snake benefits us by dining on cockroaches, scorpions and termites. The snake's historic range covers northern Pima, southern Maricopa, and Pinal Counties. The Tucson shovelnosed snake is the easternmost of four subspecies of the Western Shovel-nosed snake, a species whose range extends from southern Nevada and San Diego to the Sea of Cortez. The Tucson shovel-nosed snake

CBD's petition relies on inadequate and inconclusive research. It further declares Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan and similar local Habitat Conservation Plans too weak to affect the final rule. Our $174 million Pima County bond for SDCP, despite allegedly covering the shovel-nosed snake, would not help us.

According to the petition, "No systematic studies of habitat use by the Tucson Shovel-nosed snake have been conducted and only limited observational data is available"... "Its current distribution in Pima County is poorly known. Further research is needed to determine its current distribution and abundance." ... "Most of these areas have not been systematically surveyed and thus [UofA professor Philip] Rosen's rough characterizations of their status are the best information available." Thus CBD concludes the species is endangered.

According to CBD's own chart more than 43 percent of the snake's historic range is already protected.

Protected lands within the shovel-nosed snake's range include Ironwood Forest National Monument (189,000 acres), parts of Sonoran Desert National Monument (496,000 acres) and three National Wilderness Areas.

The Monuments already prohibit new mining, development and off-road driving. Cattle are already banished from the southern half of Sonoran Desert National Monument, and road access minimized. Despite all this CBD claims, "Bureau of Land Management currently has no regulations to protect the Tucson Shovel-nosed snake".

Only by taking private land can the government increase the snake's habitat. CBD targets hundreds of family-owned farms. CBD declares livestock grazing a "primary threat" to the shovel-nosed snake, yet cites no scientific research because no such study exists. On the contrary, studies by the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum document the lightly grazed Ironwood Monument supports significantly higher biodiversity than any cattle-free nature preserve in Southern Arizona.

CBD presents a spurious model of "habitat loss" within the shovel-nosed snake’s range by calculating the total loss since 1492, while citing evidence of "decline" as following the 1970's, a time when farms and snakes co-existed in abundance.

We harm genuinely endangered species by squandering funds for bogus listings justified on guesswork. For example, so-called "endangered" Lesser Long-Nose bat populations were recently found to be orders of magnitude greater than guesses documented in the listing, i.e., the sky is not falling. Congress should reform the ESA to award limited research grants to study non-listed species, and also award dollar-for dollar tax credits for privately funded, licensed research. Takings of such private intellectual property ought to be compensable under the Fifth Amendment.

We could then save larger funding allocations to recover species which truly are endangered. '

by Paul Driessen, Hawaii Reporter

Much to the outrage of ideological environmentalists and certain segments of the "international community," the United States won't sign the Kyoto Protocol -- which some apparently believe will guarantee happy ever-aftering on a planet where temperatures remain fixed in a one or two degree spectrum, rain never falls until after sundown and winters exit March the second on the dot.

Even worse, they whine, President "Darth" Bush has set a terrible example. Australia won't sign the treaty either, and neither will China, India, Brazil, developing countries or even Argentina, the folks who just hosted the latest four-star hotel and dinner global warming gabathon. And now Italy is turning its back on the treaty. They all recognize that stringent emission limits would stymie their future economic development, for little environmental gain.

Climate alarmists engaged in their usual antics, but they didn't come away with the prize they had so eagerly sought: entry into force of a binding treaty that would give them and international bureaucrats control over the economies, energy and lifestyles of everyone on Earth. So they fell back on Plan B, with the expectation that it might generate a "Day After Tomorrow" tidal wave of litigation that would make breast implant, asbestos and tobacco lawsuits look like an off-Broadway dress rehearsal.

EarthJustice, Friends of the Earth, the Center for International Environmental Law and other groups were busy in Buenos Aires, persuading Arctic Inuit Indians to sue an assortment of corporations for climate genocide, or something like that. The Inuits‚ subsistence traditions are threatened, they claimed, by catastrophic warming caused by our wanton use of fossil fuels. Attempting to paint their claims with a thin veneer of science was Dr. Robert Corell, lead author of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) study that had gotten the New York Times, Washington Post, London Guardian and other liberal media folks all agog.

