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4-20-98

By Luke Ford

Dennis Prager opened his show by passionately agreeing with this column in today's Wall Street Journal:

Last week, Oliver Jovanovic, a 31-year-old doctoral candidate in microbiology at Columbia University, was convicted of kidnapping and sexually abusing a 22-year-old Barnard College student he had met in an Internet "chat room." "The defense did not do enough to defend Oliver," a juror said after the verdict. In fact, the defense was hamstrung by the misapplication of a law, intended to protect victims from being dragged through the mud, which instead has been used to withhold evidence that could exonerate the accused.

Jovanovic and the Barnard student went on a date after meeting in an America Online chat room in 1996 and exchanging electronic mail. At his apartment, by her own account, the young woman let herself be stripped and tied up; she claimed that Jovanovic then kept her bound, against her will, for 20 hours and sexually tortured her. The defense argued that what happened was consensual. This argument, however, was crippled by Judge William Wetzel's decision--based on New York's "rape shield" law, which restricts the use of the accuser's sexual past--to exclude portions of the e-mail dealing with sadomasochistic sexual activity.

Rape shield laws, now on the books in every state, originated in the feminist overhaul of rape law in the 1970s. The reforms were directed at real injustices: Once, juries were commonly instructed that they could consider an accuser's lack of chastity as detracting from her credibility, and defense lawyers could grill a woman about her sexual partners. Such inquiries are now rightly perceived as not only cruel but irrelevant: A woman's promiscuity doesn't prove that she consented to sex with a particular man.

Yet sometimes sexual history is directly relevant to consent and credibility. In the Jovanovic case, the defense contends that the law ended up shielding perjury. The young woman testified that in her correspondence with Jovanovic, she had never given any indication that she was interested in sadomasochism--a statement that the e-mail excluded from trial would have called into doubt.

Luke:

The first caller, a woman, argued that allowing any testimony about a woman's sexual past would make any conviction for rape impossible.

Dennis says that the substitution of race, class and sex for morality is the greatest intellectual obstacle to achieving a good society.

Prager passionately recommends Books on Tape. 1800-88BOOKS… Mention KABC and Dennis Prager, and you will get a discount.

Prager devoted his second hour to attacking the anti-smoking movement. He interviewed the author of For Your Own Good, by Jacob Sullum, a syndicated columnist and editor at REASON magazine.

Jacob says the anti-smoking movement is paternalistic, trying to protect people from themselves.

For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of PublicHealth.(book reviews)

( National Review )

For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health, by Jacob Sullum (Free Press, 338 pp., $25)

IN my 16 years as a regular smoker, I've quit twice. It's a filthy habit that takes years off your life (three to seven, on average) and degrades your health in the meantime. And I've gone back twice, because nicotine is a wonderful drug, and cigarettes perhaps the best drug-delivery device known to man.

I savor the bitter taste and dusty feel of the smoke as it enters first my mouth and then my lungs; my spirits rise even with the tiny buzz the habit now provides. It picks me up when I'm feeling down, and adds to the joy of fine food, good drink, heartfelt conversation -- of almost everything the good LLord put on this earth for our delight. It helps me think.

Consider: nicotine is a mood stabilizer that also enhances short-term concentration. Alternately a stimulant and a depressant (and, miraculously, almost always the one you need), it never has so strong an effect as to be disruptive. Meanwhile, the device -- fire on a stick that you can hold between two fingers, with smoke you can expressively exhale -- has a host of subsidiary uses: the perfect gesturing prop, nervous-fiddling toy, meditation focus, and more.

On 12-1-96, Jacob Sullum published the following book review in REASON magazine.

The Cigarette Papers.(book reviews)

( Reason )

In August 1970 a leading tobacco defense attorney, David R. Hardy, wrote a confidential letter warning that indiscreet comments by industry scientists, including references to "biologically active" components of cigarette smoke and "the search for a safer cigarette," "constitute a real threat to the continued success in the defense of smoking and health litigation. Of course, we would make every effort to 'explain' such statements if we were confronted with them during a trial, but I seriously doubt that the average juror would follow or accept the subtle distinctions and explanations we would be forced to urge." Such remarks by employees, Hardy explained, would suggest "actual knowledge on the part of the defendant that smoking is generally dangerous to health, that certain ingredients are dangerous to health and should be removed, or that smoking causes a particular disease. This would not only be evidence that would substantially prove a case against the defendant company for compensatory damages, but could be considered as evidence of willfulness or recklessness sufficient to support a claim for punitive damages."

The letter was among the Brown & Williamson documents leaked to anti- smoking activist Stanton A. Glantz and New York Times reporter Philip J. Hilts in 1994. It nicely summarizes the quandary of the cigarette companies, which developed largely because of their own dishonesty and continues to this day. In the 1950s, responding to the first widely publicized studies finding a link between smoking and lung cancer, the industry adopted a skeptical posture that was initially reasonable but has long since become a joke. It created the Tobacco Industry Research Council, later renamed the Council for Tobacco Research, supposedly to fund studies examining "all phases of tobacco use and health." Although some CTR-funded researchers produced further evidence of tobacco's hazards, most worked in areas far afield from the CTR' s ostensible focus, while certain "special projects" were deliberately selected to cast doubt on the connection between smoking and disease. The CTR helped maintain the pretense that more research was needed - always and forever. The industry's strategy, as Tobacco Institute Vice President Fred Panzer put it in a 1972 memo, was "creating doubt about the health charge without actually denying it." Company officials steadfastly maintained that the case against smoking was not conclusive, and it soon became clear that no amount of evidence would sway them from that position.

Luke:

Dennis Prager says that Sullum's book is not as angry about the anti-smoking crowd as Prager is.

Prager made fun of an ad that compared cigarette smoking to illegal drug use. DP has pounded home for years that there is no comparison between them. Sullum disagreed. He said they were similar addictions. But that people misunderstand addiction. Addiction does not mean that you can't stop because there are as many people who have quit smoking as there people who smoke. Similarly, most cocaine and heroin users quit the drug.

Sullum disagreed with several things that Prager said, and several times Dennis cut him off, not allowing Jacob to articulate, for instance, his point that the long term harm from the use of cocaine etc is exaggerated.

Prager and Sellum agreed that smoking saves the public coffers rather than draining them. DP says the reason he is so passionately opposed to the anti-smoking movement is that the movement makes otherwise decent people into liars.

DP kept making allowances throughout this hour to the large number of his listeners who are tired of him harping on this one issue. P gets stuck in ruts at times: Around 1990 it was against Stanford. In 1995, it was over Baby Richard. And the last few years, he has ranted repeatedly against the anti-smoking crowd.

In his third hour, P discussed marriage. The late Linda McCartny spent every night with her husband but one in their 30-year marriage.

Prager says that couples should spend as much time as possible together, as should parents with their kids. Quantity of time is a quality. Prager enjoys spending as much time as possible with his wife, he says.

P's father claims that he has never seen a movie without the presence of his wife, P's mother.

P says some guys particularly need to sew wild oats before getting married.