[UPDATE 28 Apr 2021: the 3 authors of the paper discussed below have agreed to amend their response to reflect issues I raised with them in the email posted below. When this happens on the Addiction website, I will edit the blog below to reflect that.]
Earlier this year, Professor Virginia Berridge, a significant historian from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and four Australian authors from the University of Queensland published a paper in the international journal Addiction. The paper which can be read here looked at “understanding why Australia and England have such different policies towards electronic nicotine delivery systems.”
My colleague Mike Daube, an emeritus professor from Curtin University, and I were both named in the paper. We found several erroneous statements in the paper and so we wrote this response, setting out our concerns. This has now been published together with Berridge and two of her co-authors’ reply to our response.
In their reply they set out some corrections they agree needed to be made, but they have not corrected their comments on my involvement with BUGA UP, doubling down on them.
In their original paper, they wrote: ‘Chapman is an Emeritus Professor of public health who also has a long history as an anti-smoking activist, including as a proud founding member of BUGA UP in Australia, which spray-painted anti-smoking graffiti on cigarette advertising billboards [44]’.
That is simply wrong, and is not supported by the reference they provided. In our response we wrote that “Simon Chapman was not a member (let alone a ‘proud founding member’) of Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions (BUGA UP), and has indeed at various times paid credit to its founders and members”, providing two references here and here.
Prior to our response being published by Addiction today (26 April, 2021) I noticed that Berridge and colleagues reply had been published on the journal’s website. I read that they were “puzzled” that I had stated that I was not a founding member or even a member of BUGA UP.
So on 20 April, 2021 I sent the email below to Virginia Berridge, Wayne Hall and Coral Gartner, commenting on each of four new cited references which they seem to believe provide evidence that I indeed was a founding member/member of BUGA UP.
In the following days, I noticed that their response had been taken down from the Addiction website. I hoped that, now having been given explanations of their further errors, that they would have requested the take-down and edited it accordingly. But apparently not. They appear confident in their conviction that I was indeed a founding member/member of BUGA UP. I received no reply from them and their original reply has been published with its incorrect information intact.
To set the record straight, I publish my email to them.
20 April, 2021
“Dear Virginia (cc: Coral & Wayne)
I’ve seen your Addiction letter. Let me try to clear up your puzzlement about my status with BUGA UP, and whether I was a “proud founding member”.
I’ll start by saying emphatically that I know I was not a “member” of BUGA UP, let alone a “proud founding member”. So when you seek to assemble what you believe is evidence that I was a member or founding member, you’ll appreciate that this is somewhere between galling and amusing.
Let me take the sources used in your edited revision in the order you presented them in your letter, and then add an additional one – the archival mothership of evidence about BUGA UP that may have eluded you.
- My statement early in my 2008 book “At our first meeting [of MOPUP] BUGA‐UP… was born… My modest involvement was to take ongoing responsibility for the billboard on a shop directly opposite the entrance to News Ltd… We held a 20‐year reunion in October 2003.” [in fact it was October 2002 .. my error]
Response: It is clear from the unedited quote and the reference supplied in my book (your reference #10) that I was in MOP UP, not BUGA UP when the original MOP UP launch meeting took place at the Sydney morgue. Several people who I had never met who attended were already graffitiing billboards before that meeting took place. So I could hardly have been a “founding member” of BUGA UP.
I lived near the News Limited building and I graffitied a small framed, perspex covered shopfront tobacco ad that was at street level on a tiny general store/sandwich shop directly opposite the News Limited entrance. I used a marking pen and always just wrote “cancer” across the covering perspex, which I imagine was quickly erased by with a rag and methylated spirit soon afterwards. I doubt if I did this more than five times. I never signed these “BUGA UP”, which was considered indicative of membership (“The principle was that if you did a billboard on your own you could sign it BUGA-UP and that meant you were part of BUGA-UP.”)
So this is quite a long way from the elaborate, marathon and years-long efforts of those who were BUGA UP mainstays, which is why I described my billboard graffiti career as “modest”. I graffitied a few times but I was not a member of BUGA UP, although I admired their efforts immensely. That is an important difference.
The 20 year reunion held, as this Sydney Morning Herald piece makes clear, was attended by those involved in MOP UP and BUGA UP. The photo shows seven people. L-R, numbers 1,3, 4 and 5 were in MOP UP, the others in BUGA UP. I have a very large number of news clips, newsletters and correspondence showing that I was one of the founding members of MOP UP.
- “Simon Chapman was also a prominent spokesperson for Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions (BUGA UP)” your reference #4 (the BBC QED documentary in 1984)
Response: The event shown in the QED program was organized by BUGA UP. They tried to get a large crowd there to witness their civil disobedience knowing that the TV crew would be there to record it. There were lots of medical students and doctors who came along to support BUGA UP, as I did. I can identify several of them. To my knowledge, few if any of them other than those shown painting the billboard were people who were active in BUGA UP. I was there as a supporter too (the billboard was in Moore Park Rd near the (then) Sydney Sportsground, and I lived about 300m away in Selwyn St Paddington). I was interviewed not as a spokesperson for BUGA UP, but as someone who was prominent in tobacco control who had views about BUGA UP.
