The Cigarette Papers: Big Tobacco’s 40-Year Cover-Up | History for Sleep with Rain Sounds

0:00 [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Sleepless History. [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we are going to drift back through the middle of the 20th century into laboratories and hotel ballrooms, law offices and congressional hearing rooms to follow one of the longest and most carefully maintained secrets in modern history. [SPEAKER_00]: This is the story of the cigarette papers.

0:22 [SPEAKER_00]: It is the story of how the tobacco industry came to understand. [SPEAKER_00]: in its own private files that cigarettes caused cancer and that nicotine was addictive and how it chose for decades to say something very different in public. [SPEAKER_00]: It is a story about science, about doubt, about lawyers, and paralegals, and a mysterious cardboard box.

0:49 [SPEAKER_00]: And in the end, it is a story about how the truth found its way out. [SPEAKER_00]: Before we begin, if you enjoy these long journeys through history, consider following or subscribing to the channel, and leave a comment letting me know where you are listening from tonight, or what story you would like to fall asleep to next.

1:14 [SPEAKER_00]: It genuinely helps the show grow, and I read every one of them. [SPEAKER_00]: Lastly, I wanted to say that sleepless history is independent, with no network behind it. [SPEAKER_00]: just careful research and quiet evenings. [SPEAKER_00]: If these stories have become part of your nightly routine, you can support the show on Patreon linked in the show notes.

1:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Early access, add free listening and your favorite episodes with different or no background audio are waiting for you there. [SPEAKER_00]: We still have a few spaces open for our founding members, and I'd love to see you there. [SPEAKER_00]: If that's not for you right now, that's okay.

1:54 [SPEAKER_00]: Simply commenting or following the show helps just as much. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, let's step back into the year 1950. [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 1, The Science Arrives. [SPEAKER_00]: In the middle of the 20th century, the cigarette was everywhere. [SPEAKER_00]: It was in the hands of film stars on the silver screen, glowing softly in the dark of the movie house.

2:22 [SPEAKER_00]: It was in the mouths of soldiers coming home from the Second World War. [SPEAKER_00]: Many of whom had been handed free cigarettes as part of their rations. [SPEAKER_00]: It sat in ash trays on office desks, in hospital waiting rooms, on the dashboards of new automobiles, and on the bedside tables of doctors themselves.

2:44 [SPEAKER_00]: By the early 1950s, roughly half of all American men's smoked, and the number of women who smoked was climbing every year, cigarettes were not seen as a vice, so much as a part [SPEAKER_00]: as natural as a cup of coffee in the morning, or a newspaper folded under the arm. [SPEAKER_00]: The cigarette, as we know it, was still a fairly young invention.

3:10 [SPEAKER_00]: For most of the 19th century, Tobacco had been chewed or smoked in pipes or rolled into cigars. [SPEAKER_00]: The mass produced cigarette arrived with machines like the one patented by James Bonzack in the 1880s, which could roll many thousands of cigarettes in a single day. [SPEAKER_00]: A businessman named James Buchanan Duke seized upon the machine and built the American tobacco company into a vast empire.

3:41 [SPEAKER_00]: the machine made cigarette was cheap, mild, and easy to inhale deeply. [SPEAKER_00]: That last quality turned out to matter a great deal, and something strange had been happening in the hospitals of the Western world. [SPEAKER_00]: A disease that had once been so rare that medical students might be summoned to see a single case, as a curiosity they might never encounter again, was becoming common.

4:08 [SPEAKER_00]: That disease [SPEAKER_00]: At the turn of the 20th century, it was considered a medical oddity. [SPEAKER_00]: By the 1930s and 1940s, pathologists and surgeons on both sides of the Atlantic were seeing it again and again. [SPEAKER_00]: In Britain, deaths from lung cancer had risen many times over in only a few decades.

4:33 [SPEAKER_00]: In the United States, the curve was climbing just as steeply. [SPEAKER_00]: Doctors argued about the cause. [SPEAKER_00]: Some suggested it was the dust and tar from newly paved roads. [SPEAKER_00]: Some blamed the exhaust of automobiles, or industrial pollution, or the lingering effects of the influenza pandemic of 1918, or the poison gas that soldiers had breathed in the trenches of the first world war.

5:03 [SPEAKER_00]: Some simply thought that better X-ray machines and better diagnosis were finding cases that had always been there. [SPEAKER_00]: A few voices here and there had pointed toward Tobacco. [SPEAKER_00]: A German physician named Fritz Lincoln had written about the connection in the 1920s and 30s and German researchers had produced early statistical studies.

5:28 [SPEAKER_00]: but that work was tangled up in the politics of the time and largely overlooked in the English speaking world after the war. [SPEAKER_00]: Then, in the year 1950, the evidence arrived all at once, like a tide coming in. [SPEAKER_00]: The first great wave came from St. Louis, Missouri, a young medical student [SPEAKER_00]: had been born in Germany and had come to the United States as a teenager in the 1930s.

6:01 [SPEAKER_00]: During a summer of study a few years after the war, he had watched an autopsy of a man who had died of lung cancer and he had learned that the man had been a heavy smoker for most of his life. [SPEAKER_00]: the observation stayed with him. [SPEAKER_00]: When he arrived at Washington University in St. Louis, winter approached one of the most famous surgeons in the country, a man named Evart's Graham.

6:24 [SPEAKER_00]: Evart's Graham was a giant in his field. [SPEAKER_00]: In 1933, he had performed the first successful removal of an entire lung to treat cancer. [SPEAKER_00]: He was a serious, formidable man, and he was a smoker. [SPEAKER_00]: When the young student came to him with the idea that cigarettes might be causing lung cancer, Graham was skeptical.

6:48 [SPEAKER_00]: He had a theory of his own, after all, he pointed out, nylon stockings had become popular at about the same time as cigarettes, and nobody was suggesting nylon stockings caused cancer, but Graham was a scientist, and he agreed to let the student pursue the question. [SPEAKER_00]: He even allowed Winder access to his patients.

7:18 [SPEAKER_00]: They asked people who had lung cancer about their smoking habits, and they asked the same questions of people who were in the hospital for other reasons. [SPEAKER_00]: The results were striking. [SPEAKER_00]: Among the men with the most common type of lung cancer, almost none were non-smokers.

7:35 [SPEAKER_00]: The overwhelming majority had smoked heavily for many years. [SPEAKER_00]: In May of 1950, Winder and Graham published their findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association. [SPEAKER_00]: in a paper describing 684 confirmed cases. [SPEAKER_00]: Their conclusion was careful but clear.

7:58 [SPEAKER_00]: Excessive and prolonged use of tobacco, especially cigarettes, seem to be an important factor in causing lung cancer. [SPEAKER_00]: The data was so persuasive that it changed Evart's Graham himself. [SPEAKER_00]: He quit smoking, [SPEAKER_00]: and that would matter later in this story. [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, two British researchers had been working on the very same question without knowing much about what was happening in St. Louis.

8:30 [SPEAKER_00]: Their names were Richard Dole and Austin Bradford Hill. [SPEAKER_00]: Austin Bradford Hill was a statistician, one of the great architects of modern medical research. [SPEAKER_00]: He had helped develop the randomized controlled trial, the method that is still used today to test whether a new medicine truly works.

8:51 [SPEAKER_00]: Richard Dole was a younger physician with a sharp, methodical mind. [SPEAKER_00]: The medical research council in Britain had asked them to look into the alarming rise in lung cancer. [SPEAKER_00]: Dol, by his own later account, rather expected the culprit to be the tar on the roads, or the fumes of motor cars.

9:12 [SPEAKER_00]: He was a smoker too. [SPEAKER_00]: Dol and Hill designed a study using hospitals across London. [SPEAKER_00]: They interviewed patients who had lung cancer. [SPEAKER_00]: And for each one, they found a comparison patient of the same sex and similar age who was in the hospital for some other illness.

9:32 [SPEAKER_00]: They asked about everything they could think of, where people lived, what work they did, how they heated their homes, and among many other things, how much they smoked. [SPEAKER_00]: When the answers came back, [SPEAKER_00]: One factor stood out above all the others, sharp and unmistakable.

9:51 [SPEAKER_00]: The more a person smoked, the greater the chance that they had lung cancer. [SPEAKER_00]: Among the men nearly every lung cancer patient was a smoker. [SPEAKER_00]: The relationship grew stronger with every additional cigarette smoked per day. [SPEAKER_00]: In September of 1950, Dolan Hill published their preliminary findings in the British Medical Journal, Dol gave up cigarettes, part way through the study.

10:18 [SPEAKER_00]: Other researchers published similar work that same year. [SPEAKER_00]: One study after another, from different cities using different patients kept finding the same pattern. [SPEAKER_00]: A scientist might dismiss one study as a fluke. [SPEAKER_00]: But there was a limitation to all of this early research, and the tobacco companies would lean on it heavily in the years to come.

10:46 [SPEAKER_00]: These first studies looked backward. [SPEAKER_00]: They started with sick people and asked about their habits. [SPEAKER_00]: Critics could argue that perhaps patients misremembered, or perhaps the people asking the questions had unconsciously influenced the answers. [SPEAKER_00]: they would look forward.

