THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 30, 1996 TAG: 9607010176
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DAVID M. POOLE
LENGTH: 77 lines
ASHES TO ASHES
America's 100-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris
RICHARD KLUGER
Alfred A. Knopf. 807 pp. $35.
Philip Morris got credit for being a ``good corporate citizen'' last summer when it voluntarily pulled 8 billion cigarettes from store shelves, after smokers complained of irritation from what turned out to be a harmless chemical in filters.
The recall sent a clear message: The New York-based manufacturer would not sell products that could harm its customers.
The duplicity of the Philip Morris recall becomes crystal-clear, however, after reading Ashes to Ashes, the latest book by career journalist Richard Kluger, author of Simple Justice and The Paper.
This timely analysis provides a historical context to cigarette manufacturers' unwillingness to face up to the scientific evidence linking smoking to lung cancer, heart disease and other ailments.
Ashes to Ashes is filled with illuminating bits of history. Kluger points out that even though tobacco has been a part of this country's story since the arrival of the first English colonists, cigarettes are a relatively recent phenomenon that, in terms of sales, did not overtake chewing tobacco until 1922.
Kluger's spade turns up a rich vein of clever and shamelessly misleading advertising slogans - such as ``Just What The Doctor Ordered'' - that manufacturers used to reassure smokers they were not killing themselves slowly.
Ashes to Ashes also shows how tobacco merchants, after vowing in the 1950s to spare no expense in developing a ``medically safe'' cigarette, shut down their laboratories at the urging of their lawyers.
Kluger is at his best when explaining the addictive buzz of cigarettes - acting as both sedative and stimulant - that keeps a full one-quarter of American adults puffing away to cope with the pressures of modern society.
``Its users have found it their all-purpose psychological crutch, their universal coping device, and the truest, cheapest, most accessible opiate of the masses,'' he writes.
Kluger's moral indignation is evident throughout the book. He deploys adjectives such as ``reprehensible'' and ``heinous'' to describe cigarette manufacturers' efforts to becloud the medical consensus on smoking. He gives industry officials their say, but often debunks their comments with editorial asides.
Cigarette manufacturers have seized upon this heavy-handedness to brush off Ashes to Ashes as just another anti-smoking polemic.
But Kluger, a former Forbes magazine reporter, cannot be dismissed so lightly. His research - weaving together legal, scientific, social and historical facts - raises provocative questions about the tobacco debate now raging in Congress.
For example, why is a product that is one of the worst killers of our times exempt from oversight by the federal Food and Drug Administration? Kluger points out the absurdity of the FDA ordering a recall of Perrier in 1990 after the mineral water was found to contain minute amounts of toxic benzene. Yet, the FDA did nothing when the 1986 Surgeon General's report showed a pack of cigarettes contains 2,000 times more benzene than a single bottle of Perrier.
Because politicians are unwilling to regulate the cigarette industry, decisive battles probably will take place in the courtroom.
So far, cigarette manufacturers have been able to fend off product liability lawsuits filed by smokers. Kluger sheds light on the inherent contradiction in their defense strategy: They claim that smokers know the risks, but at the same time the manufacturers do not accept the medical community's conclusions about the risks.
``Have we been convinced by these merchants' unyielding insistence that peddling poison in the form of tobacco is no vice if (a) it is freely picked by its users and (b) its dangers have not yet been conclusively, to the last logarithm of human intellect, proven?`` MEMO: David M. Poole is a reporter in the Richmond bureau of The
Virginian-Pilot. by CNB