Cornered

by Peter Pringle

  The “orgy of buncombe” of which Senator Smoot of Utah spoke so eloquently in 1929 when he rose in Congress to denounce the tobacco companies’ “unconscionable, heartless and destructive attempts to exploit the women and youth of this country” was again in full swing. It would be left to Judge William Osteen to decide whether the tobacco companies had a case, or were engaged once more in a campaign, as Smoot put it, “whose only God is profit, whose only bible is the balance sheet, whose only principle is greed.”

  9

  THE SCIENCE TEACHER

  This guy is Jekyll and Hyde; he’ll do whatever he needs to do for whoever is paying him.

  —Gordon Smith, a lawyer for Brown & Williamson

  MERRELL WILLIAMS CHANGED the balance of power in the tobacco wars. For a lowly paralegal, he had managed to select such explicit and damning confidential documents of such high quality that the antitobacco forces now possessed a potent arsenal of evidence. For all his cleverness, though, Williams was still only a clerk. He had no firsthand knowledge of how decisions were made in the company; no evidence that the proposals in the documents were actually carried out. He had not met anyone who made big decisions, only supervisors at the document center in Louisville. Brown & Williamson would make much of this distinction, claiming in many cases that the documents Williams had stolen were only the random thoughts of individual scientists or lawyers, not company policy. What the antitobacco forces needed desperately was a high-level executive who had knowledge of policy making, someone who could substantiate conversations at board level about nicotine addiction and cancer of the lung or heart disease. At trial, Williams would be useless as a witness. He was just a document thief, a $9-an-hour clerk who turned against the company. The lawyers needed a tobacco executive.

  As it turned out, such a person had been found at the end of 1993 but his identity was being kept secret. His FDA code name was “Research.” His real name was Jeffrey Wigand, a smart but somewhat erratic biochemist who once dreamed of being a doctor but had never made it to medical school. Instead, he worked as a scientific research manager in companies that produced health-care products. In 1989, he had just lost a job in New Jersey as a result of a company reorganization and had answered an ad in The New York Times for a company research director. A headhunting firm from Louisville, Kentucky, contacted him. They told him that Brown & Williamson was looking for someone to lead the company’s research department.

  Wigand had never thought of being employed by Big Tobacco, but he was interested in public health and knowing the problems of smoking and cancer, he thought he might be able to make a difference. In interviews he was told he would be working on the development of a “safe cigarette,” one with much reduced harmful substances and tobacco additives. Wigand was intrigued. He embarked on a tortuous journey that would earn him lots of money for doing rather little and, in the end, give him a pile of trouble.

  After four and a half years, Wigand was fired. But within months he was working as a consultant on the tobacco industry for the CBS program 60 Minutes, and as a witness in the Justice Department’s investigation into fire-safe cigarettes, and then as a consultant to the FDA on its inquiry. He would become the highest-ranking defector in the history of the tobacco industry. He would be hounded by hostile company lawyers and private investigators. He had little prospect of ever resuming a career in the pharmaceutical industry to which he had been attached for almost three decades. Eventually, he would teach high school for a tenth of the salary Brown & Williamson had been paying him. He would be divorced from his second wife; his personal life was in tatters. He was, however, not without friends and admirers, especially among the antitobacco forces. He was honored for what he had done—he blew the whistle on a powerful and secretive industry—and he became a national hero, of sorts. Most important, the tobacco industry would decide it could not afford to have Jeffrey Wigand on the witness stand. His defection was clearly one of the reasons why the industry would capitulate and go to the negotiating table in the spring of 1997.

  * * *

  WIGAND HAD JOINED Brown & Williamson in 1989 at their headquarters in Louisville. They made him head of R&D. His name was in a box with all the other executives at the top of the company’s organization chart. He had a budget of more than $20 million, a staff of 265, and a salary of $300,000 a year—more than he had ever earned before. For one who believed that his research skills were better, and certainly more important to him, than his management expertise, this was indeed a challenge. Wigand accepted it with gusto. He became a willing, even eager, participant in the strange, incestuous world of the tobacco executive. He went to the parties they held for themselves and joined the company’s favored golf club. He even took up occasional smoking “to understand the science of how it made you feel.”

  The big salary created a comfortable life at home, more comfortable than it had been, perhaps ever. He had grown up the oldest of five children in a strict Catholic household, first in the Bronx and then in upstate New York, near Poughkeepsie. He dropped out of Dutchess Community College to join the air force and to get away from a stifling home life. He was sent to Japan, where he ran a hospital operating room. He learned Japanese and the martial arts. He returned after one tour and went back to school. He studied biochemistry at the University of Buffalo, where he earned a doctorate and wrote a master’s thesis on vitamin B12. When his first wife developed multiple sclerosis, the strain of caring for her began to take a toll. She left him after the birth of a daughter. He met his second wife when he was director of marketing for Johnson & Johnson. They married in 1986 and had two daughters.

  Why Brown & Williamson decided to hire Wigand is a mystery because he was not their type. He cared too much about pure science to sustain the untenable public position of the industry—that smoking does not cause cancer and that nicotine is not addictive. And he grew to despise their philosophy. For example, Wigand would find repulsive the argument used by tobacco executives that an adult’s right to smoke is as important as a woman’s right to an abortion.