"Very rapid and severe climate change in the Arctic," rising sea levels from the projected melting of Greenland's ice shelf, changes in animal habitats and possible shifts in ocean currents "present serious challenges to human health and food security, and possibly even the survival of some cultures," Dr. Corell

solemnly intoned. Even now, "abnormally warm" weather might be causing wildlife to disappear, and the Inuits snowmobiles to fall through the ice. To back up these gloom-and-doom claims, he presented an array of glitzy charts and maps.

But the linchpin of his Armageddon theory lies in a temperature graph that depicts a 33-year warming trend, during which temperatures rose nearly 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 F). Project that out in a straight line, Dr. Corell said, and it's easy to foresee a potentially devastating temperature spike of 4.5 C or 8.1 F over the next century. Rising seas would surely inundate New York City, Bangladesh and the Florida keys, as another graphic graphically showed.

Thankfully, it's all just the stuff of Hollywood horror movies. Not only is the ACIA study flawed, it's as plausible as the "science" in "The Day After Tomorrow."

Its horrific scenarios depend on Dr. C's deliberate selection of the 1971-2003 time snapshot, and his faulty assumption that this trend will continue, forever. Relatively cold in 1971 -- warmer in 2003 -- Arctic meltdown by 2100, if we don’t slash fossil fuel use immediately.

But what if he and his team had selected a different window, just a few years earlier -- such as the period 1938 to 1966? During those three decades, Arctic temperatures FELL 3.5 C (6.3 F), according to studies by American, Canadian, Russian and other researchers. At this rate, equally misleading computer models could easily show, temperatures would plummet a whopping 12.5 degrees C (22.5 F) in just one century - and reach the temperature of dry ice (minus 109 F) in just five centuries. Talk about impacting wildlife and Inuit culture.

This scenario is just as ludicrous - and just as reasonable -- as the scenarios that Corell & Co. are peddling. Actually, it's only a slight exaggeration of what their predecessors -- the global cooling alarmists who have since morphed into today's global warming alarmists -- did back in the 1970s.

That's when they, Newsweek (see its April 28, 1975 issue) and anxious colleagues were worrying about agricultural disaster brought on by global cooling -- because of our wanton use of fossil fuels, naturally. Had they been quicker on their feet back then, they would no doubt have found some natives in Hawaii (or Tuvalu) to file lawsuits to stop that cultural genocide.

However, it's a fact of life here on Planet Earth that our climate can be as unpredictable and cyclical as the solar and orbital variations that play prominent roles in determining that climate. Thus we get mild temperature shifts every 40 years or so, and much more significant changes every few hundred years -- amid interglacial periods that are marked at either end by massive walls of ice flowing down from this same Arctic, obliterating everything in their path: forests the last time, maybe entire cities the next.

The global environmental movement, however, has long portrayed our planet as a stable, idyllic utopia - until evil people, corporations and technologies ruined everything. It has a nice, neat Garden of Eden ring to it. But it ignores the Ice Ages, Medieval Warm Period, Viking colonization of Greenland back in the days (950-1300) when people could actually grow crops there, and Little Ice Age (1350-1650) when northern seas were choked with ice and Europe was plunged into an era of cold, wet, stormy weather that  destroyed crops, caused famines, and hammered populations, communities and cultures.

The ample historical record of these events underscores how turbulent and uncertain Earth's climate has always been. (It's doubtful that cavemen, Vikings, Medieval alchemists or a lost race of aliens from another galaxy caused those past climate mood swings.) To suggest that we have suddenly arrived at an immutable ideal state may serve the pressure groups‚ political ends, but it is not reality.

The best thing we can do is continue to adjust to changing climates, just as our ancestors did. After all, the Inuit people survived the 1930s, when Arctic temperatures were even warmer than today. The worst thing we could do is follow the alarmists prescriptions, and agree to hobble our institutions, forego future health and prosperity, and impose permanent poverty on our Earth's least fortunate citizens -- in the name of

If a corporation or accounting firm were to issue an annual report or stock offering as misleading as the ACIA "analysis" and other climate claims, its officers and directors would end up in jail - deservedly so. Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for the climate charlatans, no such laws govern environmental pressure groups or even semi-governmental groups like the ACIA.

