Cornered (13 page)

—
from BAT,
“Structured Creativity Group” (undated)

 

I
F A SINGLE IMAGE
symbolizes the Third Wave of the tobacco wars, it is surely the chief executive officers of America's seven largest tobacco companies standing side by side, with their right hands raised, swearing to tell the truth about smoking to a committee of the U.S. Congress.

On the morning of April 14, 1994, having turned down many invitations over the years to appear before Congress, the seven CEOs lined up before Henry Waxman's Health and Environment Subcommittee and were asked to state their opinion for the record. “Yes or no, do you believe nicotine is addictive?”

William Campbell of Philip Morris was first. “I believe nicotine is not addictive,” he stated loud and clear.

Then came James Johnston of R. J. Reynolds. “Mr. Congressman, cigarettes and nicotine clearly do not meet the classic definition of addiction. There is no intoxication.”

He was followed by Joseph Taddeo, of U.S. Tobacco, the leading manufacturer of chewing tobacco. “I don't believe that nicotine or our products are addictive,” he said.

Three more executives, Andrew Tisch of the Lorillard Tobacco Company, Edward Horrigan of the Liggett Group, and Thomas Sandefur of Brown & Williamson, each repeated the sentence, “I believe that nicotine is not addictive.”

The last was Donald Johnston, of the American Tobacco Company. “And I, too, believe that nicotine is not addictive,” he said.

No one had expected them to say anything else, of course. After a century of claiming they sold cigarettes containing nicotine “for taste and pleasure,” and after at least thirty years of denying what everyone who had ever worked in the tobacco industry knew well, namely that most people continue to smoke cigarettes because of a sometimes uncontrollable desire for a shot of nicotine, the CEOs were not about to change their story. Moreover, corporate custom demands not that a company spokesmen tell the whole truth about the product, but only that they tell a corporate version of the truth cleared by the board of directors and legal counsel. For some listeners there were echoes of Alice's encounter with Humpty Dumpty: “When
I
use a word it means just what I chose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

Mr. Campbell of Philip Morris was personally affronted at even being asked to consider the question. “Smokers are not drug users or drug addicts, and we do not appreciate or accept being characterized as such,” he complained. He wanted Congress to know that he was one of 50 million smokers in America and, as far as he was concerned, nicotine was no more addictive than coffee. “Mr. Chairman, coffee contains caffeine and few people seem to enjoy coffee that does not. Does that make coffee a drug? Are coffee drinkers drug addicts? I think not.”

Mr. Johnston of R. J. Reynolds spoke eloquently about nicotine playing “an essential role in the overall smoking experience.” Nicotine, in his view, had many pleasing properties, none of which should be regarded in the same light as hard drugs. “It enhances the taste of the smoke and the way it feels on the smoker's palate and it contributes to the overall smoking enjoyment,” he said. Nicotine could not be put into the same class as heroin and cocaine. “You don't need to be a trained scientist to see this.… All you need to do is to ask and honestly answer two simple questions. First, would you rather board a plane with a pilot who just smoked a cigarette, one with a pilot who had just had a couple of beers, or snorted cocaine, or shot heroin, or popped some pills? Second, if cigarettes were addictive could almost 43 million Americans have quit smoking, almost all of them on their own without any outside help? The answers are obvious, and that is precisely my point. Cigarettes are clearly not in the same class as addictive, mind-altering [drugs] like heroin and cocaine.” The term “addictive” had been misused, he said. “The allegation that smoking cigarettes is addictive is part of a growing and disturbing trend that has destroyed the meaning of the term by characterizing [as such] virtually any enjoyable activity whether it is eating sweets, drinking coffee, playing video games or watching TV. This defies common sense.” His written company statement to Congress added that smoking was no more addictive than Twinkies.

Thomas Sandefur of Brown & Williamson agreed. Use of the word “addiction” was far too loose, he said. It had been used to describe everything from an enslavement to hard drugs to an inability to lose weight or watch less television. The former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, well known as being antitobacco, had himself proclaimed in 1982 that children were “addicted” to video games. As more than half of American smokers had quit—90 percent of them without help—Sandefur declared that “equating cigarettes and hard drugs is nothing more than rhetoric.”