  Apparently, he had not revealed his true self at the interviews. He was totally unsuited to life in the bunker of the tobacco industry where being a team player is essential. That was never his strength. He couldn’t keep his own counsel when silence was required for his survival. “I have a very bad problem—saying what’s on my mind. I don’t take too much crap from anybody.”

  On his first week at work, he was shocked to find the poor state of the company’s research labs, which he said looked like “a high school chemistry lab from the ’50s, filled with old-fashioned smoking machines. There was no fundamental science being done and no contemporary apparatus.” (Indeed, testimony that first surfaced in 1997 from one of Wigand’s predecessor’s, Dr. Irwin Tucker, would suggest that the research department had long been the company’s poor cousin. And the Merrell Williams papers would show that most of the group’s research was done abroad by the British parent company, BAT Industries.)

  Wigand hired a physicist, a toxicologist, and an analytical chemist and started work on two projects. One was a new low-tar cigarette and the other was fire safety—how to make a cigarette burn at lower temperatures to reduce the risk of fire. But it soon became apparent that the company had little interest in him completing what he was doing. A series of incidents occurred that would bring Wigand into confrontations with his superiors and eventually terminate his employment with the company.

  The first was his indoctrination into the lawyer-run nature of the tobacco industry. As he tells the story, Wigand went out to Kansas City to meet the lawyers from Shook, Hardy & Bacon. They would explain how a tobacco company defends itself against lawsuits; how it would be necessary for the lawyers to know what the research scientists were doing to make sure no project endangered the well-being of the company. If there was any doubt about what this regime entailed, it was confirmed by a meeting in Vancouver of company researchers shortly after he joined. The meeting included scientists from BAT
in England and its subsidiaries around the world and it left Wigand disturbed and concerned about his job.

  The researchers had discussed the possibility of finding an artificial substitute for nicotine, an “analogue” in the chemist’s lexicon. Other companies had been interested in nicotine analogues, which would have the same effect as nicotine on the central nervous system while avoiding the cardiovascular effects. At the meeting, Wigand would later testify, about fifteen pages of notes were taken by a British scientist. As head of R&D in Louisville, Wigand received a copy. A few weeks later, he was sent a truncated version of the notes, a mere three pages long, from the office of J. Kendrick Wells, B&W’s corporate counsel. Wigand would say later that the deletions had been made to avoid “references that would be discoverable during any kind of liability action.” Wells denied that the minutes had been improperly altered.

  Such was his baptism into the world of censored scientific reports where potentially embarrassing material was excised by the legal department. Wigand would soon discover that despite his fancy title, head of R&D, there were other research reports from England that he was not privy to at all. Sent first to the legal department, there they stayed if they were considered too sensitive for circulation, even to the head of R&D. The scientists in England sometimes bypassed the system by sending documents to Wigand’s home fax machine.

  Wigand increasingly felt himself undermined by company lawyers. His answer was to immerse himself in strictly domestic projects. He started work on additives the company was putting into cigarette tobacco to improve taste. A large number of chemicals end up in cigarette tobacco besides the ones that come naturally in the tobacco plant. They include not only the residue of pesticides and insecticides, but also compounds added as flavorings in the factory. Still more are produced by the burning of the tobacco.

  Unlike additives to foods, those in tobacco were not subject to government regulation in the United States. The tobacco companies had to submit a list of additives used to the Department of Health and Human Services, but under an agreement, the list was not published because the companies claimed it contained proprietory information. Under constant pressure from antismoking groups to reveal what was on the list, the companies, including B&W, debated the issue from time to time.

  Like all tobacco companies, B&W had been concerned about an additive called coumarin, a vanilla-like flavor also used as a flavor fixative. It had been used as a food and tobacco additive for decades, but most commercial use was halted after it was found that coumarin caused liver damage in rats and dogs and was suspected of being carcinogenic. Coumarin was banned for use in foods in the United States. In the United Kingdom by the late ‘70s, levels of coumarin in tobacco were controlled by the government, but not in the United States where it continued to be used in cigarettes until 1984. B&W had stopped using coumarin in domestic cigarettes in 1982, but continued to use it in pipe tobacco. When Wigand found out, he said he suggested to Thomas Sandefur that the company should remove it from the remaining products and Sandefur was reluctant to do so because it would affect sales. (The company says coumarin is not used in any B&W company products today, and even when it had been used, the levels were entirely safe.)

  The coumarin issue would turn out to be only one of several important differences Wigand had with Sandefur, a rough-hewn Georgian who had started at the company as a salesman. According to Wigand’s testimony, he had two big fights with Sandefur. The first was about producing a low-tar cigarette.