11:09 [SPEAKER_00]: In 1951, Dolan Hill wrote to every doctor registered in the United Kingdom and asked them a few simple questions about their smoking habits. [SPEAKER_00]: some 40,000 doctors replied. [SPEAKER_00]: Then the researchers simply waited and watched and recorded how and when these doctors died.

11:31 [SPEAKER_00]: Doctors were an ideal group to study. [SPEAKER_00]: They were easy to keep track of. [SPEAKER_00]: Their causes of death were carefully recorded. [SPEAKER_00]: and nobody could claim they were especially ignorant or careless people. [SPEAKER_00]: Within only a few years, the pattern was already visible.

11:50 [SPEAKER_00]: By 1954, Dolan Hill reported that the doctors who smoked were dying of lung cancer at far higher rates than those who did not. [SPEAKER_00]: And the risk climbed steadily with the amount smoked. [SPEAKER_00]: The British doctors' study would go on for half a century. [SPEAKER_00]: and it would become one of the most important studies in the history of medicine.

12:12 [SPEAKER_00]: In the United States, a similar forward-looking project was underway. [SPEAKER_00]: Two researchers working with the American Cancer Society Edward Kailahamand and Daniel Horn. [SPEAKER_00]: recruited thousands of volunteers who in turn enrolled close to 200,000 men, Hammond himself had been a heavy smoker.

12:34 [SPEAKER_00]: When their early results were presented in June of 1954, they showed that the men who smoked cigarettes had a much higher death rate overall, and especially from lung cancer and heart disease. [SPEAKER_00]: Hammond, too, gave up cigarettes. [SPEAKER_00]: running through these years. [SPEAKER_00]: Again and again, the researchers who uncovered the danger were smokers themselves, and again and again, the evidence changed their own behavior before it changed the world.

13:07 [SPEAKER_00]: Now, statistics can be persuasive to scientists, but they are abstract. [SPEAKER_00]: Numbers in a journal do not always frighten the public. [SPEAKER_00]: What finally captured the imagination of ordinary people was something much more vivid and it came once again from Ernst Winder. [SPEAKER_00]: By the early 1950s, Winder had moved to the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York.

13:33 [SPEAKER_00]: Together with Evart's Graham and a researcher named Adel Croninger, he designed an experiment to show in a living animal that the substances in cigarette smoke could cause cancer. [SPEAKER_00]: They built a smoking machine, a contraption that drew cigarette smoke through a chamber the way a smoke would, and collected the dark sticky residue that condensed out of it.

13:57 [SPEAKER_00]: This was cigarette tar. [SPEAKER_00]: They then painted that tar onto the shaved backs of mice, again and again over many months. [SPEAKER_00]: Slowly, tumours appeared, mice that had been painted with tobacco tar developed skin cancers, and a large share of the mice that lived long enough to be fully studied, close to half of them in the highest dose group, grew cancerous growths.

14:27 [SPEAKER_00]: the mice that had not been painted did not. [SPEAKER_00]: The paper was published in the journal Cancer Research in December of 1953, and this time the press seized on it. [SPEAKER_00]: There were photographs. [SPEAKER_00]: there were images of mice with tumors on their backs. [SPEAKER_00]: Magazines and newspapers across the country carried the story.

14:49 [SPEAKER_00]: The previous winter, Reeders digested one of the most widely read magazines in America had already run an article with a memorable title, cancer by the carton. [SPEAKER_00]: Now there was a picture to go with the words. [SPEAKER_00]: The effect was immediate. [SPEAKER_00]: cigarette sales dipped, tobacco stocks fell.

15:09 [SPEAKER_00]: For the first time, the people running the great tobacco companies faced a threat that seemed truly existential. [SPEAKER_00]: If the public came to believe that their product caused a fatal disease. [SPEAKER_00]: the entire business might collapse, and so in December of 1953, the heads of America's largest tobacco companies came together in New York City.

15:34 [SPEAKER_00]: The meeting was called by Paul Hahn, the president of the American tobacco company, the maker of Lucky Strike. [SPEAKER_00]: He sent invitations to his rivals, men who ordinarily [SPEAKER_00]: On the 15th of December, they gathered at the Plaza Hotel, the grand old building that overlooks the southern edge of Central Park.

16:00 [SPEAKER_00]: Snow may have been falling outside. [SPEAKER_00]: Inside, there were the leaders of Reynolds, the maker of camel cigarettes, and of Philip Morris, of Benson and hedges, of Brown and Williams, and of the United States tobacco company. [SPEAKER_00]: Only one major firm, Ligit and Myers, the maker of Chesterfield, declined to fully join the effort at first.

16:24 [SPEAKER_00]: These were men who did not trust one another. [SPEAKER_00]: Their companies spent four tunes trying to steal each other's customers. [SPEAKER_00]: But on this question, [SPEAKER_00]: They understood that they would rise or fall together. [SPEAKER_00]: If cigarettes were proven deadly, it would not matter whose brand was smoother or whose advertising was cleverer.

16:47 [SPEAKER_00]: They needed help and they turned to a public relations firm. [SPEAKER_00]: Its name was Hill and Nolton, and its founder John Hill was one of the most respected figures in the young profession of public relations. [SPEAKER_00]: His firm had represented the steel industry and other powerful clients.

17:06 [SPEAKER_00]: He'll met with the executives, listened to their worries, and his firm began to sketch out a plan. [SPEAKER_00]: The plan was subtle, and in its own way, brilliant. [SPEAKER_00]: The companies would not simply deny the science. [SPEAKER_00]: A flat denial might sound defensive, and it might be quickly disproven.

17:27 [SPEAKER_00]: Instead, they would present themselves as concerned, responsible partners in the search for truth. [SPEAKER_00]: They would say that the question was still open. [SPEAKER_00]: They would say that more research was needed. [SPEAKER_00]: They would fund that research themselves through a new organization.

17:46 [SPEAKER_00]: that would appear independent and scientific. [SPEAKER_00]: And in doing all of this, they would plant the most important seed of all, the idea that the case against cigarettes was not yet proven, that reasonable scientists disagreed and that smokers did not need to make any sudden decisions.

18:08 [SPEAKER_00]: Notes from the planning later revealed how the public relations men thought about the situation. [SPEAKER_00]: They worried that the scientific evidence was being widely accepted and they aimed to reassure the public. [SPEAKER_00]: They believed the word research should appear prominently in the name of the new organization.

18:27 [SPEAKER_00]: They believed the effort should be framed as being in the public interest rather than in the interest of the industry. [SPEAKER_00]: On 4th January, 1954, just a few weeks after the meeting at the plaza. [SPEAKER_00]: the plan went public. [SPEAKER_00]: Readers opening their morning newspapers found a full-page advertisement with a plane sober headline.

18:51 [SPEAKER_00]: It was called a Frank statement to cigarette smokers. [SPEAKER_00]: It appeared in more than 400 newspapers across the United States, in cities large and small, and it reached an audience estimated in the tens of millions. [SPEAKER_00]: The Frank statement was signed by the Presidents of the major tobacco companies, and by growers organizations and warehouse associations.

19:18 [SPEAKER_00]: its tone was calm, reasonable, even warm. [SPEAKER_00]: It acknowledged that recent reports had suggested a link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer in mice. [SPEAKER_00]: But it went on to say that these experiments were not conclusive, that distinguished authorities disagreed and that there was no proof that cigarette smoking was one of the causes.

19:43 [SPEAKER_00]: It pointed out accurately enough that people had been smoking for centuries and that every time some new accusation had been made against tobacco, it had been abandoned for lack of evidence. [SPEAKER_00]: Then came the promises. [SPEAKER_00]: The companies declared that they accepted an interest in people's health as a basic responsibility.

20:06 [SPEAKER_00]: Paramount to every other consideration in their business. [SPEAKER_00]: They stated plainly that they believed their products were not injurious to health, and they pledged to cooperate closely with those whose task it was to safeguard public health. [SPEAKER_00]: To prove their sincerity, they announced the creation of a new organization.

20:27 [SPEAKER_00]: the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, which would support research into all phases of Tobacco use and health. [SPEAKER_00]: The research would be directed, they said, by a scientist of unimpeachable integrity and national repute. [SPEAKER_00]: Read on its own, the Frank Statement sounds almost admirable.

20:48 [SPEAKER_00]: It sounds like the voice of an industry taking a serious concern seriously. [SPEAKER_00]: That was exactly [SPEAKER_00]: When the company's internal papers came to light, the Frank statement would be read in a very different way as the opening move in a campaign that would last for more than 40 years.

21:08 [SPEAKER_00]: The scientist chosen to lead the research was Clarence Cook Little. [SPEAKER_00]: He was a genuinely distinguished figure, a geneticist who had studied cancer in mice, a former president of the University of Michigan and of the University of Maine, [SPEAKER_00]: that would become the American Cancer Society.