Waxman and his colleagues protested. To compare tobacco to common foods was “a calculated attempt to trivialize” the effects of smoking, objected Waxman. “You know and I know that Twinkies don't kill a single American a year. The difference between cigarettes and Twinkies … is death.”

Ron Wyden from Oregon was struck by the obvious, “that people who have no vested financial interest in this particular subject say that nicotine is addictive” [he mentioned the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Surgeon General, the American Medical Association, and the World Health Organization] “and the people who have a vested financial interest in saying otherwise argue that it's not.”

But it was John Bryant, an old-fashioned Texas Democrat, a believer in strong government intervention as long as it doesn't affect the price of oil and natural gas, who struck at the heart of the matter. “It is the case, is it not,” he said, adopting a prosecutorial tone, “that your usual defense is the smoker smoked voluntarily as a matter of free choice and, therefore, assumed the risk and you are not responsible? Is that not the case?”

“That's correct, sir,” Mr. Johnston of R. J. Reynolds replied.

“It is also true that your argument that smokers continue to smoke as a matter of their own free choice is a key part of the defense. Is that not right?” asked Congressman Bryant.

“I wouldn't characterize it as essential,” Mr. Johnston answered. “It is part of the defense, yes, part of the American record.”

“Is it not the case that that defense would be wiped out if you conceded here today or [in] any forum that nicotine and your products are addictive?”

Johnston was caught off balance. “Mr. Congressman, I don't know. Addiction is a term that is—”

“We all know what it means,” Bryant shot back. “Would it not be the case that if you conceded here today that nicotine was addictive and your products were addictive, that you would no longer be able to claim that the sick or dead individual smoked as a matter of free choice? Is that not the case?”

“I can tell you what juries believe,” said Johnston. “Juries usually believe, because of the common definition of addiction, that the person was addicted but the person can quit.”

“The fact of the matter is,” retorted Bryant, “that you cannot sit here today and say to us that people made a free choice to smoke if you also concede that once a person starts, they are addicted. Now, you cannot do that. So, it is very clear that you all have an economic interest in telling the American people and in sustaining the idea and saying and not deviating from the assertion that your products are not addictive. I think that is a matter of logic.”

“I respectfully disagree with you.… Mr. Congressman, I'm not a litigation lawyer or expert,” pleaded Mr. Johnston.

“But I hope you are a logical thinker.”

“I am, I hope.”

Congressman Bryant then observed that when all the CEOs replied to the addiction question in virtually the same way it raised the question of whether their response had been rehearsed. He asked Horrigan, of Liggett, “Did your lawyer tell you that you needed to affirm that you did not believe nicotine is addictive?”

“No one had to tell me anything about my opinions about addiction, sir,” replied Horrigan.

Bryant then asked, “Did this group [of CEOs] discuss the need to state clearly in the same words as you all did … that nicotine is not addictive?”

Campbell: “Absolutely not.”

Horrigan: “That's absolutely outrageous.”

But Bryant would not be stopped. “It is very difficult for me,” he said, “to find you at this table characterizing anything as outrageous after seven apparently intelligent people have stood here and told the American people, 250 million of whom know better, that cigarettes are not addictive. What could be more ridiculous?”

*   *   *

I
N
N
EW
O
RLEANS
, Pascagoula, Minneapolis, and San Francisco, Wendell Gauthier, Dick Scruggs, Mike Ciresi, Elizabeth Cabraser, and their comrades of the plaintiffs' bar celebrated. In Washington, D.C., John Coale, who was fast becoming the man the media turned to for quick reactions to the growing litigation, joked, “We were concerned about statute of limitations—when did they last say nicotine was not addictive?” Of course, they had never said anything different. Gauthier himself would forecast, “With the documents we have, there's no way this industry can stand before a jury and say, ‘We want you to return a verdict that says smoking isn't addictive.' It's just not going to happen.”