In the long run, we need to reform our legal system, to enforce basic standards of honesty, integrity, transparency and accountability for everyone: for-profit and not-for-profit corporations alike. In the short run, we simply need to apply the same standards of credibility to Dr. Corell, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and their Inuit plaintiffs, as we do now to Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Anderson and other companies that bilked employees and investors out of billions.

The stakes are actually higher this time -- because these activists threaten to disrupt our global economy, technology, health and prosperity, to "safeguard" us from a "risk" that is no more real than Tyrannosaurus Rex bursting out of a lump of Cretaceous amber.

Policing and Prosecuting for Profit: Arizona's Civil Asset Forfeiture Laws Violate Basic Due

In 2002, New Jersey’s Carol Thomas made headlines after her teenage son used her 1990 Ford Thunderbird to sell marijuana to an undercover police officer. He was arrested, pled guilty and faced his punishment.

However, that did not end the case. The government also seized Thomas’ car, despite the fact that no drugs were found in the car, she was the sole owner, and she had no knowledge of her son’s use of the car to sell illegal drugs. The government’s action was pursuant to a legal doctrine—civil asset forfeiture—that allows police and prosecutors to seize and forfeit property without ever filing criminal charges against the property owner.

The purported intent of asset forfeiture laws is to deprive criminals of their ill-gotten property and cash and then use those proceeds to enforce the very laws the wrongdoers violated. Yet civil forfeiture laws are one of the most serious assaults on private property rights in the nation today because many forfeiture schemes give police and prosecutors a direct financial stake in the outcome of forfeiture proceedings by allowing them to keep the money and property confiscated from individuals. Arizona’s forfeiture law is just such a scheme. It threatens to divert law enforcement priorities away from the fair administration of justice and toward the pursuit of property and profit in violation of both state and federal constitutional due process provisions, which guarantee that those responsible for enforcing the law must administer justice in an impartial manner.

Over the past four years, civil forfeitures generated $64.5 million in revenue for state and local law enforcement agencies and, in many cases, forfeitures constitute a sizable percentage of agency budgets. For example, in fiscal year 2003 forfeiture revenues constituted 39 percent of Pima County’s Counter Narcotics Alliance’s budget—up from zero percent in 2000. Pinal County’s forfeiture spending leapt from less than $500,000 to close to $1.5 million—a 200 percent increase in one fiscal year.

While law enforcement is a legitimate government expense, and properly funding police should be a legislative priority, law enforcement agencies should not rely on forfeiture funds to increase their budgets. It is precisely because law enforcement agencies want to purchase weapons or hire additional officers—and because more forfeiture means more money—that an improper incentive is created to forfeit more and to do so in a manner that is not necessarily fair.

Due process prohibits statutory schemes that create actual bias, the potential for bias, or even the appearance of bias in the administration of justice. Policymakers should repeal Arizona’s civil asset

Landowners and developers want assurances that conservation and habitat plans made with FWS would not change after they've invested time and money in implementing conservation measures. This “no surprises” rule was challenged in court, but now apparently has been resolved by a Dec 10 ruling by FWS.

This rule allows the Service to revoke an incidental take permit only if take of listed species caused by the permitted activity will reduce the likelihood of survival and recovery in the wild of one or more of the covered species and the Service cannot find a remedy to prevent this situation.

Global Warming Good News for Coral Reefs:

In stark contrast to previous predictions that coral reef growth will suffer large, potentially catastrophic, decreases in the future, a new study by Australian scientists suggests that ocean warming will foster considerably faster future rates of coral reef growth that will eventually exceed pre-industrial rates by as much as 35 per cent by 2100.

Coral reefs are built from calcium carbonate when red algae cement together a framework of coral skeletons and sediments. Seawater surface temperatures and the quantity of carbonate in seawater dictate their growth rate.

