by Allan Brandt
But the cigarette had reached a critical tipping point, and rates of smoking began a slow but persistent fall. In 1983, approximately one-third of all adults were regular smokers; three years later, the number had fallen to about 30 percent. This decline reinforced the notion that smoking was becoming an increasingly minority behavior. The recognition of this fact further emboldened nonsmokers to assert their rights over a minority perceived as inflicting the risks of their bad behavior on the majority.
At the same time, smoking became increasingly associated with lower educational and socioeconomic status. Data from the Centers for Disease Control showed smoking declining with levels of education: more than 40 percent of people who dropped out of high school were smokers, compared to 15 percent of those with college degrees. On seeing these numbers, University of Michigan economist Kenneth Warner remarked that “smoking-related diseases will increasingly become a class-based phenomenon.”122
The cultural shift associated with secondhand smoke had tipped the balance in favor of quitting. Smokers reported increasing social pressures to quit, as well as declining pleasure from cigarettes. But the reductions in smoking followed patterns of education and class. Once loaded with positive meanings, the cigarette now carried the burdens of risk, pollution, and contamination. The product and its consumer had moved from the normative to the stigmatized.
Source: Centers for Disease Control; Surgeon General’s Reports (1988, 1989, 2001)
CHART S Male and female smoking prevalence, United States, 1900-2004
As the social acceptability of cigarette use fell precipitously, the tobacco companies redoubled their efforts in marketing and promotion, intensifying efforts to target new smokers, women, and ethnic minorities. Of particular note were new strategies across the industry to solicit African-American smokers. During the course of the twentieth century, African-Americans had generally begun smoking in large numbers later than whites, in part responding to advertising campaigns directed to them in the 1930s and 1940s. By the early 1960s, rates of smoking among blacks had become similar to those among whites. Among African-Americans there was a long-standing preference (frequently investigated and commented on within the tobacco industry) for menthol cigarettes. According to most assessments, patrons associated these brands—intensively advertised in black media—(Kool, Newport, and Salem) with less harsh, cooler, and medicinal tastes. Such preferences could perhaps also be linked to the use of menthol and other herbal remedies in African-American healing practices dating back to the colonies.123
As rates of smoking began to fall in the 1970s and early 1980s, the tobacco companies centered new attention on the African-American market.124 Promotional campaigns were linked to efforts to secure stronger ties to the African-American community through philanthropic support of key institutions and charities. Philip Morris had been a trendsetter in corporate integration in the 1940s and 1950s, and it was the first tobacco company to promote African-Americans into sales and executive positions.125 Along with its competitors, Philip Morris also became a major contributor to the NAACP, the National Urban League, and the United Negro College Fund. In 1988, the principal sponsors for the annual conference of the Congressional Black Caucus were Anheuser Busch, Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Miller Brewing Company, and Coors. Observers of this trend drew attention to the companies’ attempts to curry good will and political favor within the minority community. In an internal memorandum, Brown & Williamson explained its support for African-American philanthropies:Obviously, care must be exercised not to “over-commercialize” the agreement or B&W’s association with the NAACP. However, if managed with sensitivity, this association can be linked positively to the minority buying public. . . .
Clearly, the sole reason for B&W’s interest in the black and Hispanic communities is the actual and potential sales of B&W products within these communities and the profitability of these sales.