21:30 [SPEAKER_00]: He had founded a famous laboratory in Bar Harbor main, which bred strains of mice for research around the world. [SPEAKER_00]: His name, lent, the new committee, enormous credibility. [SPEAKER_00]: But little held a particular scientific view that suited the industry well. [SPEAKER_00]: He believed that cancer was largely a matter of genetics, of inherited susceptibility, rather than of outside causes like smoke.

21:58 [SPEAKER_00]: Throughout his long tenure at the committee, he would insist again and again that the case against cigarettes was unproven, that the statistics showed only associations, and that much more research was needed into the many complex factors that might cause cancer. [SPEAKER_00]: The Tobacco Industry Research Committee set up its offices in the Empire State Building.

22:24 [SPEAKER_00]: Hill and Nolton [SPEAKER_00]: handled much of its early operation and the line between the research committee and the public relations campaign was thin from the very beginning. [SPEAKER_00]: In the spring of 1954, the committee sent out a booklet titled a scientific perspective on the cigarette controversy.

22:45 [SPEAKER_00]: It gathered statements from doctors and researchers who doubted the link between smoking and cancer. [SPEAKER_00]: and it was mailed to more than 170,000 physicians, journalists, members of Congress, and other people of influence. [SPEAKER_00]: The committee did fund real research, and some of it was legitimate laboratory science.

23:09 [SPEAKER_00]: But very little of it was aimed directly at the most important question, where the cigarettes caused cancer in human beings. [SPEAKER_00]: Much of the money went to broad studies of the basic biology, of cancer, of genetics, of immunology, of stress. [SPEAKER_00]: These were respectable fields.

23:31 [SPEAKER_00]: They were also conveniently fields that would never produce a clear answer about cigarettes. [SPEAKER_00]: and each grant allowed the industry to say truthfully that it was spending millions of dollars on research into smoking and health. [SPEAKER_00]: The public for the most part was reassured.

23:54 [SPEAKER_00]: After the dip in sales during the scare of 1953, cigarette consumption recovered and began to climb again. [SPEAKER_00]: The company's also discovered a powerful new tool, the filter. [SPEAKER_00]: Filter cigarettes had existed before, but now they were marketed aggressively as a safer way to smoke.

24:16 [SPEAKER_00]: Brands advertise their filters as scientific breakthroughs with tiny fibers and clever designs that supposedly trapped the harmful parts of the smoke. [SPEAKER_00]: One brand, Kent, promoted its micronite filter as offering the greatest health protection in cigarette history. [SPEAKER_00]: Years later, it would emerge that in the early versions of that filter, the material used had included a form of asbestos.

24:43 [SPEAKER_00]: Sales of filter cigarettes sawed through the late 1950s. [SPEAKER_00]: And so, by the middle of the 1950s, a curious situation had settled into place. [SPEAKER_00]: In the medical journals, the evidence was growing stronger every year. [SPEAKER_00]: Study after study, in country after country, pointed in the same direction.

25:07 [SPEAKER_00]: But in the newspapers, in the advertisements, and in the minds of most smokers, the questions seem to remain open. [SPEAKER_00]: There was a controversy people were told. [SPEAKER_00]: Scientists disagreed. [SPEAKER_00]: The research was continuing. [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody needed to worry just yet.

25:24 [SPEAKER_00]: In 1957, Evart's Graham [SPEAKER_00]: The great surgeon who had once doubted his young student's idea, who had then helped to prove it, and who had quit smoking because of what he found, was himself diagnosed with lung cancer. [SPEAKER_00]: He had stopped smoking several years earlier, but decades of cigarettes had already done their work.

25:47 [SPEAKER_00]: In a letter to an old friend, a fellow surgeon, he wrote with sorrow about the disease and he noted that he hoped his friend had stopped smoking, he died in March of that year. [SPEAKER_00]: The science had arrived, the industry had answered, and behind the closed doors of the tobacco companies.

26:08 [SPEAKER_00]: in their laboratories and their legal departments, another kind of knowledge was beginning to take shape, one that would stay hidden for a very long time. [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 2 Knowing in private. [SPEAKER_00]: Let's leave the newspapers and the public statements behind for a while and walk into the places where the public was never invited.

26:34 [SPEAKER_00]: Into the research laboratories of the tobacco companies with their gleaming glassware and their smoking machines. [SPEAKER_00]: Into the offices of the company lawyers where memos were written and filed and marked confidential. [SPEAKER_00]: Into the meeting rooms, [SPEAKER_00]: where scientists reported their findings to the men who ran the business.

26:56 [SPEAKER_00]: Here, in the years after the Frank statement, a different conversation was taking place. [SPEAKER_00]: It was more frank, in fact. [SPEAKER_00]: than anything the industry ever set allowed, the tobacco companies employed chemists and good ones. [SPEAKER_00]: These scientists had the same journals as everyone else.

27:17 [SPEAKER_00]: They read the work of Dol and Hill of Winder and Graham of Hammond and Horn, and they did their own studies analyzing what was actually in the smoke rising from the tip of a burning cigarette. [SPEAKER_00]: what they found was sobering, cigarette smoke turned out to be an extraordinarily complex mixture containing thousands of different chemical compounds.

27:44 [SPEAKER_00]: Among them were substances already known to cause cancer in laboratory animals. [SPEAKER_00]: There were polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, [SPEAKER_00]: and in workers who handled coal tar. [SPEAKER_00]: There were nitrosamines, which would later be recognized as powerful carcinogens, specific to tobacco.

28:13 [SPEAKER_00]: There was a long list of other irritants and toxins. [SPEAKER_00]: As early as 1953, a chemist at Reynolds named Claude Teague wrote an internal survey of the cancer [SPEAKER_00]: He noted that studies had identified compounds into back-oproducts with known carcinogenic activity. [SPEAKER_00]: It was a dry, technical document.

28:36 [SPEAKER_00]: The sort of thing a careful company scientist would write. [SPEAKER_00]: It was also never shared with the public. [SPEAKER_00]: Over the following years, consultants hired by the companies kept reaching similar conclusions. [SPEAKER_00]: In the early 1960s, the research firm Arthur D. Littel, working for Liggid and Myers.

28:55 [SPEAKER_00]: prepared reports that listed among the biologically active materials in cigarette smoke substances that were cancer-causing and cancer-promoting. [SPEAKER_00]: Inside the industry, the existence of car synergians in smoke was simply understood as a technical fact. [SPEAKER_00]: The question for company scientists was not whether these substances were there, but whether they could be reduced [SPEAKER_00]: Several companies quietly pursued the dream of a safer cigarette, but a safer cigarette posed a terrible dilemma.

29:32 [SPEAKER_00]: To market a cigarette a safer would be to admit that ordinary cigarettes were dangerous, and that admission the lawyers understood. [SPEAKER_00]: could open the door to lawsuits beyond counting. [SPEAKER_00]: Then there was the matter of nicotine. [SPEAKER_00]: nicotine is the substance that gives tobacco its kick.

29:53 [SPEAKER_00]: It is a natural compound produced by the tobacco plant, likely as a defense against insects. [SPEAKER_00]: In the human body, it acts quickly on the brain. [SPEAKER_00]: When a smoker inhales, nicotine travels from the lungs into the bloodstream and reaches the brain within seconds. [SPEAKER_00]: Faster than if it had been injected into a vein in the arm.

30:16 [SPEAKER_00]: There it binds to receptors and triggers [SPEAKER_00]: which is associated with feelings of reward and pleasure. [SPEAKER_00]: Nicotine can both calm and stimulate. [SPEAKER_00]: It can sharpen attention, ease tension and dull appetite. [SPEAKER_00]: And when the nicotine wears off, the smoke begins to feel restless, irritable, and anxious, until the next cigarette.

30:44 [SPEAKER_00]: Today, we have a simple word for this. [SPEAKER_00]: We call it addiction. [SPEAKER_00]: But in the 1950s, [SPEAKER_00]: and early 1960s, the word was used more narrowly, mostly for drugs like heroin and morphine that produced dramatic withdrawal and were associated with intoxication. [SPEAKER_00]: Tobacco, it was said in public, was merely a habit.

31:09 [SPEAKER_00]: Inside the industry, the scientists were not so sure, and some of the most important work on this question was done not in the United States, but in Europe, under the direction of the British American tobacco company known as B-A-T. [SPEAKER_00]: which was the parent company of Brown and Williamson, the American firm based in Louisville, Kentucky.

31:34 [SPEAKER_00]: In the early 1960s, B-A-T, commissioned research from the Batell Memorial Institute, a respected scientific research organization. [SPEAKER_00]: Some of this work took place at a Batell laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, [SPEAKER_00]: The studies look closely at how nicotine affected the body and especially how it affected the body's response to stress.

31:59 [SPEAKER_00]: The research projects carried playful code names. [SPEAKER_00]: One of them was known as hippo. [SPEAKER_00]: The scientists found that nicotine acted on the body's hormonal stress systems in complex ways and they explored how the body came to depend on it. [SPEAKER_00]: The conclusions were striking enough that senior figures at B-A-T began to speak about nicotine in private in terms that would have been unthinkable in public.

