Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 8, 1994 TAG: 9405080066
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
The executives of the company, the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., chose to remain silent, to keep their research results secret, to stop work on a safer cigarette and to pursue a legal and public relations strategy of admitting nothing.
In more than 100 documents, letters and cables from the 1960s and 1970s that provide a rare look at the internal discussions among tobacco executives, the officials spoke of the hazards of cigarettes and stated plainly to one another that nicotine is addictive.
In one document, the company's general counsel said Brown & Williamson's research had found that cigarettes caused or predisposed people to lung cancer, contributed to heart disease and might cause emphysema. The statements contradict the tobacco industry's contention over the last three decades that it has not been proved that cigarettes are harmful or that nicotine is addictive.
The question of addiction has taken on importance in recent months after the Food and Drug Administration said for the first time that it would consider regulating cigarettes. To establish control over cigarettes, the FDA said, it must show that nicotine is addictive and that tobacco companies intentionally exercise control over the amount of nicotine in cigarettes to maintain smokers' addiction.
Officials of Brown & Williamson, which makes Kool, Viceroy and other brands, refused to comment on the documents but sent a letter to The New York Times Friday suggesting that the documents had been "stolen by a former employee of a law firm doing work for Brown & Williamson." The company said the documents should not be disclosed because some of them may be subject to attorney-client privilege and may be covered by an injunction forbidding their release. The injunction was issued by Judge Thomas B. Wine of Jefferson Circuit Court in Louisville, Ky.
Wine is presiding over a case in which Brown & Williamson is suing a man named Merrell Williams, who they say stole documents from the company.
A lawyer for The New York Times Co., Adam Liptak, said he did not believe that the injunction applied to the newspaper. "Under the Supreme Court's decisions, injunctions may be directed only to specific parties to a lawsuit," he said. "Injunctions directed to the whole world are ineffective."
Some documents were obtained by The Times from a government official who was disturbed about the testimony last month in the House by the top executives of the seven major tobacco companies, in which they said that nicotine was not addictive.
The official said that the documents also were given to Rep. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a smoking opponent who has been working on investigations of tobacco companies in recent weeks. Wyden said that he had turned over the documents to Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, and that he found them to be "very disturbing."
Waxman's subcommittee has held several hearings on the tobacco industry, and at one of them the top executives of the seven biggest American tobacco companies testified. Wyden asked each of the executives whether in his opinion nicotine was addictive, and each in turn answered no.
Thomas E. Sandefur Jr., the chairman and chief executive of Brown & Williamson, said in his testimony, "I believe nicotine is not addictive," but in response to a request for any research the company has on nicotine and addiction, he said he would turn over documents but added, "We do not have any animal research."
From the documents, it is apparent that there were debates within Brown & Williamson in the 1960s and 1970s about whether to disclose what the company knew of the hazards of cigarettes, and to try to make a safer cigarette, or instead to keep silent about their own research and work to minimize the impact of the research of others.
Researchers formerly with other tobacco companies and industry experts said that the debate within Brown & Williamson was echoed within each of the other major companies, and that some of the documents and arguments within Brown & Williamson were shared with executives of other companies through the Tobacco Industry Research Committee and later the Council on Tobacco Research.
In the documents, Addison Yeaman, who was general counsel for the company, then a vice president, and finally director of the industry's Council on Tobacco Research, suggested in July 1963 that the company "accept its responsibility" and disclose the hazards of cigarettes directly to the surgeon general, freeing the company to do research openly to develop safer cigarettes. The company officials were aware at the time that the surgeon general's report, issued in 1964, was being prepared, the documents show.
That proposal was apparently turned down, as later documents show that the research reports remained secret for 30 years. Work on the safer cigarette was stopped.
In the summer of 1963, as part of the corporate debate about how to handle the health hazards of cigarettes while continuing to keep the company free of the possibility of lawsuits by smokers, Yeaman wrote an analysis of whether the company should acknowledge the hazards of cigarettes and accept the risks of litigation, or say nothing. The latter would cost it the ability to discuss its research in public and give up credible standing to criticize the surgeon general's report.
Yeaman said in the July 17, 1963, report, labeled "strictly private and confidential," that new information about the tranquilizing effects of nicotine and its positive effects on weight loss "delivers to the industry what may well be the first effective instrument of propaganda counter to that of the American Cancer Society, et al, damning cigarettes as having a causal relationship to cancer of the lung."
He noted that company research had shown that nicotine has an anxiety-reducing effect, and helps control body weight, and "moreover, nicotine is addictive."
"We are, then, in the business of selling nicotine, an addictive drug effective in the release of stress mechanisms," he wrote.
The research found that despite the beneficial effects of nicotine, cigarettes "cause, or predispose, lung cancer."
"They contribute to certain cardiovascular disorders," the research found. "They may well be truly causative in emphysema, etc. etc."
The memo said that the surgeon general would soon issue a major report that would conclude that cigarettes cause lung cancer and cardiovascular disease.
The industry, he said, should take the event seriously. Whatever means the companies used to minimize the impact of the surgeon general's report, the industry must face the fact that a "responsible and qualified group of previously non-committed medical authorities have spoken," he wrote.
Yeaman said the company should not continue to say that the hazards were not proved, and should not continue in a defensive posture. Rather, he said, the industry should embark on a "massive and impressively financed" campaign of research that would either disprove the hazard, or far more likely, he said, discover just which chemicals are the cancer-causing ones so the companies could "neutralize them."
Yeaman said he would not discuss his memorandums over the phone.
In the years since Yeaman's analysis, several tobacco companies have created cigarettes which can greatly reduce the amounts of key disease-causing chemicals, which can nearly eliminate second-hand smoke, and which can nearly eliminate the fire hazard of cigarettes. None are on the market.
by CNB