Smoking Gun

The Age

Tuesday January 14, 1997

Alan Attwood

More than 40 years ago US tobacco manufacturers knew the addictive qualities on nicotine. Knowledge of smoking's adverse health effects was withheld form governments and an unsuspecting public for fear of damaging bottom lines. Now this shabby deception is being exposed. Damning files uncovered in a legal chase are revealing the full extent of smoking's dirty secret.

IT WAS a delightful place for a seminar: the picture-postcard Caribbean island of St Martin. A group of scientists gathered there in 1972 for a seminar sponsored by the tobacco industry. The topic was as perplexing as it was profound: why do people smoke?

One of the participants was a psychologist, Mr William Dunn, a member of the research staff of the tobacco giant Philip Morris. After the meeting, in his report to the company on the findings, Mr Dunn gave an eloquent explanation for the worldwide allegiance to cigarettes, despite mounting evidence of their health risks.

He wrote: "The primary incentive to cigarette smoking is the immediate salutary effect of inhaled smoke upon body function." A cigarette, he said, should be considered "not as a product but as a package . . . The product is nicotine . . . Think of the cigarette pack as a storage container for a day's supply of nicotine."

And yet, some 22 years later in 1994, the chief executives of America's tobacco industry, including the head of Philip Morris, appeared before a Congressional subcommittee on health in Washington DC and denied, under oath, that cigarettes were addictive.

Slowly it is all coming out: more than 40 years of consistent deception and double-speak by the tobacco industry about the risks of smoking. Through depositions filed for court hearings, company documents pilfered or leaked by whistleblowers, papers handed over in clandestine meetings in dark bars like scenes from a spy novel, the industry is condemning itself. Its own words - such as the Dunn memo - are now being used against it.

What is becoming clear is that, whatever the public posturing, senior people in the tobacco industry have long had information, much of it generated by researchers they funded themselves, making clear the association between smoking and disease. This information was either ignored or suppressed so as not to affect the huge profits generated by the sale of cigarettes. By doing so they condemned millions more to addiction and a shorter life expectancy.

The latest chapter in a continuing saga came in Florida last week, when details were revealed of a sworn statement filed for one of many anti-smoking lawsuits now grinding through the tortuous US legal system. In the statement, a former government health official suggested that the duplicity of the tobacco industry had impaired public health programs.

Mr Jack Henningfield, a former senior researcher for the US Government's National Institute on Drug Abuse, said in the statement - released to the Los Angeles Times - "It's frustrating from a public health perspective because there was information out there that could have helped us in our efforts to keep kids from getting addicted."

Mr Henningfield, now an associate professor at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, also said: "We see littered throughout tobacco industry documents dating back to the 1960s that they understood clearly that their business was a drug delivery business." He has suggested that if this had been recognised earlier, cigarette sales might have been more tightly regulated.

Some nine years before William Dunn's report from St Martin, a lawyer for the Brown & Williamson tobacco company used almost identical language when he wrote in a confidential internal memo: "Nicotine is addictive. We are, then, in the business of selling nicotine, an addictive drug effective in the release of stress mechanisms."

This infamous memo was not revealed until 1994, 31 years later, when it was part of a package of incriminating company documents stolen by a disgruntled former employee of Brown & Williamson. It was one reason that a Jacksonville jury, in a landmark case last year, awarded $US750,000 ($A830,000) in damages against Brown & Williamson to a former smoker dying of lung cancer.

The company appealed against the judgment. The legal process rolls on. But the Jacksonville case was just one reason 1996 was a pivotal year in the long battle to make tobacco companies accountable for harm done by their products. It was also the year an avowedly anti-smoking President was re-elected, and the Food and Drug Administration declared nicotine an addictive drug and urged tighter controls on cigarette sales.

Now, with more than 20 lawsuits against tobacco companies under way in US states and counties, many seeking compensation for the medical costs incurred in treating victims of tobacco, statements such as those by Mr Henningfield may well have implications beyond the Florida case.

Mr Henningfield has suggested the industry deliberately kept information from committees preparing surgeon-generals' reports on the dangers of smoking. The industry's own documents, Mr Henningfield says, show "a pattern of conscious disregard by the tobacco industry for the health and safety of the American public".

As the cases unfold this year, statements like Mr Henningfield's will be submitted and disputed in court as lawyers for the many plaintiffs argue that companies deliberately quashed or dismissed information about health risks associated with smoking so as not to jeopardise their market or huge profits.