32:28 [SPEAKER_00]: One of the company's top scientific advisers, Sir Charles Ellis, told a gathering of colleagues in the early 1960s. [SPEAKER_00]: that smoking was a habit of addiction and that nicotine was a very fine drug. [SPEAKER_00]: In the internal discussions, the cigarette was increasingly understood not as a simple consumer product like a candy bar.

32:51 [SPEAKER_00]: but as a delivery system for a drug that people needed. [SPEAKER_00]: All of this flowed back across the Atlantic to Louisville, to the headquarters of Brown and Williamson. [SPEAKER_00]: And there, in the summer of 1963, the company's general council sat down to put his thoughts in writing.

33:12 [SPEAKER_00]: His name was Addison Yee-man. [SPEAKER_00]: He was the company's top lawyer, a thoughtful man who had absorbed the Batell research and the growing scientific consensus. [SPEAKER_00]: In July of 1963, he wrote a memorandum laying out what he believed the company should do in the face of the coming storm.

33:31 [SPEAKER_00]: It was a confidential document, intended only for a small circle of executives and in it, [SPEAKER_00]: He wrote a sentence that would later become one of the most quoted lines in the entire history of the tobacco industry. [SPEAKER_00]: Nicotine is addictive, he wrote. [SPEAKER_00]: We are then in the business of selling nicotine and addictive drug.

33:54 [SPEAKER_00]: He went on to describe nicotine as effective in the release of stress mechanisms. [SPEAKER_00]: And in the same memo, he acknowledged the possibility that cigarettes caused or predisposed smokers to lung cancer and to heart disease and other illnesses. [SPEAKER_00]: He suggested that the company might do better to accept certain of the facts and look for ways to make a less harmful product rather than simply denying everything.

34:23 [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth pausing on that phrase for a moment. [SPEAKER_00]: We are then in the business of selling nicotine. [SPEAKER_00]: Here was the company's own chief lawyer in the year 1963 saying in plain words what the industry would publicly deny for another 30 years. [SPEAKER_00]: The memo was filed away.

34:46 [SPEAKER_00]: The Candid Strategy at Hintedat was never adopted and the public never saw it until a box of photocopies arrived at a university office in San Francisco in the spring of 1994. [SPEAKER_00]: The summer that Yaman wrote his memo was a tense time for the industry because the federal government had finally decided to weigh in.

35:11 [SPEAKER_00]: In the early 1960s, [SPEAKER_00]: pressure had been growing on the United States government to take a formal position on smoking. [SPEAKER_00]: In Britain, the Royal College of Physicians had issued a report in 1962, declaring that smoking caused lung cancer and other diseases. [SPEAKER_00]: Leading American Health Organizations, including the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association and others, [SPEAKER_00]: urged President John Fitzgerald Kennedy to act.

35:45 [SPEAKER_00]: In 1962, the surgeon general of the United States, a thoughtful physician named Luther Terry, announced that he would assemble an expert committee to review all of the available evidence on smoking and health. [SPEAKER_00]: Terry went about this with great care. [SPEAKER_00]: He knew that the conclusions would be attacked.

36:07 [SPEAKER_00]: and so he designed the committee to be beyond reproach. [SPEAKER_00]: He compiled a list of distinguished scientists and he allowed the tobacco industry along with health organizations and other groups to review the list and strike out anyone they considered biased. [SPEAKER_00]: Anyone who had already taken a public position on smoking was excluded.

36:29 [SPEAKER_00]: In the end, the committee consisted of 10 men drawn from medicine, chemistry, statistics, and other fields. [SPEAKER_00]: Half of them were smokers. [SPEAKER_00]: The committee met over more than a year, mostly at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland. [SPEAKER_00]: They reviewed more than 7,000 scientific articles.

36:52 [SPEAKER_00]: They examined the laboratory studies, the statistical studies, the clinical observations, and the arguments of the skeptics. [SPEAKER_00]: Brown and Williamson, for its part, had the [SPEAKER_00]: about whether to share it with the Surgeon General's Committee. [SPEAKER_00]: In the end, the company did not.

37:16 [SPEAKER_00]: The report was released on a Saturday, the 11th of January, 1964. [SPEAKER_00]: The timing was deliberate. [SPEAKER_00]: On a Saturday, the stock markets were closed, so the news would not cause a sudden panic on Wall Street, and the Sunday newspapers would have time to digest it. [SPEAKER_00]: The release took place at the State Department in a large auditorium with the doors locked behind the assembled reporters so that nobody could slip out to file a story before the briefing was over.

37:47 [SPEAKER_00]: Copies of the report were handed out and the journalists were given time to read. [SPEAKER_00]: The report ran to nearly 400 pages and its central conclusion was stated without hedging. [SPEAKER_00]: cigarette smoking was causally related to lung cancer in men. [SPEAKER_00]: The magnitude of the effect of cigarette smoking far outweighed all other factors.

38:12 [SPEAKER_00]: The data for women the committee said pointed in the same direction, though they were less extensive because fewer women had smoked heavily for long enough. [SPEAKER_00]: The report also linked smoking to chronic bronchitis to cancer of the larynx and to other illnesses and it noted that smokers had higher death rates overall.

38:34 [SPEAKER_00]: Cigarette smoking, it concluded, was a health hazard of sufficient importance to warrant appropriate remedial action. [SPEAKER_00]: It was front-page news across the country and around the world. [SPEAKER_00]: but there was one place where the report was cautious and that tobacco companies took note of it.

38:59 [SPEAKER_00]: The committee did not call smoking an addiction. [SPEAKER_00]: At the time, the World Health Organization drew a distinction between addiction and what it called habituation. [SPEAKER_00]: Addiction was reserved for drugs that caused intoxication that people craved desperately and that harmed society.

39:21 [SPEAKER_00]: habituation described a weaker, more psychological dependence. [SPEAKER_00]: By those definitions, the committee decided that tobacco use should be classed as habituation. [SPEAKER_00]: That language would be repeated for years by the industry, as proof that smoking was a free choice made by free people who could stop any time they wished.

39:44 [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, its own lawyer had already written that it was selling an addictive drug. [SPEAKER_00]: The industry's public response to the Surgeon General's report was measured and familiar. [SPEAKER_00]: It said the report was important, but that it did not settle the matter. [SPEAKER_00]: It said that more research was needed.

40:04 [SPEAKER_00]: It said, in effect, that the controversy continued. [SPEAKER_00]: in private, executives understood the stakes very clearly. [SPEAKER_00]: The question was no longer how to win the scientific argument. [SPEAKER_00]: It was how to keep the argument from ever being considered finished. [SPEAKER_00]: Congress responded to the report the following year.

40:26 [SPEAKER_00]: In 1965, it passed the Federal cigarette labeling and advertising act, which required a warning on every pack of cigarettes sold in the United States. [SPEAKER_00]: The warning began appearing at the start of 1966, and it was mild indeed. [SPEAKER_00]: Corsion, it read, cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health.

40:50 [SPEAKER_00]: The tobacco industry's lobbyists had worked hard on the law, and in an important way, it served the companies well. [SPEAKER_00]: The same law prevented states and cities from imposing their own, stronger warnings. [SPEAKER_00]: And in the years to come, the company's lawyers would argue in court that smokers had been warned.

41:11 [SPEAKER_00]: They had read the label. [SPEAKER_00]: They had chosen to smoke anyway. [SPEAKER_00]: The warning, in other words, could become a shield. [SPEAKER_00]: Change came slowly through the rest of the decade. [SPEAKER_00]: A young lawyer named John Banzaf argued that under the broadcasting rule known as the Fairness Doctorant, television and radio stations that aired cigarette advertisements should also have to air messages about the dangers of smoking.

41:40 [SPEAKER_00]: He won, and for a few years at the end of the 1960s, American saw public service announcements warning them about cigarettes alongside the glamorous commercials. [SPEAKER_00]: Those messages seem to work, consumption dipped, and in 1970, Congress passed a law banning cigarette advertisements on television and radio all together.

42:07 [SPEAKER_00]: The last cigarette commercial aired on American television just before midnight on the first of January 1971 during a late night talk show, the industry, which had once poured enormous sums into television, simply shifted its money to magazines, billboards, sports sponsorships and promotions, and without the cigarette commercials on the air, [SPEAKER_00]: the anti-smoking announcements disappeared from the air as well.

42:35 [SPEAKER_00]: All the while inside the companies, the knowledge continued to deepen. [SPEAKER_00]: In 1969, an internal document was prepared at Brown and Williamson. [SPEAKER_00]: about how the company should respond to the growing pressure on smoking and health. [SPEAKER_00]: It was a strategy paper, the sort of thing a marketing department might write about a new product launch, and it contained another of those sentences that would echo for decades after it was finally revealed.

43:06 [SPEAKER_00]: Doubt is our product, the document said. [SPEAKER_00]: It went on to explain that doubt was the best means of competing with the body of fact that existed in the mind of the general public. [SPEAKER_00]: And it described doubt as the means of establishing a controversy, there it was written plainly, not tobacco, not pleasure or flavor or relaxation doubt.