. . . [T]his relatively small and often tightly knit community can work to B&W’s marketing advantage, if exploited properly. Peer pressure plays a more important role in many phases of life in the minority community. Therefore, dominance of the market place and the community environment is necessary to successfully increase sales there.126
Corporate philanthropy and targeted promotion drew new advocates to the ranks of tobacco control. Increasingly, critics pointed out that tobacco billboards were concentrated in poorer urban neighborhoods, especially in African-American communities. “Every day when little children are on their way to school they get a message that the way to be happy and get ahead is to have a beer and smoke cigarettes,” Representative John Lewis explained.127 Philip Morris spokesman Steven Weiss quickly countered, “The argument that minorities are more susceptible to our advertising is at best reprehensible and at worst racist.” Walker Merryman of the Tobacco Institute added that claims of targeting were “offensive” and “implied that blacks and other minorities are unable to make their own decisions as to whether or not to smoke, and that they do not have information to make their own decisions.” A 1987 survey in St Louis showed that black neighborhoods had three times as many billboards as did white areas.128
In 1977, an R.J. Reynolds executive, noting that their “business among Blacks is underdeveloped,” suggested that “a project designed to develop a cigarette for Blacks may even be a viable business proposition.”129 With market share of its principal menthol cigarette, Salem, in decline, R.J. Reynolds decided to launch a new brand to compete with Lorillard’s Newport in the black community. The result of these efforts was Uptown, designed specifically to appeal to urban, African-American smokers. R.J. Reynolds planned to promote the brand in packs of both ten and twenty with a gold and black logo. Ads sought to associate Uptown with the “good life” announcing “Uptown. The Place, The Taste.”130
In Philadelphia, where the brand was test-marketed, R.J. Reynolds’s announcement of Uptown touched off a grassroots protest that soon attracted national media attention. The introduction of Uptown, along with its marketing campaign, ignited a vigorous debate about smoking, the tobacco industry, and the African-American community. Ultimately, Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Sullivan publicly called for the withdrawal of Uptown. “At a time when our people desperately need the message of health promotion, Uptown’s message is more disease, more suffering, and more death,” declared Sullivan.131 R .J. Reynolds was forced to scrap the campaign and kill the brand. The company lost some $5 million to $7 million invested in the project and, even more significantly, considerable public credibility. “Much can be said about the Uptown cigarette debacle,” concluded an internal R.J. Reynolds assessment.
However, even an error of this magnitude can represent a positive thing if one can extract an important lesson to guide his future direction. . . . Had Blacks across various strata been asked to respond to this issue (a cigarette targeted specifically at Blacks), undoubtedly researchers would have discovered or been reminded of the fact that an underlying distrust exists among Blacks for institutions, governments, industries and companies controlled by whites. A white-owned tobacco company, targeting a cigarette to Blacks, a product widely accepted as harmful to one’s health, would undoubtedly surface that inherent distrust inevitably described as ‘institutional genocide.’132
In response, the industry eagerly sought to connect attacks on smoking as discriminatory and stigmatizing, forces well understood in the African-American community. But others suggested that targeting of minorities simply represented one more predatory strategy in the marketing of a deadly product. Further, they argued, the impact of funding black charitable institutions had blunted the political response of leaders in the African-American community. “To suggest that we are buying influential members of the community is an outrageous insult to the members of that community,” argued Steven Weiss for Philip Morris. “Any of our funding of programs is no-strings-attached funding.”133 Some African-American leaders reacted defensively to the questions raised about the propri
ety of these gifts. “Implicit in this is the premise that Blacks are so naïve they will be persuaded to smoke by a billboard or an ad,” contended Benjamin Hooks, executive director of NAACP. “This is an insidious form of paternalism. Blacks, like the rest of the populace, can make the choice of whether to smoke or not.”134 “The leaders of these organizations should have been fanatical in their opposition to smoking, which slaughters their membership,” responded Bob Herbert in the New York Times. “Instead they lined up before the tobacco companies with their lips zipped and their hands out for their share of the industry’s hush money.”135
Looming over this debate were statistics showing that African-Americans suffer disproportionately from tobacco-related diseases. By 1990, some 45,000 deaths per year among African-Americans were associated with smoking. Black men reportedly had a 48 percent higher rate of lung cancer than white men and lost twice as many years of life to tobacco-related diseases. According to some studies, African-Americans had significant metabolic differences, perhaps genetic in origin, which led to an inability to detoxify NKK, a particularly toxic carcinogen in tobacco smoke.136
The debate about targeting minorities had the effect of drawing even more critical attention to the larger problem of marketing tobacco in an age of declining rates of smoking. The fall in consumption led companies to devise more aggressive and targeted marketing campaigns. These efforts, in turn, subjected the industry to growing social sanctions and political attack. Because of its tactics, the tobacco industry would come to be singled out as the preeminent example of corporate irresponsibility, greed, and the failure of business ethics.