Similarly, in the ABC Today Tonight segment (hardly a “documentary”), I was not speaking as a BUGA UP member, but again as someone prominent in tobacco control. Nowhere am I described as being from BUGA UP. At one point, in recounting how the two groups emerged I said of the BUGA UP people who attended MOP UP’s launch “they said ‘you’re MOP UP, we’re BUGA UP”.
- The on-line article by Dietz: “Founding BUGA UP member, Dr. Simon Chapman”
Response: I have never seen this article before you cited it. It was published in Autumn 2014. I notice in the reference list that the author says she had a personal communication with me in September 2003. So this is a longer gestation period than even Tolkein took to write Lord of the Rings. I have no recollection of speaking with the author, but I gave many, many interviews across the years and do not doubt that I did speak with her. But I certainly was never contacted by her to check or approve her attributions to me. Had I been, I would have corrected the following:
- I was never “Professor of Community Medicine at Sydney University” (it’s public health).
- She says I “hosted the reunion” (of BUGA UP). As mentioned above, it was a reunion of MOP UP and BUGA UP. The reunion was not held on “23 Aug 2003” but on 11 October 2002.
- I was not a “founding member” of BUGA UP, nor a “member”.
BUGA UP’s archival website has a page where many press items have been posted. Please look through that page and on any of the other pages on the site and try to find any reference that says I was a member or founding member of BUGA UP. You won’t find any because I wasn’t.
So your letter in Addiction, despite being a correction of your original article, still contains errors. You could have very easily checked your assertions out with me prior to publication. I would have been very happy to assist you.
You also say that we provided no evidence that ATHRA took funding from KAC. But you could have checked that in a few seconds by googling [ATHRA + “Knowledge Action Change”] which would have taken you immediately to this Sydney Morning Herald item. You might also like to read this about the tobacco industry’s digital fingerprints on ATHRA’s website.”
Simon Chapman AO 
My goodness. With friends like these.
Steve
Stephen Leeder Emeritus Professor of Public Health and Community Medicine The University of Sydney Menzies Centre for Health Policy Level 2, Charles Perkins Centre D17 | The University of Sydney | NSW | 2006
Editor-in-Chief The International Journal of Epidemiology ije.editorial@sydney.edu.au
stephen.leeder@sydney.edu.au M +61 419 209 569
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Even if you were a founding member of BUGAUP, that would still make you a far better public health person than the many I have met with public health degrees( and some with MDs also) that totally ignore tobacco or actively oppose tobacco public health advocacy. You probably deserve Sainthood for all you have done. Thank You.
Joel Dunnington MD, FACR, 1981 Hunters Cove, New Braunfels,TX 78132 (281) 387-6770 jsdunnington@gvtc.com Sent from my iPad
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I was a long-time ‘member’ of BUGA UP. (Strictly speaking, it might be noted that there was no formal membership, you became a member by your actions). BUGA UP’s three founding ‘members’ were Bill Snow, Ric Bolzan and Geoff Coleman. When active graffiti was stopped by rain, there was a discussion between the three graffitists. There is some doubt as to who was actually responsible for the acronym. The words ‘bugger up’ were stated as an objective and then alternative spellings and acronyms were workshopped. Geoff with his background in political economy had the concept of an action linked by a name to create a grass roots movement, and this was probably the key to the success. Geoff is reluctant to take credit for this. He was however painted as a Commo threatening civilisation as we know it in the early media reports by journalist Bob Brown (not the Greens founder Bob Brown). Simon had been involved in founding MOP UP, and this acronym was part of the discussion, but Simon was not part of the discussion, nor to my knowledge was he ever involved in BUGA UP’s graffiti, street theatre or other activities. He has performed the valuable service of writing about BUGA UP in academic journals.
I would like to correct the record about the public billboard refacing before the 1983 Rugby League Final in 1983 in Moore Park Rd. This was a major act of defiance to demonstrate public support for BUGA UP and to contrast the morality of advertising tobacco versus writing the truth about it. The media and all the advertising and tobacco companies were invited to witness or contribute to a debate onsite. Naturally the advertisers and tobacco companies did not come publicly. The event was filmed by Stephen Rose for the BBC’s QED program. Simon’s blog has the link. Among the crowd of about 100 supporters who attended there were about 10 people there who had sprayed in the past. The ABC was on strike that day, so it was broadcast only on SBS News, which had very low ratings at that time. The commercial media did not cover it but there were 4 film crews present. Presumably based on one of these, a journalist, whose name I do not recall claimed that BUGA UP was only two people, as only Peter Vogel and I sprayed on that day. I was very conscious of the other graffitists there as I wondered how many would continue spraying if we were arrested. In true BUGA UP tradition, no one was asked to make a commitment beforehand. At least 3 Police cars drove by, but none stopped or took any action.
BUGA UP really should write its own history. Dr Simon Chapman has written about BUGA UP in academic journals, and I wrote an article in the Medical Journal of New York State in 1983. The key point is that BUGA UP used a successful activist strategy to polarise public opinion against tobacco and its advertising. This put Australia in the lead in tobacco control and enabled policy and legislative change at a rate that otherwise would not have happened. It also created a large amount of funding for health promotion as a raised tobacco tax was used to replace tobacco advertising on the billboards with health messages.
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