43:36 [SPEAKER_00]: The industry could not win the scientific argument on the merits, and its own experts knew it. [SPEAKER_00]: But it did not need to win. [SPEAKER_00]: It needed only to keep the public uncertain, to keep juries uncertain, to keep politicians uncertain. [SPEAKER_00]: As long as there was a controversy, people could keep smoking with a clear conscience, and the companies could keep selling.

43:59 [SPEAKER_00]: The same document acknowledged the limits of the approach. [SPEAKER_00]: Doubt, it noted, was also the limit of the product. [SPEAKER_00]: The industry could not take a strong, positive stand in favor of its own safety, because it did not have the facts to support one. [SPEAKER_00]: It could only muddy the waters.

44:20 [SPEAKER_00]: The theme would be repeated in other documents. [SPEAKER_00]: In 1972, a tobacco institute official named Fred Panzer wrote a memo to the head of the institute reviewing the industry's longstanding strategy. [SPEAKER_00]: He described it with admiration as a strategy for creating doubt about the health charge without actually denying it.

44:45 [SPEAKER_00]: He also wrote that the [SPEAKER_00]: but even he worried that the approach could not hold forever. [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, in the research departments, the understanding of nicotine was growing ever more precise. [SPEAKER_00]: In 1972, the same year as Panzer's memo, a scientist at Philip Morris, named William Dunn, wrote a remarkable internal document about the nature of the cigarette.

45:19 [SPEAKER_00]: He suggested that his colleagues should think of the cigarette pack as a storage container for a day's supply of nicotine. [SPEAKER_00]: They should think of the cigarette itself as a dispenser for a dose unit of nicotine, and they should think of a puff of smoke as the vehicle that carried the nicotine into the body.

45:37 [SPEAKER_00]: To done, [SPEAKER_00]: the tobacco, the paper, the filter and the flavour were all secondary. [SPEAKER_00]: The real product was the drug. [SPEAKER_00]: Over at Reynolds, Claude Tieg, the chemist who had written about car synergians back in 1953, was thinking along similar lines. [SPEAKER_00]: In internal writings from the early 1970s, [SPEAKER_00]: He observed that the tobacco industry might be thought of as a specialised, highly ritualised and stylised segment of the pharmaceutical industry.

46:10 [SPEAKER_00]: Tobacco products, he wrote, uniquely contain and deliver nicotine, a potent drug with a variety of physiological effects. [SPEAKER_00]: He also worried with a businessman's eye about where new smokers would come from. [SPEAKER_00]: Internal documents from Reynolds and other companies in this era discussed the importance of younger smokers, because nearly everyone who became a lifelong smoker started in their teenage years.

46:41 [SPEAKER_00]: The companies publicly insisted that they never marketed to children. [SPEAKER_00]: Their private research into the smoking habits of the young told a different story. [SPEAKER_00]: because it would matter enormously later on. [SPEAKER_00]: In the late 1960s and through the 1970s, the industry introduced so-called low-tar and light cigarettes.

47:08 [SPEAKER_00]: These were measured on smoking machines, which puffed on cigarettes in a standardized way. [SPEAKER_00]: And by that measurement, they delivered much less tar and nicotine. [SPEAKER_00]: Many of them had tiny ventilation holes in the filter that diluted the smoke with air. [SPEAKER_00]: Smokers, who were worried about their health, switched to these brands in great numbers, believing they had found a safer way to smoke, but human beings are not smoking machines.

47:40 [SPEAKER_00]: The company's own researchers came to understand that smokers who switched to lighter cigarettes tended to compensate without even realizing it. [SPEAKER_00]: They took longer, deeper puffs. [SPEAKER_00]: They smoked more cigarettes each day. [SPEAKER_00]: Their fingers and lips sometimes covered the little ventilation holes.

47:59 [SPEAKER_00]: In the end, their bodies sought out the same amount of nicotine they had always needed. [SPEAKER_00]: And in doing so, they took in much of the same smoke. [SPEAKER_00]: The industry understood this phenomenon, which its scientists called compensation. [SPEAKER_00]: The public, for the most part, did not.

48:18 [SPEAKER_00]: Light cigarettes were marketed for decades with the strong implication that they were healthier. [SPEAKER_00]: Much later, a federal judge would find that this too had been a deception. [SPEAKER_00]: So by the early 1970s, here is where things stood. [SPEAKER_00]: In the company files, there was a substantial record of knowledge.

48:40 [SPEAKER_00]: Sigurett's smoke contained carcinogens. [SPEAKER_00]: Nicotine was a drug and people smoked in order to get it. [SPEAKER_00]: The company studied how to deliver it efficiently. [SPEAKER_00]: They understood that light cigarettes did not work the way smokers believed, and their own strategy documents described out as the product they were selling to the public.

49:05 [SPEAKER_00]: None of this was visible from the outside. [SPEAKER_00]: On the outside, there was only the calm, steady voice of an industry assuring everyone that the question remained open, that the science was not settled, and that a free adult could make up his or her own mind. [SPEAKER_00]: That steady voice did not maintain itself.

49:27 [SPEAKER_00]: It required an organisation, a budget, a network of scientists and lawyers and spokesmen. [SPEAKER_00]: And over the next two decades, that machinery would grow into one of the most effective campaigns of persuasion ever assembled. [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 3, Manufacturing Down In the late 1950s, the tobacco companies decided that their [SPEAKER_00]: could not carry the whole burden alone.

49:59 [SPEAKER_00]: The Tobacco Industry Research Committee with its scientific advisory board and its grants to laboratories was meant to look like a scientific body, but the industry also needed a voice in politics, a presence in Washington, an organization that could speak to legislators, to journalists and to the public without the pretence of being a laboratory.

50:22 [SPEAKER_00]: And so, [SPEAKER_00]: In 1958, the company's created the Tobacco Institute, the Tobacco Institute, set up its headquarters in Washington and over the following decades it grew into one of the most formidable lobbying operations in the capital. [SPEAKER_00]: It employed spokesman who appeared on television news programs, lobbyists who walk the halls of Congress, and staff who track every state legislature in the country, ready to oppose any new tax or restriction on smoking.

50:55 [SPEAKER_00]: It published newsletters and pamphlets. [SPEAKER_00]: It answered every new scientific report with a press release, often within hours. [SPEAKER_00]: For many years it was led by a former congressman from North Carolina, Horace Cornagay, a genial and well-connected southern politician who knew exactly how Washington worked.

51:17 [SPEAKER_00]: The research committee meanwhile was given a new name in 1964, the year of the Surgeon [SPEAKER_00]: The new name sounded even more like an independent scientific institution. [SPEAKER_00]: Clarence cooked little, remained its scientific director for several more years, and it continued to fund grants for laboratory research.

51:43 [SPEAKER_00]: Here, it is worth slowing down to understand how this research actually worked because it was more subtle than simple propaganda. [SPEAKER_00]: The Council fought a backer research, did fund real scientists doing real work. [SPEAKER_00]: Its grants went to universities and medical schools across the country.

52:05 [SPEAKER_00]: Some of the researchers it supported went on to distinguished careers. [SPEAKER_00]: and some of the work it paid for contributed to genuine knowledge about cancer, genetics, and the body's immune system. [SPEAKER_00]: Many of the scientists who accepted its money were honest people pursuing honest questions.

52:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Some of them may never have thought very deeply about where the money came from or why, but... [SPEAKER_00]: The internal documents later showed how the companies thought about this program. [SPEAKER_00]: The research was valuable to them less for what it discovered than for what it allowed them to say.

52:43 [SPEAKER_00]: Every grant was a talking point. [SPEAKER_00]: Every new study of genetics or stress or air pollution [SPEAKER_00]: as a possible cause of cancer was a way to suggest that the matter was complicated, that there were many factors that cigarettes were only one suspect among many. [SPEAKER_00]: And crucially, the research rarely aimed directly at the questions that would have mattered most to the company's legal position.

53:09 [SPEAKER_00]: It did not set out to determine, once and for all, whether the substances in their smoke caused cancer in people. [SPEAKER_00]: Alongside the regular grants, there was a second quieter channel. [SPEAKER_00]: It came to be known as special projects. [SPEAKER_00]: Special projects were research efforts that were directed not by the Council's scientific advisory board, but by lawyers.

53:35 [SPEAKER_00]: The lawyers for the major tobacco companies, working through prestigious law firms in New York, Washington and Kansas City, would identify scientists whose work might be useful in litigation or in public argument. [SPEAKER_00]: sometimes through the council. [SPEAKER_00]: And sometimes directly through the law firms themselves.

53:59 [SPEAKER_00]: Why go through lawyers? [SPEAKER_00]: Because communications between a lawyer and a client can be protected by what is called attorney client privilege. [SPEAKER_00]: And work prepared in anticipation of a lawsuit can be shielded as attorney work product. [SPEAKER_00]: If research was commissioned and directed by attorneys, [SPEAKER_00]: the company's hope it could be kept secret.

54:24 [SPEAKER_00]: If the results turned out badly, they need never be disclosed. [SPEAKER_00]: If the results were helpful, they could be brought forward at the right moment. [SPEAKER_00]: Many of the most sensitive scientific discussions in the industry were deliberately rooted through lawyers' offices, and sometimes documents were even sent to the lawyers, simply so that they could be claimed as privileged later on.