The tobacco industry worked hard to maintain public acceptance for its customers. “The social acceptability issue will be the central battleground on which our case will be lost or won,” an industry executive explained in 1979.137 The industry worked to restore “first-class citizenship status to smokers.” At the same time, however, it recognized that there were “immediate and awesome obstacles” to this task. As an R.J. Reynolds memo explained:First, it is going to be difficult to restore first-class citizenship status to smokers when an overwhelming percentage of the public believes smoking does indeed cause numerous dread and terminal diseases.
Second, although to a lesser degree, a still significant percentage of the public believes the smoker is harming the health of the nonsmoker in his presence. Public suicide and voluntary spreading of diseases to innocent victims are never going to be socially acceptable or regarded as a characteristic of first-class citizenship.138
“Increasingly,” noted the memo, “the general public and its leaders are of the opinion that smoking is a messy, indulgent, down-scale, non-family oriented, non-fashionable habit—one that is increasingly a smaller part of contemporary lifestyles and increasingly alien to contemporary lifestyles and increasingly alien to contemporary aspirations.”139 As industry executives and consultants agreed, this decline in the social acceptability of the cigarette created a hostile new territory in which to market their product.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the cigarette’s success depended on the industry’s ability to create acceptance for a product that had long been disparaged, disdained, and stigmatized. As cigarette smoking became phenomenally popular, it came to be governed by complex notions of mores and manners. Where and when was it appropriate to smoke? Should men and women smoke in mixed company? Changes in such practices depended on subtle but powerful shifts in the cultural norms and meanings of cigarette use.
The American tobacco industry had worked persistently through its advertising and marketing to control these meanings so as to make smoking an appropriate public activity. The industry read and exploited the rise of a consumer culture, the standardization of products, and mass production to ensure that cigarettes and modern mores went hand-in-hand. But now, with the culture shifting the other way, it was critical to the industry that social conventions against public smoking be overturned. In 1926, Chesterfield, then the nation’s number one cigarette, ran its famous advertisement in which a woman asks a man smoking nearby to “Blow Some My Way.” From the perspective of the late twentieth century, this ad is a strikingly ironic indication of the radical shift in the nature of smoking and risk. At that time, it was still considered inappropriate to show women smoking in advertisements. But the ad clearly suggested the sexual allure of smoke, its intimacy, and its fragrance. The very idea of “blow some my way,” by the 1990s, was associated with antagonism, risk, and environmental taint. Despite the companies’ obvious ability to defend their political interests, especially at the state and federal levels, they were losing the cultural battle. And as their own analyses pointedly demonstrated, losses in the “culture wars” of tobacco could have dire implications for the industry’s ongoing regulatory, business, and legal vulnerabilities.
Many observers in the media and among tobacco interests predicted a war between smokers and nonsmokers, but it never happened. As public restrictions on smoking became more aggressive in the 1980s and early 1990s, compliance remained remarkably high despite little or no official enforcement. Whether it was McDonald’s going smoke-free, federal bans on airline smoking, or antismoking policies in corporate offices, regulations were generally respected. The thousands of smoking regulations enacted during this period were only a step ahead of changing social conventions, and they did not cause conflict so much as help legitimate the new norms.140
Thus, in the decades following the first surgeon general’s report, both the smoker and the cigarette were transformed. What was fragrant became foul; what was attractive became repulsive; a public behavior became virtually private. The identification of the health risks of passive smoke was the main force behind this radical change. American smokers became pariahs in a powerful moral tale of risk and responsibility—objects of scorn and hostility clustered around the doorways of buildings. A cultural climate inhospitable to smoking had changed the very experience. Many smokers, given the limited and hostile space in which they could still smoke, gave it up.141 The pleasure of smoking had proved to be historically contingent.
