NEW YORK - March 23, 2018 - PRLog -- The American Council on Science and Health, since 1978 America's leading pro-science consumer advocacy group, has created a petition to let citizens show their disgust with how trial lawyers exploit the language of science to promote fear and doubt useful products in order to get rich.
"We see it time and again," said ACSH President Hank Campbell. "Shoddy epidemiological data is tortured by professional expert witnesses until it confesses to something bizarre, lawyers file lawsuits, and companies settle because they know juries are going to be swayed more by emotion than data, and consumers pay the price with higher costs."
The problem is how the language of science is manipulated by trial lawyers. Scientists hesitate to speak in absolutes and plaintiff attorneys, such as those who are suing agriculture companies in states like Hawaii, engage in a jury version of wedge politics, demanding impossibilities like that "products be proven completely safe." And use films they create as evidence.
Last year's movie "Poisoning Paradise", for example, opens with litigants and repeatedly showcases legal groups who make money suing corporations. It features paid industry representatives from trade organizations like Organic Consumers Association without disclosing their conflicts of interest, and at the end it tells consumers who are concerned to write two legal groups.
What they leave out is that Hawaiians love agricultural science, it saved the papaya industry and provides high-paying jobs, and if science were really harming people Hawaiians would not have the best longevity of all 50 states.
To combat this hijacking of science for financial gain, the American Council on Science and Health is gathering petitions and will deliver them personally to trial lawyer lobbying groups who are polluting the discourse in Washington, DC.
The petition can be signed here: https://www.change.org/p/american-college-of-trial-lawyers-let-s-defeat-the-trial-lawyers-war-against-science
It reads:
Whereas, I am outraged by greedy trial lawyers who have turned litigation claims about science and health into big business, concerned only with enriching themselves and caring nothing about truth or justice; and
Whereas, I am outraged trial lawyers are exploiting those who mistakenly equate "chemical" with "poison," using fear mongering to initiate frivolous litigation; and who are also using the threat of costly legal action as an intimidation tool to shut down genuine scientific debate; and
Whereas, the trial lawyers waging this assault threaten to corrupt real science and inflict bad public policy our nation, thereby placing the health and well-being of millions of Americans at risk;
Therefore, I, the undersigned concerned citizen, do hereby support the campaign of the American Council on Science and Health to educate the public about the many benefits we enjoy from chemical additives so they won't fall prey to the litigation industry's baseless scare tactics and expose the threat that frivolous lawsuits pose to the scientific method.
The American Council on Science and Health is a 501(c)(3) science and health education and consumer advocacy organization that was founded in 1978 to promote evidence-based science and health policy. If you would like to support evidence-based decision-making, you can make a tax-deductible donation here: https://interland3.donorperfect.net/weblink/weblink.aspx?name=acsh&id=1
Contact
Erik Lief
***@acsh.org
2123627044
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