Part II: The Scientists Are Doing Their Part. Advocates Must Do Theirs.

In the aftermath of The Scientists Who Didn’t Get the Memo, a researcher described what it took to publish a single paper.

Two years.

Four journals.

Hostile editorial decisions overrode favourable but critical reviews.

Anonymous “technical” objections that were factually wrong.

Conflict-of-interest insinuations without evidence.

Appeals that stalled.

Oversight bodies that declined to act because the misconduct was not dramatic enough.

The paper was eventually published.

But publication is not the story. Survival is.

What readers see is the PDF. What they do not see is the attrition, the hours spent responding to ideological objections phrased as methodological, the slow erosion of goodwill, the calculation of whether challenging a flawed but dominant model is worth the reputational cost. What they do not see is how many researchers watch that process unfold and quietly decide not to attempt it themselves.

The scientists are doing their part.

They are running experiments.

Testing aerosol generation protocols.

Measuring biomarkers rather than relying on speculation.

Interrogating animal models that expose rodents to conditions no human consumer would replicate.

Re-examining NIH-funded preclinical studies that have shaped public messaging.

Publishing comparative risk analyses that introduce gradients into debates built on absolutes.

They are not demanding immunity from criticism. They are asking for engagement.

Advocates must understand what that distinction means.

There is a tendency in harm reduction spaces to frame everything as a battle against regulators or NGOs. But the more consequential arena is often upstream: the production and filtration of evidence itself. When gatekeeping narrows the range of acceptable conclusions, policy is merely downstream compliance.

If advocates focus only on the final policy output, they miss the choke point.

The myth that “the evidence will win” is comforting but false. Evidence competes. It competes for publication, for funding, for media attention, and for advisory roles. It competes against narratives that are simpler, morally cleaner, and institutionally entrenched.

The opposition understands this perfectly. They respond to new studies immediately. They issue pre-emptive framing. They circulate talking points to journalists. They contextualise findings before policymakers encounter them independently.

Harm reduction advocates too often respond emotionally or not at all.

That is not a criticism of passion. It is a recognition of asymmetry.

Passion without strategy is noise. Strategy without discipline is fragile.

If you claim to support tobacco harm reduction science, then supporting it must involve more than sharing links when a paper confirms your priors. It must involve:

Reading beyond the abstract.

Understanding exposure conditions.

Knowing what “overheated aerosol” means in a lab context.

Recognising when a cell culture model tells you something useful and when it does not.

Distinguishing between correlation and causation in population data.

Resisting the temptation to flatten nuanced findings into slogans.

Scientists in this field already operate under suspicion. Overstatement by advocates does not protect them; it isolates them. When advocates exaggerate, opponents use that exaggeration to discredit the underlying research.

If harm reduction is to retain credibility, it must model the epistemic standards it demands from others.

There is also a deeper responsibility.

When a researcher challenges forty preclinical studies, many publicly funded, they are not simply disputing technique. They are questioning a body of work that has already entered guidelines, informed public messaging, and shaped regulatory decisions. That is destabilising. Not because it is wrong, but because it is disruptive.

Institutions rarely reward disruption.

This is where advocates must widen their understanding of support. It is not enough to defend outcomes. You must defend processes.

Ask questions about editorial transparency.

Ask why anonymous editors can override reviewer consensus without explanation.

Ask how conflicts of interest are evaluated and why insinuation replaces documentation.

Ask why oversight bodies treat ideological obstruction as invisible.

Do not ask these questions angrily. Ask them persistently.

The most corrosive feature of what Roberto described is not hostility. It is procedural indifference. The polite dismissal. The slow appeals process. The institutional instinct to protect its own rather than interrogate bias.

Gatekeeping thrives in silence. It weakens under scrutiny.

But scrutiny requires discipline.

If you transform every editorial dispute into proof of conspiracy, you lose credibility. If you ignore recurring patterns of obstruction, you surrender the field. The line between paranoia and naivety is navigated through evidence, the very thing this debate is about.

There is also a moral urgency that advocates must not forget.

Smoking does not pause while editorial disputes unfold. People do not suspend combustible use until academic consensus becomes comfortable. Every year that flawed models go unchallenged, every year that substitution effects are minimised, every year that lower-risk alternatives are framed as equally dangerous, real people make decisions based on distorted information.

The harm is cumulative.

Advocates often speak in sweeping moral terms about youth, about industry misconduct, about precaution. But precaution cuts both ways. If suppressing or delaying evidence about risk gradients contributes to continued combustible smoking, that is not neutral. That is consequential.

And consequences belong to everyone in the ecosystem, not just regulators.

There is another uncomfortable reality.

Some advocates contribute to the problem inadvertently. When debates become personal, when disagreement becomes accusation, when every critic is labelled corrupt, it becomes easier for institutions to dismiss harm reduction as unserious. Scientists then absorb the reputational cost of rhetoric they did not author.

Serious advocacy requires intellectual maturity.

It requires knowing when to defend and when to concede.

It requires openly acknowledging limitations.

It requires accepting that not every study will support your position.

It requires recognising that credibility is both cumulative and fragile.

The scientists are absorbing professional risk so the evidence can enter the record.

Advocates must ensure it survives interpretation.

That means building platforms where dissenting research is discussed carefully. It means engaging journalists with methodologically literate summaries. It means briefing policymakers with clarity rather than outrage. It means connecting clinicians, toxicologists, and behavioural scientists across silos so they are not isolated.

It also means thinking long-term.

Fields do not correct themselves because one paper breaks through. They correct themselves when a body of work accumulates and remains visible long enough to become unavoidable. That visibility is not automatic. It is constructed.

If the researchers who refuse the memo stand alone, the system does not self-correct. It calcifies.

Part I was about the scientists who follow the data even when it isolates them.

Part II is about the responsibility of those who claim to stand beside them.

Support is not applause.

It is literacy.

It is discipline.

It is amplification without distortion.

It is procedural vigilance.

It is persistence.

The scientists are doing their part.

If advocates want to be taken seriously by policymakers, by the media, by history, they must now do theirs.