54:50 [SPEAKER_00]: This is one of the quiet themes of the entire story. [SPEAKER_00]: In most industries, scientists lead the science. [SPEAKER_00]: In the tobacco industry, over these decades, lawyers increasingly did it. [SPEAKER_00]: They decided which questions were safe to ask. [SPEAKER_00]: They reviewed research before it went forward.

55:11 [SPEAKER_00]: They helped decide which findings would be shared and which would be filed away. [SPEAKER_00]: Science, in this world, was not primarily a search for truth. [SPEAKER_00]: It was a part of the legal defense. [SPEAKER_00]: The companies also cultivated a network of expert witnesses and consultants, scientists, and physicians who were testifying court or speak to the press.

55:38 [SPEAKER_00]: Some were genuine skeptics with honest doubts. [SPEAKER_00]: Others were paid consultants whose financial ties to the industry were not always made clear to the public. [SPEAKER_00]: They would appear before congressional committees right letters to the editors of medical journals and offer comments to reporters always with the same essential message.

56:02 [SPEAKER_00]: The science was not settled. [SPEAKER_00]: Correlation was not causation. [SPEAKER_00]: The mechanism was not fully understood. [SPEAKER_00]: More research was needed. [SPEAKER_00]: There was a certain intellectual slight of hand in all of this. [SPEAKER_00]: It is true that the precise biological mechanism by which smoke caused cancer was not fully understood for many years.

56:29 [SPEAKER_00]: It is true that not every smoker developed lung cancer and that some people who never smoked did. [SPEAKER_00]: It is true that statistical studies show associations. [SPEAKER_00]: But by the 1960s, the weight of evidence from many different kinds of studies, from the laboratory, from animal experiments, from huge population studies, and from the bodies of patients, all pointed powerfully in the same direction.

56:59 [SPEAKER_00]: The scientists who served as the industry's voices, were, in effect, demanding a level of certainty. [SPEAKER_00]: that is almost never available in medicine and then pointing out that it had not been achieved. [SPEAKER_00]: In 1972, as we heard, Fred Panzer at the Tobacco Institute summarized the strategy that had served the industry for nearly two decades.

57:25 [SPEAKER_00]: He described it as having three parts. [SPEAKER_00]: First, creating doubt about the health charge without actually denying it. [SPEAKER_00]: Second, advocating the public's right to smoke without actually urging them to take up the practice. [SPEAKER_00]: And third, encouraging objective scientific research as the only way to resolve the question of health hazards.

57:51 [SPEAKER_00]: Each part was carefully balanced. [SPEAKER_00]: the industry never had to say that cigarettes were safe. [SPEAKER_00]: Only that nobody had proven they were dangerous. [SPEAKER_00]: It never had to encourage anyone to start smoking, only to defend their freedom to choose, and it could always point to research, endless research as the responsible way forward.

58:15 [SPEAKER_00]: The approach was enormously effective, and its greatest successes came not in the court of public opinion, but in actual courtrooms. [SPEAKER_00]: The first lawsuits against the tobacco companies were filed in the middle of the 1950s, soon after the scientific studies began to appear. [SPEAKER_00]: Smokers who had developed lung cancer, or their widows and children, sued the companies for damages.

58:42 [SPEAKER_00]: They argued that [SPEAKER_00]: that the companies had sold a dangerous product, or that they had promised in their advertising that cigarettes were safe. [SPEAKER_00]: Over the next decade and more, dozens of these cases were filed in courts across the country. [SPEAKER_00]: The industry did not settle a single one.

59:00 [SPEAKER_00]: This was a deliberate policy, and it was enforced with remarkable discipline. [SPEAKER_00]: The companies understood that if they paid even one plaintiff, even a modest amount, it would encourage thousands more. [SPEAKER_00]: So they fought every case all the way, no matter the cost, and they had remarkable resources to fight with.

59:25 [SPEAKER_00]: The companies hired the finest law firms in the country with armies of attorneys. [SPEAKER_00]: A smoker suing a tobacco company was typically represented by a single small town lawyer or a modest firm working on contingency which meant the lawyer would only be paid if the case was one.

59:44 [SPEAKER_00]: The industry's lawyers knew this and they used it. [SPEAKER_00]: They filed motion after motion. [SPEAKER_00]: They demanded mountains of records. [SPEAKER_00]: They took long depositions of the plaintiffs, of their family members, of their doctors. [SPEAKER_00]: They investigated every part of the dying smoke as life, looking for other possible causes of illness, other habits, other exposures, anything that might create doubt in the mind of a jury.

1:00:15 [SPEAKER_00]: They delayed and delayed and some plaintiffs died before their cases ever came to trial. [SPEAKER_00]: Many of the plaintiff's lawyers simply ran out of money and time and gave up. [SPEAKER_00]: Years later, an attorney for Reynolds put the philosophy bluntly in an internal memo. [SPEAKER_00]: He observed that the companies had won these cases not by spending all of their own money, but by forcing the other side to spend all of theirs.

1:00:44 [SPEAKER_00]: The goal was to make lawsuits against tobacco so exhausting and so expensive that few lawyers would ever try. [SPEAKER_00]: When cases did reach a jury, the industry's arguments rested on two pillars. [SPEAKER_00]: The first was doubt. [SPEAKER_00]: The company's expert witnesses would testify that it had not been proven that smoking caused this particular plaintiff's cancer.

1:01:09 [SPEAKER_00]: The second pillar was free choice. [SPEAKER_00]: The companies would argue that everyone had always known that smoking might be harmful. [SPEAKER_00]: People had called cigarettes coffin nails for generations. [SPEAKER_00]: After 1966, there was a warning printed on every pack. [SPEAKER_00]: The plaintiff [SPEAKER_00]: the companies argued, knew the risks and chose to smoke anyway.

1:01:32 [SPEAKER_00]: If they suffered, it was the result of their own free decision. [SPEAKER_00]: There is a deep contradiction hidden in those two arguments, and it would later strike many people. [SPEAKER_00]: The companies argued at the same time that the dangers of smoking were unproven. [SPEAKER_00]: and that the dangers were so well known that any smoker had accepted them.

1:01:54 [SPEAKER_00]: They said, smoking was not addictive, and therefore was a free choice. [SPEAKER_00]: While their own scientists studied nicotine as a drug that people could not easily give up. [SPEAKER_00]: But juries in those years did not have access to the company's internal documents. [SPEAKER_00]: They heard only what was said in the courtroom.

1:02:17 [SPEAKER_00]: And in case after case, through the 1950s, 60s and 70s, the industry won. [SPEAKER_00]: In the early 1980s, a second wave of lawsuits began. [SPEAKER_00]: The most famous of these was brought by a woman from New Jersey named Rose Sipelone. [SPEAKER_00]: Rose Sipelone had started smoking as a teenager in the 1940s.

1:02:41 [SPEAKER_00]: She had smoked for about 40 years, switching brands over time. [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes choosing brands that were advertised as milder, [SPEAKER_00]: or filtered in the hope that they would be safer. [SPEAKER_00]: In the early 1980s, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. [SPEAKER_00]: In 1983, she and her husband Antonio filed a lawsuit against three tobacco companies, including Ligit, the maker of the brands she had smoked for much of her life.

1:03:14 [SPEAKER_00]: Their attorney was a New Jersey lawyer named Mark Edel. [SPEAKER_00]: Rose Cipallone died in October of 1984 at the age of 58. [SPEAKER_00]: Her husband and her son carried the case forward. [SPEAKER_00]: What made the Cipallone case different was that Edel managed through a long and grinding legal battle to obtain some of the company's internal documents during the discovery process.

1:03:43 [SPEAKER_00]: a jury saw a glimpse of what the industry knew. [SPEAKER_00]: There were documents about research the companies had conducted, about the safer cigarette projects that had been shelved, about what executives understood regarding the health effects of their products. [SPEAKER_00]: In 1988, the jury returned a verdict.

1:04:04 [SPEAKER_00]: It found that Ligget had failed to warn about the risks [SPEAKER_00]: and that it had breached an express warranty through its advertising. [SPEAKER_00]: The jury awarded Antonio Cipoloni $400,000. [SPEAKER_00]: It was the first time a tobacco company had ever been ordered to pay damages to a smoker in a product liability case.

1:04:31 [SPEAKER_00]: But the victory was fragile. [SPEAKER_00]: The jury also found Rose Cipalloni mostly responsible for her own illness, and it awarded nothing directly to her estate. [SPEAKER_00]: The verdict was overturned on appeal. [SPEAKER_00]: The case went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled in 1992 that the Federal Warning Label Law did block some kinds of claims against the companies, but not all of them.

1:05:04 [SPEAKER_00]: By then, the Cipeloni family and their lawyers had been fighting for nearly a decade. [SPEAKER_00]: Antonio Cipeloni had died, the legal costs had grown enormous. [SPEAKER_00]: In 1992, the case was dropped. [SPEAKER_00]: The industry, once again, had outlasted its opponent. [SPEAKER_00]: Still, something had shifted.