The question for tobacco companies, as it was asked of Richard Nixon at the height of Watergate, is what did they know, and when did they know it? The answer - made clear in a number of recent books, none better than Richard Kluger's Ashes to Ashes - is that the industry knew far more about the probable health risks of smoking decades before it conceded anything publicly.

The generations of cover-ups go far beyond the brazen chicanery of the early cigarette advertising campaigns.

They also show a far more serious contempt for the public than that showed by Mr John Switzer, head of the Philip Morris foot-slogging sales team in New York before World War II, who urged his salesmen to practise the cheapest form of advertising: tossing away their empty packets of Philip Morris cigarettes in conspicuous places.

Mr Kluger argues that tobacco companies have long been burning the cigarette at both ends: publicly professing a desire to be fully informed about possible health risks while privately suppressing information deemed likely to affect sales.

The industry has also shown an extraordinary ability to turn possible adversity to advantage: first using concerns about health risks to introduce filter cigarettes (early versions of which used asbestos fibres in the filters); then king-size cigarettes (though there was no evidence of links between length and safety); and, more recently, even using warning labels on packets as a way of denying liability for illness. Consumers had been warned about possible health risks, industry lawyers have repeatedly argued.

But until recently consumers have not been aware of the level of deception carried out by tobacco companies. In 1954, for example, in response to the first trickle of medical reports linking smoking with cancer, all the US companies combined to produce a full-page newspaper ad headed "A frank statement to cigarette smokers".

In the ad the cigarette manufacturers asserted: "We believe that the products we make are not injurious to health." This is now being used as evidence by long-time smokers suing manufacturers, although industry lawyers have described it as a creed, not an enforceable warranty.

Noting smoking's long history, the "frank statement" said tobacco "has given solace, relaxation and enjoyment to mankind" while being held "responsible for practically every disease of the human body. One by one these charges have been abandoned for lack of evidence." Nevertheless, the industry would continue its unstinting efforts to research the health issues.

Jack Henningfield has said of this: "It's false. The 'frank statement' is a frank lie when you consider the evidence of their own documents."

Richard Kluger, who has sifted these documents as much as anyone, writes that at the time of the statement the cigarette manufacturers had three options, the least likely being "accept the evidence against them as conclusive and go out of business rather than further risking the public's health". Alternatively, it could deny everything or join in the studies "hoping that it would either exonerate their product or isolate the harmful product".

Publicly, the cigarette industry opted for this last course. But, Kluger adds, it didn't leave it at that: "Instead, it proceeded . . . to dispute, distort, minimise, or ignore the unfolding evidence against it."

In recent years, the challenge for lawyers bringing actions against the tobacco industry has been to convince juries that companies had indeed suppressed health information or that their public stance has been at odds with what their own researchers discovered.

With every leaked document, every bit of research into the industry's recent history, that task has become a little easier.

Kluger demonstrates the way in which industry-funded research has essentially been window-dressing, and gives several examples of what happened when scientists, many of whom had been given assurances of independence, came up with inconvenient results.

In 1970, the R.J. Reynolds company summarily fired 26 scientists and ended a four-year program in which animals were being tested for the effects of tobacco smoke. All of the researchers' notebooks were seized. One of the scientists said later: "Reynolds did not at that time want to be collecting information that might be detrimental to itself - which would be telling the public what its product does. Ignorance is bliss."

Around the same time, under a contract with the industry-funded Council for Tobacco Research, a pathologist named Homburger conducted a two-year study of hamsters which had inhaled smoke over this period. He prepared a paper, detailing his findings of damage to the larynx and lungs of the animals as well as cancerous cells, and submitted it - as required - to the council. Then followed visits from representatives of the council, urging no mention of cancer in the paper. After he refused, his funding was withdrawn.

The industry used legal action to prevent the US screening of a British TV documentary called Death in the West, showing ranchers - prototypical Marlboro men - dying from lung disease they attributed to smoking. It boosted its public image by pouring millions of dollars into sponsorship of sports and the arts. It increased its hold on legislators by throwing money at political parties and senior politicians.

The industry, a behemoth, has survived despite growing attacks. Now there are indications that what it has most feared - a legal defeat that could open floodgates to massive claims for compensation - is inevitable. It may even happen this year. The smoking gun has been found in company filing cabinets.

Kluger argues that the industry should now run up the white flag, settling for a massive hike in federal excise tax on cigarettes in return for exemption for all personal injury claims. It should also accept tougher controls on advertising.

But knowing the industry as he does, he thinks it unlikely. There may be, he concludes, plenty of fight left in "an incubus that has defied all reason, thrived on greed and folly, and driven poor mortals to grasp on to it for succor in a fashion their Maker never designed their bodies to long endure".