ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, March 26, 1996 TAG: 9603260044
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
RECENT REPORTS from the front in America's tobacco wars hint of breakthroughs as potentially significant as they are currently satisfying.
The casualties, of course, continue to mount. Today, like every day, another 1,000 Americans will die from tobacco-related diseases, and untold numbers of kids will be drawn into lifetime addictions.
Still, amid the carnage signs of hope spring up - two signs that the nicotine wall may be cracking:
Liggett Group, maker of Chesterfield and Eve brand cigarettes, has in the past couple of weeks settled lawsuits brought by states seeking compensation for the costs of treating smokers. It also has settled part of a class-action suit alleging that tobacco companies manipulate nicotine levels to keep smokers hooked.
Much has been made of the non-health-related motives of tobacco's Benedict Arnold, Bennett LeBow - chairman of the company that owns Liggett. By agreeing to pay a maximum of less than $2 million a year for anti-smoking programs, not only has he escaped risk of big losses from the lawsuits. He also may have gained advantage in a hostile takeover battle for RJR Nabisco, America's second-largest tobacco company, because a merged RJR would be offered the same liability limit.
But the significance of the settlement stems no more from LeBow's financial machinations than from the small sums going to public-health programs as a result. What's worth celebrating is the break in tobacco-company solidarity: Until now, no cigarette maker has paid a penny to a plaintiff claiming damage from smoking. The crack in this wall is likely to widen.
Last week, a former research scientist and a former plant shift manager at Philip Morris, the nation's largest tobacco manufacturer, accused the Richmond-based company of doctoring nicotine levels in cigarettes to keep smokers from kicking the habit.
"Nicotine levels were routinely targeted and adjusted by Philip Morris in its various products at least in part through blend changes and blend design," said a senior scientist who left Philip Morris in 1989. Employees test nicotine levels on an hourly basis, said the shift manager, to ensure they meet certain levels. If the levels aren't right, the product is pulled and reprocessed to increase the nicotine content. (Is this quality control?) A third witness, a former director of applied research, said it "was commonly understood" that the amount of nicotine affected whether people would keep smoking.
So much for the sworn testimony of William Campbell, then-president of Philip Morris USA, before a congressional subcommittee in 1994. "Philip Morris does not manipulate or independently control the level of nicotine in our products," he testified. Somebody's not telling the truth here.
Much will be made of these contradictions by the Food and Drug Administration, now looking for a way to regulate tobacco - even though it's hard to imagine how the agency could do so without resorting to an impossible prohibition. (Will it ban advertising of a legal product? What, exactly, are the safe and efficacious levels of smoking?) Federal prosecutors' perjury and fraud probes may be more promising.
In any event, the significance of these revelations isn't so much in the government's response. It's in how they undercut tobacco merchants' cynical efforts, still in a united front, to maintain the claim of innocence in the face of evidence that they are drug dealers.
LENGTH: Medium: 65 linesby CNB