1:05:28 [SPEAKER_00]: The documents that surfaced in the Ciprolone case were a crack in the wall, a sign of what might lie behind it. [SPEAKER_00]: While the courtroom battles continued, the science was moving on to new fronts, and the industry followed it there with the same strategy. [SPEAKER_00]: In 1981, [SPEAKER_00]: A Japanese researcher named Takeshi Hirayama published a study following the wives of smokers in Japan.

1:05:55 [SPEAKER_00]: He found that non-smoking women married to men who smoked had a higher risk of lung cancer, than non-smoking women married to non-smokers. [SPEAKER_00]: This was evidence. [SPEAKER_00]: of a danger the industry feared, even more than any risk to smokers themselves. [SPEAKER_00]: A smoker could be said to have made a choice, but a wife, a child, a coworker, a fellow passenger on an aeroplane, had made no choice at all.

1:06:25 [SPEAKER_00]: If second-hand smoke harm non-smokers, then smoking was no longer a private matter. [SPEAKER_00]: It would justify bands in offices, restaurants, and public places. [SPEAKER_00]: And those bands would make smoking far less convenient, and far less socially acceptable. [SPEAKER_00]: The industry attacked the Hirayama study fiercely, and it built new organizations and new research programs to challenge the science of second-hand smoke.

1:06:54 [SPEAKER_00]: It recruited scientists in Europe, Asia and the Americas to question the evidence and it funded research into other sources of indoor air pollution, emphasising everything from ventilation systems to cooking fumes. [SPEAKER_00]: In 1986, the surgeon general, Everett Coup, issued a report concluding that involuntary smoking was a cause of disease, including lung cancer, in healthy non-smokers.

1:07:25 [SPEAKER_00]: The industry's response once more. [SPEAKER_00]: was that the evidence was weak and the question was unresolved. [SPEAKER_00]: Surgeon General Cooper was a striking figure with a full white beard and the uniform of the public health service and he was not a man who backed away from a fight.

1:07:43 [SPEAKER_00]: In May of 1988, he released another report. [SPEAKER_00]: This time devoted entirely to nicotine. [SPEAKER_00]: Its conclusions were unequivocal, cigarettes and other forms of tobacco were addicting. [SPEAKER_00]: Nicotine was the drug into tobacco that caused addiction. [SPEAKER_00]: and the processes that determined to backo addiction were similar to those that determined addiction to drugs such as heroin and cocaine.

1:08:10 [SPEAKER_00]: By the late 1980s, the scientific understanding of addiction had changed. [SPEAKER_00]: Experts no longer insisted on dramatic intoxication as a requirement. [SPEAKER_00]: They focused instead on compulsive use. [SPEAKER_00]: on the difficulty of stopping, despite a desire to stop, on tolerance and withdrawal.

1:08:32 [SPEAKER_00]: By those standards, nicotine fit the definition clearly. [SPEAKER_00]: The industry, through the Tobacco Institute, rejected the report. [SPEAKER_00]: It suggested that calling smoking an addiction trivialised the serious problem of illegal drug use and it insisted that millions of people had quit smoking on their own which proved that smokers could stop whenever they wished.

1:08:58 [SPEAKER_00]: What the public did not know was that one of the companies had already confirmed the surgeon general's conclusion in its own laboratory and had then buried the result. [SPEAKER_00]: Philip Morris employed a young research psychologist named Victor Denobel. [SPEAKER_00]: The company had set up a behavioral farm ecology laboratory and denoble and his colleague Paul Mellay studied the effects of nicotine on rats.

1:09:26 [SPEAKER_00]: Their work was serious and well-designed. [SPEAKER_00]: They found that rats would press a lever again and again to give themselves doses of nicotine, which is one of the classic laboratory signs of an addictive substance. [SPEAKER_00]: they also studied compound similar to nicotine, searching for one that might have the same rewarding effect on the brain without harming the heart.

1:09:52 [SPEAKER_00]: In 1983, Denobal and Melee submitted a paper describing some of their findings to a scientific journal. [SPEAKER_00]: The paper was accepted for publication, but the company asked that it'd be withdrawn [SPEAKER_00]: not long afterward, in 1984, Philip Morris shut the laboratory down abruptly.

1:10:13 [SPEAKER_00]: The animals were removed, the equipment was taken away, and the researchers were told to stop their work. [SPEAKER_00]: Denobel later recalled being told not to try to publish or even discuss what they had found. [SPEAKER_00]: For years, he stayed silent. [SPEAKER_00]: By the end of the 1980s then, the gap between what the [SPEAKER_00]: had grown wider than ever.

1:10:37 [SPEAKER_00]: The surgeon general had declared nicotine addictive. [SPEAKER_00]: Second hand smoke was emerging as a public health concern. [SPEAKER_00]: Restrictions on smoking were spreading with bands on domestic airline flights, arriving at the end of the decade, public attitudes were slowly turning.

1:10:56 [SPEAKER_00]: Smoking rates among American adults, which had been above 40% in the mid-1960s, had fallen to under 30%. [SPEAKER_00]: and yet, the industry still stood. [SPEAKER_00]: It had not lost a single case in which it had actually been forced to pay. [SPEAKER_00]: It's executive still insisted in public that smoking had not been proven to cause disease and that nicotine was not addictive.

1:11:24 [SPEAKER_00]: The Tobacco Institute was still operating in Washington and the Council for Tobacco Research was still handing out grants. [SPEAKER_00]: The internal [SPEAKER_00]: The memo is about nicotine and doubt and carcinogens, still sat in the company files, and the law firm archives. [SPEAKER_00]: Locked away, protected by privilege, unseen by the public.

1:11:46 [SPEAKER_00]: The strategy had worked for nearly 40 years. [SPEAKER_00]: but a secret of that size depends on many people keeping quiet. [SPEAKER_00]: And by the late 1980s, in an ordinary office building in Louisville, Kentucky, an unremarkable man had just been hired to read through those very files.

1:12:10 [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 4. [SPEAKER_00]: The Leap. [SPEAKER_00]: His name was Merrill Williams. [SPEAKER_00]: In 1988, he was in his late 40s, a soft spoken man with a background that did not quite fit the world of corporate law. [SPEAKER_00]: He had a doctorate, and he had spent years as a teacher of drama and theatre.

1:12:32 [SPEAKER_00]: His life had not gone exactly as planned. [SPEAKER_00]: He had gone through a divorce, he was short of money, and he needed work. [SPEAKER_00]: So he took a job as a paralegal with a large and respected Louisville law firm called Wyatt, Tarant and Cones. [SPEAKER_00]: The firm represented Brown and Williamson, whose headquarters stood in Louisville.

1:12:56 [SPEAKER_00]: Brown and Williamson was facing a growing number of lawsuits, and its lawyers needed to understand exactly what was in the company's own records, so that they would never be surprised in [SPEAKER_00]: Teams of paralegals were hired to read through the company's internal documents, page by page, and to code them, sorting each one by subject, and noting how sensitive it might be in litigation.

1:13:23 [SPEAKER_00]: It was patient, tedious, and confidential work done in a document center where the files were kept. [SPEAKER_00]: Merrill Williams was a smoker. [SPEAKER_00]: He had smoked for most of his adult life. [SPEAKER_00]: And as he sat in that office day after day, turning over the pages, he began to read things that troubled him deeply.

1:13:47 [SPEAKER_00]: He read the scientific reports about the carcinogens in smoke. [SPEAKER_00]: He read the discussions of nicotine and its effects on the body. [SPEAKER_00]: He read the reports from the Batell laboratories in Geneva and the memo from Addison Yaman about being in the business of selling nicotine.

1:14:07 [SPEAKER_00]: how research had been discussed and then set aside. [SPEAKER_00]: As he later described it, he came to feel that he was reading the history of a deception, and that he himself was helping to keep it hidden. [SPEAKER_00]: Williams began quietly to take copies. [SPEAKER_00]: He did it carefully and secretly.

1:14:29 [SPEAKER_00]: He would take documents from the files, [SPEAKER_00]: Over a period of time by some accounts, he wore a kind of girdle or wrap beneath his clothing to hide the papers against his body as he walked out of the office. [SPEAKER_00]: Bit by bit, he built up a collection of thousands of pages.

1:14:55 [SPEAKER_00]: He did not yet have a clear plan for what to do with them. [SPEAKER_00]: He seems to have been driven by a mixture of conscience, anger and fear, and perhaps by the thought that one day these papers might matter. [SPEAKER_00]: In the early 1990s, Williams' job came to an end. [SPEAKER_00]: Not long afterward, he underwent heart bypass surgery.

1:15:17 [SPEAKER_00]: He came to believe that his years of smoking had damaged his health, and he began to think about suing Brown and Williamson himself. [SPEAKER_00]: He approached lawyers, and he told them that he had the documents. [SPEAKER_00]: He found it difficult to know whom to trust, brown and Williamson, for its part, would later argue that he had stolen confidential and privileged materials, and the company went to court to stop him from revealing them.

