John Luik

John C. Luik is a senior fellow of the Democracy Institute.^[1] He was previously "a Senior Associate of the Niagara Institute with responsibility for its work in public policy and its Values and Organizational Development programmes."^[2] From 1977 to 1990 he taught philosophy and ethics at two Canadian universities, being fired from each (in 1985 and 1990) for misrepresenting academic credentials. Subsequently he has acted on behalf of the tobacco industry, for example criticising the links between passive smoking and cancer.

Career

1977 to 1990

Luik taught philosophy at Nazarene College in Winnipeg, Canada from 1977 to 1985. He was dismissed in 1985 because he had not completed the Oxford University PhD he had claimed to. After he returned to Oxford and did so, he was hired by Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. Brock was aware of the earlier misrepresentation but chose to give Luik a second chance.^[3] At Brock, Luik taught applied and professional ethics.^[3]

However, in 1990 Brock dismissed him when it transpired that he had gained the position "on the basis of a further padded CV claiming teaching experience and publications that he did not have. What caused concern and led to Luik's dismissal from Brock was 'not any single misrepresentation ... so much as the apparently uniform pattern of representations engaged in since 1977' (Marsden 2001: A12)."^[3] The then Dean of Humanities at Brock, Cecil Abrahams, later told CBC Television "I certainly would not trust anything John Luik says because he must be the worst case of fraud that I have come across and I've been an administrator at universities for a long period of time, both in North America and in Africa, and I think he's by far the worst case of fraudulent behaviour".^[4]

1990 onwards

In 1993 Luik wrote Pandora's box: the dangers of politically corrupted science for democratic public policy,^[5] in response to the United States Environmental Protection Agency report which classified environmental tobacco smoke as a human carcinogen. Industry documents later made public as a result of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement showed that "Luik had corresponded regularly with John Legere, chairman of the Confederation of European Community Cigarette Manufacturers (CECCM) on the content of the paper and where it should be published."^[6]

More recently, Luik was a Senior Fellow at the Democracy Institute, where amongst other subjects he continued to work on tobacco. A 2006 work on "why graphic warnings don't work" was acknowledged as being "made possible by funding provided by Imperial Tobacco Group PLC".^[7] Luick died in December 2012.

Books

• Unintended Consequences of Health Fascism, Institute of Economic Affairs, 2011
• Diet Nation: Exposing the Obesity Crusade, by John Luik, Patrick Basham, and Gio Gori. Social Affairs Unit, December 2006.
• Passive Smoke: The EPA's Betrayal of Science and Policy, by John Luik and Gio Gori. Fraser Institute, January 1999.
• Advertising and Markets: A Collection of Seminal Papers, by M.J. Waterson and John C. Luik (eds), NTC Publications, 1996
• Smokescreen: 'passive smoking' and public policy, Institute of Public Affairs, 1996
• The Question of Humanism: Challenges and Possibilities by David Goicoechea, John Luik, and Tim Madigan (eds). Prometheus Books, 1991

Selected papers

• Luik, J.C. and Basham, P., (2008), "Is the obesity epidemic exaggerated? Yes", British Medical Journal
• Luik, J.C. (1996), "'t_help_myself.pdf I can't help myself: Addiction as Ideology", Human Psychopharmacology
• Luik, J.C. (1993), "Tobacco advertising bans and the dark face of government paternalism", International journal of advertising, 12, pp303 – 324.
• Luik, J.C. (1991), "Government Paternalism and Citizen Rationality. The Justifiability of Banning Tobacco Advertising"

References

External links

• Patrick Basham and John Luik, Daily Telegraph, 26 November 2006, Four big, fat myths
• Sourcewatch, John Luik