The tobacco companies observed these changes—and the corresponding regulations—with a mixture of anxiety, outrage, and denial. The cigarette would survive the assault, but the companies would never again unilaterally shape the public perception of their product. After nearly a century, they lost control of the cigarette’s image. But this cultural reconfiguration of the smoker was something of a double-edged sword. In one important sense, it played into industry hands by asserting the individual agency and moral irresponsibility of the smoker, exonerating the industry from culpability. It often had the effect of making the smoker the object of condemnation, rather than the industry that had produced the cigarette. If the smoker was pariah, or criminal, it was easy to forget that it was the smoker who was the victim, inevitably suffering the double jeopardy of inhaling both active and passive smoke.
IV
LAW
In the past, we at R&D have said that we’re not in the cigarette business, we’re in the smoke business. It might be more pointed to observe that the cigarette is the vehicle of smoke, smoke is the vehicle of nicotine and nicotine is the agent of a pleasurable body response. . . . We are not suggesting that the effect of nicotine is responsible for the initiation of the habit. To the contrary. The first cigarette is a noxious experience. . . . To account for the fact that the beginning smoker will tolerate the unpleasantness we must invoke a psychosocial motive. Smoking a cigarette for the beginner is a symbolic act. The smoker is telling the world, “This is the kind of person I am.” Surely, that there are many variations of the theme, “I am no longer my mother’s child, I’m tough, I am an adventuress, I’m not square.” Whatever the individual intent, the act of smoking remains a symbolic declaration of personal identity. . . . As the force from the psychological symbolism subsides, the pharmacological effect takes over to sustain the habit, augmented by the secondary gratifications.1
&
nbsp; HELMUT WAKEHAM, 1969
VICE PRESIDENT OF RESEARCH AND
DEVELOPMENT, PHILIP MORRIS
Thus a tobacco product is, in essence, a vehicle for the delivery of nicotine, designed to deliver the nicotine in a generally acceptable and attractive form. Our industry is then based upon design, manufacture and sales of attractive dosage forms of nicotine which have more overall value, tangible or intangible, to the consumer than those of our competitors.2
CLAUDE TEAGUE, 1972
RESEARCH SCIENTIST, R.J. REYNOLDS
CHAPTER 10
Nicotine Is the Product
IN THE SPRING OF 1983, Marc Edell was an attorney in search of a client. He had come to the conclusion that the tobacco industry, after years of virtual immunity from liability, might now be vulnerable. Having previously defended an asbestos company in health litigation, he had grown well acquainted with pulmonary pathology and the risks of smoking. It was not uncommon in asbestos litigation for defendants to assert that injuries attributed to workplace risk had actually been caused by smoking. Edell reasoned that cigarettes represented the preeminent product of high risk with little or no compensatory benefit, making the tobacco industry uniquely vulnerable to liability. A New York chest surgeon referred him to fifty-eight-year-old Rose Cipollone of Little Ferry, New Jersey, who was then undergoing treatment for lung cancer. Edell filed a complaint on her behalf against four of the major tobacco companies on August 1, 1983.3
Since 1954, literally hundreds of similar cases had been brought, without a single victory for plaintiffs. Typically taken on a contingency basis by the plaintiff’s attorneys, who would be compensated only should they recover damages, these cases had left plaintiffs without compensation and the attorneys with nothing but thousands of dollars in unremunerated legal hours and other court costs. A principal strategy of the companies had been to undertake legal maneuvers to maximize these costs. Edell had nonetheless persuaded his law firm, Porzio, Bromberg & Newman, to back the initiative. The obstacles to a successful case were high, but so were the payoffs if he should succeed. The culture of liability litigation had come to accept such calculations.4