  * * *

  FOR FIFTY YEARS the tobacco industry had plans to develop a safer cigarette, one that would contain less of the harmful substances in the “tar” of tobacco smoke. The companies had tried all kinds of modifications. First they added filters, which contained a wide variety of absorbent materials including cork, cotton wool, cellulose, charcoal, and even asbestos. Then they tried putting microscopic holes in the filters and the cigarette paper to increase the volume of air mixing with the smoke. They puffed up the tobacco like Rice Krispies in an effort to eliminate some of the harmful compounds. They even invented a new synthetic tobacco. They also invented a nonburning cigarette: a charcoal rod inside the cigarette heated up the tobacco so that it never actually caught fire. Out of all these, at least some of the harmful products of burning tobacco were eliminated.

  Some of these experiments produced cigarettes that appeared to significantly reduce the carcinogenic effects of tobacco smoke, but none produced a cigarette that smokers wanted to smoke; they didn’t taste as good and they didn’t contain as much nicotine. And governments and antismoking groups were not enthusiastic about a product that could turn out to be a new version of the old.

  The tobacco companies could never promote their experimental products as a “safer” cigarette because that meant admitting that the cigarettes they were already selling were harmful, or at least not as safe as the new ones. Producing a “safer cigarette” that was free, or freer, from the toxins of tobacco smoke was a legal trap. They would also be open to FDA control if they marketed a product that carried a health claim, as a so-called safer cigarette would. So, the attempts by the companies had always been half-hearted at best.

  Brown & Williamson’s parent, BAT, had tried to make a “safer” cigarette in the 1960s. Project Ariel produced a device that relied on burning tobacco to heat a central tube containing nicotine and an aerosol generator, such as water, which would then be inhaled. The tobacco provided a small amount of “taste” but many fewer toxins. Nothing came of Ariel. The companies concentrated on filters instead, which did cut down the tar levels considerably. But eliminating all the toxins was a problem the tobacco companies shelved. It was too complicated.

  The problem was as bewildering in its way as the mix of thousands of compounds that make up tobacco smoke. Up to five billion particles are jammed into a cubic centimeter of smoke. Microscopic, oily droplets agitate and kick other particles around, coalesce with them, and grow bigger, turning into particulate matter known as “tar.” In 1964, only 500 compounds had been isolated; by 1967, 1,300 were known. They included hydrocarbons of the polycyclic and heterocyclic types, phenols and polyphenols, trace metals, some of which are radioactive, toxic gases such as carbon monoxide, cyanide, and hydrogen sulphide. Many of these are not found in the tobacco leaf but are formed as the cigarette burns, and at least some of them produced or helped to produce cancers.

  Painting the shaved skin of mice with the brownish-black gooey condensate of smoke produced tumors, but the question was, What in the tar does the damage? The polycyclic hydrocarbons are the product of the incomplete combustion of tobacco—chiefly benzpyrene. In its pure state it is a yellowish, crystalline material. In the smoke, it floats like microscopic blobs of asphalt. Benzpyrene can be produced by burning any vegetable matter and is found in minute quantities in roasted coffee beans and charcoal-broiled steak. It is a relatively weak initiator of tumors, but when it interlocks and combines with other substances, such as phenols, it is more potent. The phenols are tumor promoters, as are fatty acids.

  But seemingly, B&W’s leadership wasn’t really interested in unraveling the problem. According to Wigand, Sandefur had told him, “I don’t want to hear any more discussion about a safer cigarette.… Any research on a safer product would clearly expose every other product as unsafe and, therefore, present a liability issue in terms of any type of litigation.”

  In a deposition taken in 1995, Wigand was asked about the company’s policy on such matters and whether, “If science affected sales, the science would take the back door?” And he answered, “Yes.” Asked whether Sandefur expressed this policy, Wigand replied, “Several times.” B&W says this is absolutely false; there never was such a policy.

  Wigand’s second important conversation with Sandefur was about nicotine addiction. Wigand would claim that BAT scientists had conducted studies on the levels of nicotine needed to keep smokers “using the product”: “Below a certain level of 0.4 milligrams [the drug] does not sustain sat
isfaction … over 1.2 milligrams it becomes too harsh and has too much of an impact.” Wigand claims that Sandefur understood perfectly well that nicotine was an addictive substance and had discussed it as such with him several times. The company denied the conversations ever took place.

  Wigand admits he grew to dislike Sandefur intensely and couldn’t help showing it. “Sandefur used to beat on me for using big words. I never found anyone as stupid as Sandefur in terms of his ability to read and communicate,” says Wigand. “In terms of his understanding something and his intellectual capacity, Sandefur was just like a farm boy.”

  The dislike was mutual. When Sandefur was promoted to CEO of Brown & Williamson in January 1993, Wigand knew his days were numbered. He had been warned by a colleague that B&W management thought he was difficult and spoke out too much about company business.

  On March 24, Sandefur fired Wigand. He was escorted from the building. He was not allowed to take any of his belongings, including his scientific diary. But he did leave with a two-year payoff and health insurance for his family, something that was becoming more important after he discovered that one of his daughters had spina bifida and required expensive treatment. The price of the severance package was Wigand’s silence. He signed a lifelong agreement of confidentiality so severe that he would be in violation if he discussed anything at all that he had done for, or knew about, the corporation. And for Wigand this was a problem. The conflict between his eagerness to expose the wrongdoings of the tobacco industry and his need to keep his severance pay and medical benefits would land him in a lot of trouble.