The predicted increase in the rate of coral reef calcification is most likely due to an enhancement in coral metabolism and/or increases in photosynthetic rates of red algae, according to the scientists. [Press release University of New South Wales] '

Data from two ice sheet boreholes were used to reconstruct the temperature history of Greenland over the past 50,000 years. The analysis indicated that temperatures on the Greenland Ice Sheet during the Last Glacial Maximum (about 25,000 years ago) were 23 ± 2 °C colder than at present. After the termination of the glacial period, however, temperatures increased steadily to a value that was 2.5°C warmer than at present, during the Climatic Optimum of 4,000 to 7,000 years ago. The Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age were also evident in the borehole data, with temperatures 1°C warmer and 0.5-0.7°C cooler than at present, respectively. Then, after the Little Ice Age, the group of seven scientists reports that "temperatures reached a maximum around 1930 AD" and that "temperatures have decreased during the last decades." [ Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change] '

1) Vitamin E Scare

Vitamin E users were recently frightened by news was that high doses of the nutrient may be dangerous — “High dose of vitamin E may increase death risk” was how USA Today put it.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University reported that people who took more than 400 International Units (IUs)of vitamin E per day had about a 5 percent greater risk of premature death than subjects who took lower daily doses of vitamin E.

The researchers concluded that “High dosage vitamin E supplements may increase mortality and should be avoided.”

While I can’t assure you that “high dose” vitamin E supplementation will definitely improve your health, I’m pretty confident that the Hopkins study shouldn’t scare you about the nutrient.

The researchers didn’t study any vitamin E-users first-hand; instead they simply reviewed data from 19 earlier vitamin E clinical trials, including 11 "high dose" trials. But 10 of the 11 “high-dose” trials didn’t make any statistically significant correlations between vitamin E use and premature death.

Apparently this glaring fact didn’t fit with the researchers’ seemingly pre-determined conclusion, so they “cooked the books,” statistically speaking. They combined the 11 high-dose studies into one larger, supposedly more statistically robust study.

But while this “study stew” produced the appearance of a slightly elevated risk of premature death among high-dose vitamin E users, the reported “increase” was exceedingly small — too small to be considered reliable, particularly given the crudeness of the statistical method used to obtain it.

In a sense, it’s like the researchers tried to count atoms with the naked eye — it simply can’t be done. The most prudent interpretation of the Hopkins’ results is that there is no persuasive evidence that “high dose” vitamin E users have a higher risk of premature death. But that wouldn’t be news, now would it? {Steven Milloy, Junckscience.com] '

2. Farmed salmon causes cancer. Last year, the Environmental Working Group launched this scare,releasing a study of seven farmed salmon that they said had measurable levels of PCBs – industrial chemicals. This year, an article in Science presented data showing that farmed salmon had higher levels of PCBs than wild salmon. But the warnings that found their way into the press were exaggerated fears based on the assumption that because PCBs are animal carcinogens they must pose a human cancer risk even at trace levels. Indeed there is no evidence--even at high levels -- that PCBs cause human cancer. Many synthetic and natural chemicals in food cause cancer in high doses in rodents--and those findings have no direct relevance for human cancer risk. [Elizabeth Whelan, Sc.D., M.P.H., president of the American Council on Science and Health.] '

3. Mercury in seafood threatens health. Mercury is a toxic metal, and at high levels it can indeed pose a serious threat to human health. But again, media reports overlooked the "dose makes the poison" rule. The government has strict tolerance levels for mercury in fish, and at the levels found in fish, mercury does not pose a health hazard to humans. [Ibid.] '

4) Vioxx, Celebrex & Aleve:

None of the clinical trials giving rise to the questions about Vioxx, Celebrex and Aleve were, after all, specifically designed to test whether the drugs posed a heart attack or stroke risk. The data on Vioxx came from a study of gastrointestinal effects; the Celebrex data came from a cancer prevention study; and the Alleve data came from an Alzheimer’s prevention study.

If weak statistical correlations are to raise legitimate concerns about drugs that have been widely used for years without noticeable problems, those correlations should at least be produced by studies specifically designed to examine the precise health endpoints of concern. Results from well-designed studies would allow physicians and arthritis sufferers to choose whether to manage any clearly identified risks of effective drugs, rather than be told to be happy with “safe”, but ineffective treatments. [Steven Milloy] '

We will welcome commentary from readers. If you write, please keep in mind that we don’t endorse political candidates. Articles should be no longer than 300 words for a half page, or 600 words for a full page. Let’s hear your take on some of these issues. '