The Merrell Williams papers demonstrated that the research Brown & Williamson and its British parent, BAT, had conducted into nicotine more than thirty years earlier gave them a sophisticated and scientifically accurate understanding of nicotine pharmacology, including an explicit recognition of nicotine's addictiveness. There was evidence from other companies, Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds, showing they also fully recognized that the pharmacological action of nicotine was the main reason why many people continued to smoke cigarettes. There was nothing surprising about this in-house research. Indeed, it would have been surprising to find out that the companies had not carried out such basic work on their product. But the Williams papers provided ample evidence that the companies had covered up their understanding of nicotine's actions on the body, using euphemisms such as “taste” and “satisfaction” to explain nicotine's hold. There was evidence, too, that although the scientific community generally referred to nicotine as a drug, the tobacco companies had censored use of that word in their scientific papers, substituting “compound” instead. They had also suppressed publication of scientific papers that discussed aspects of nicotine's addictiveness, or “dependence” or “habituation.”

Gauthier and his colleagues were now prepared to go into court and argue in front of a jury something that every medical scientist, every doctor, every lawyer, every public health official, every person who had ever smoked and most of those who had not, had known perfectly well for decades: nicotine is addictive. Billions of dollars, not to mention the health of smokers, were riding on the outcome of this debate. Once a jury had declared nicotine was addictive, the industry would lose their first line of defense: that smokers choose to smoke.

*   *   *

O
VER THE YEARS
, medical science has struggled with the definition of addiction. What should the criteria be? Does the drug have to be able to intoxicate the user to the point of impairment, like alcohol? Should it always exhibit unmistakable withdrawal symptoms, as heroin does? Does it have to show “tolerance”—which means the person who is taking the drug keeps wanting more? Should any drug that causes uncontrollable antisocial behavior be classified as addictive? This was a genuine and ongoing debate.

The tobacco companies could not participate in this scientific debate for fear that they would be stuck with a definition that risked their first line of defense. Instead, they chose “common sense”: to any reasonable person, nicotine is not addictive because it does not possess the properties of illegal narcotics such as heroin and cocaine. As Campbell of Philip Morris put it in his testimony, “I have a commonsense definition of addiction which tells me … basically [as a smoker] I can function in quite a normal way, my judgment is not impaired.” In essence, people who smoke cigarettes do not become intoxicated.

Common sense would also tell you, the industry said, that the withdrawal symptoms of nicotine are not the same as those of heroin. Smokers don't get convulsions if they are deprived of cigarettes. They don't steal or murder for a smoke. And look how many smokers actually do give up smoking without help—millions every year. As for the question of tolerance, addicts of hard drugs like heroin and cocaine can never have enough. They always crave more. Smokers of cigarettes reach a certain level of consumption—you hear them say “I'm a one-pack-a-day or a two-pack-a-day person”—and that's it. They never smoke more for the rest of their lives.

Finally, cigarettes are legal, sold without prescription, consumed by the hundreds of billions every year (485 billion at the last count), said the companies. Smoking is part of human culture, celebrated in literature, opera, film, and art. Jean Cocteau had written, “One must not forget that the pack of cigarettes, the ceremony that extracts them, lights the lighter, and that strange cloud which penetrates us and which our nostrils puff, have with powerful charms seduced and conquered the world.” Smoking is associated with sex, pleasure, virility, women's liberation, Satan, death, and the gods. The desire to smoke did not begin with the cigarette companies, whose enterprise is barely a century old. It cannot be attributed to the $6 billion they currently spend on advertising and promoting cigarettes.

Concluding their case, the tobacco companies pointed to the words of Dr. Luther Terry who, as Surgeon General, was charged with the task of adjudicating on this issue by President Kennedy. In his 1964 report he concluded: “Smokers … usually develop some degree of dependence upon the practice, some to the point where significant emotional disturbances occur if they are deprived of its use.… In medical and scientific terminology the practice should be labeled
habituation
to distinguish it clearly from
addiction,
since the biological effects of tobacco, like coffee and other caffeine-containing beverages, betel morsel chewing and the like, are not comparable to those produced by morphine, alcohol, barbiturates and many other potent addicting drugs.”