1:15:45 [SPEAKER_00]: Eventually, through a series of contacts, Williams connected with a lawyer from Pasca Gula, Mississippi, named Richard Scruggs, who was known to his friends as Dickie. [SPEAKER_00]: Scruggs was a wealthy and ambitious trial lawyer who had made a fortune in law suits over a specialist, and at that very moment, in the spring of 1994, he was helping his old law school friend, the attorney general of Mississippi, preparing unprecedented law suit against the entire tobacco industry.

1:16:19 [SPEAKER_00]: The documents Williams had carried out of that office in Louisville were exactly what Scruggs needed. [SPEAKER_00]: Scruggs took them and the papers began to spread. [SPEAKER_00]: They went to members of Congress including representative Henry Waxman of California who chaired a house subcommittee on health and the environment.

1:16:39 [SPEAKER_00]: They went to journalists. [SPEAKER_00]: and in May of 1994 a reporter for the New York Times named Philip Hilts began publishing stories based on the Brown and Williamson files and they went in a way that has since become legendary to a professor in San Francisco. [SPEAKER_00]: His name was Stanton Glance.

1:17:01 [SPEAKER_00]: He was a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco and he was not a physician but a researcher [SPEAKER_00]: who had turned his attention to cardiology and then, increasingly, to tobacco control. [SPEAKER_00]: He was outspoken, energetic and well-known in anti-smoking circles.

1:17:23 [SPEAKER_00]: He had helped campaign for smoke-free laws in California and had studied that tobacco industries political activities for years. [SPEAKER_00]: The industry knew him well and he knew the industry. [SPEAKER_00]: On the 12th of May 1994, a box arrived at Glances Office at the University. [SPEAKER_00]: It was an ordinary cardboard box.

1:17:47 [SPEAKER_00]: There was no clear return address from any real person. [SPEAKER_00]: Instead, the sender was listed simply as Mr. Butts. [SPEAKER_00]: Mr. Butts was a character from Dunesbury, the newspaper comic strip by Gary Trudeau. [SPEAKER_00]: In the strip, Mr. Butts was a giant talking cigarette, a smug, fast-talking figure, who served as the cheerful voice of the tobacco industry, trying to lure people into smoking, who ever sent the box had a sense of humour and a sense of irony.

1:18:20 [SPEAKER_00]: Inside the box were roughly [SPEAKER_00]: They were internal records from Brown and Williamson and from its parent company, British American tobacco, stretching back to the early 1950s. [SPEAKER_00]: There were scientific reports, research proposals, memos from executives and lawyers, and summaries of research on nicotine and cancer.

1:18:48 [SPEAKER_00]: There was the Yaman memo. [SPEAKER_00]: There were the Batell studies. [SPEAKER_00]: There were documents showing how the lawyers had shaped the research. [SPEAKER_00]: It was as if someone had cut open the wall of the industry's private archive and let the light pour in. [SPEAKER_00]: Glance understood at once what he had been sent.

1:19:08 [SPEAKER_00]: He also understood that the documents would be fought over and that he needed to be careful. [SPEAKER_00]: He and his colleagues began to read and catalogue them. [SPEAKER_00]: and he made sure that the papers were deposited in the archives of the university's library where they could be preserved.

1:19:26 [SPEAKER_00]: Brown and Williamson moved quickly. [SPEAKER_00]: The company argued that the documents had been stolen and that many of them were privileged legal communications. [SPEAKER_00]: It sent investigators to the university library and it demanded that the documents be returned. [SPEAKER_00]: It went to court in California to prevent the university from making them available to the public.

1:19:48 [SPEAKER_00]: The university and glance resisted. [SPEAKER_00]: The legal fight went on for more than a year. [SPEAKER_00]: In the end, the courts sided with the university. [SPEAKER_00]: In late June of 1995, the Supreme Court of California declined to take up Brown and Williams' final appeal. [SPEAKER_00]: The University Library opened the documents to the public.

1:20:15 [SPEAKER_00]: Soon afterward, they were placed on the internet at a time when the internet was still new to most people. [SPEAKER_00]: Anyone anywhere in the world could now read the secret files of a tobacco company, but we are getting slightly ahead of ourselves. [SPEAKER_00]: Let us go back to the spring of 1994.

1:20:34 [SPEAKER_00]: because in the weeks before that box arrived in San Francisco, something remarkable had happened in Washington. [SPEAKER_00]: Pressure on the industry had been building on several fronts at once. [SPEAKER_00]: In February of 1994, a television news program on the ABC Network called Day One, aired a report alleging that tobacco companies manipulated the levels of nicotine in their cigarettes to keep smokers hooked.

1:21:02 [SPEAKER_00]: Phillip Morris sued the network for billions of dollars over the report. [SPEAKER_00]: At around the same time, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, a physician and lawyer named David Kessler, announced that his agency was considering whether nicotine should be regulated as a drug and cigarettes as drug delivery devices.

1:21:25 [SPEAKER_00]: If he succeeded, [SPEAKER_00]: It would place the entire industry under federal oversight for the first time. [SPEAKER_00]: Kestler's investigators had been digging into how cigarettes were designed and manufactured. [SPEAKER_00]: They learned that the company's carefully controlled the nicotine in their products, blending tobacco's, adding ammonia compounds that changed how nicotine was absorbed, and developing special high nicotine strains of tobacco.

1:21:55 [SPEAKER_00]: One such strain developed for Brown and Williamson was known by the codename Y1. [SPEAKER_00]: To Kessler, it looked very much as if the industry was managing nicotine with the precision of a drug company. [SPEAKER_00]: representative Henry Waxman decided to call the industry's leaders to testify.

1:22:16 [SPEAKER_00]: On the 14th of April 1994, the chief executives of the seven largest tobacco companies in the United States came before his subcommittee in a crowded hearing room on Capitol Hill. [SPEAKER_00]: The scene would become one of the most famous images of the decade. [SPEAKER_00]: The seven men sat side-by-side at a long table, in dark suits, facing the members of Congress.

1:22:44 [SPEAKER_00]: There was William Campbell of Philip Morris, James Johnston of Reynolds, Joseph Tadeo of the United States Tobacco Company, Andrew Tish of Laurelard, Edward Horrigon of Ligit, Thomas Sanderfer of Brown and Williamson, and Donald Johnston of the American Tobacco Company. [SPEAKER_00]: At the beginning of their testimony, they stood together, raised their right hands and swore to tell the truth.

1:23:11 [SPEAKER_00]: They're hearing went on for hours. [SPEAKER_00]: The members of Congress pressed them about nicotine levels, about additives, about marketing to young people, and about whether cigarettes cause disease. [SPEAKER_00]: The executives gave careful, practiced answers. [SPEAKER_00]: They said they did not believe it had been proven that smoking caused cancer.

1:23:35 [SPEAKER_00]: They said they did not manipulate nicotine to keep people addicted, but adjusted it for taste. [SPEAKER_00]: And then, toward the end, [SPEAKER_00]: A congressman from Oregon named Ron Wyden asked a simple question. [SPEAKER_00]: He wanted to go down the road and ask each executive, one by one, whether he believed that nicotine was addictive.

1:23:58 [SPEAKER_00]: He asked for a yes or a no. [SPEAKER_00]: One after another, down the long table, the seven men answered. [SPEAKER_00]: I believe nicotine is not addictive, said the first. [SPEAKER_00]: I believe that nicotine is not addictive, said the next. [SPEAKER_00]: And so it went. [SPEAKER_00]: Each of them repeating some version of the same phrase seven times in a row.

1:24:21 [SPEAKER_00]: The moment was captured by television cameras. [SPEAKER_00]: And the image of seven executives in a line, swearing that nicotine was not addictive, was broadcast around the world. [SPEAKER_00]: To many viewers, it seemed absurd on its face. [SPEAKER_00]: Most people knew a smoker who had tried desperately to quit and failed.

1:24:41 [SPEAKER_00]: Many viewers were smokers themselves, and they knew exactly how it felt to need a cigarette. [SPEAKER_00]: The executives were defending the industry's long-held position using careful definitions, but to the public, [SPEAKER_00]: It looked like a group of powerful men standing up and denying something that everyone knew to be true.

1:25:00 [SPEAKER_00]: Within a few weeks, the box from Mr. Butts would arrive in San Francisco. [SPEAKER_00]: The New York Times would publish the Yemen memo from 1963 saying that nicotine was addictive and that the company was in the business of selling an addictive drug. [SPEAKER_00]: The contrast could hardly have been sharper.

1:25:22 [SPEAKER_00]: Here was the industry's own lawyer 30 years earlier, saying the opposite of what the executives had just sworn under oath. [SPEAKER_00]: At the end of April, only two weeks after the executives testified, Waxman's subcommittee heard from another witness. [SPEAKER_00]: It was Victor Denobel, the former Philip Morris researcher, whose nicotine laboratory had been shut down a decade before.

1:25:47 [SPEAKER_00]: Released from his confidentiality agreement at Waxman's request, he described his experiments with rats, self-administering nicotine, and explained how the company had stopped his work. [SPEAKER_00]: The industry's own scientists it seemed. [SPEAKER_00]: had been studying nicotine addiction while its executives denied it existed.

1:26:08 [SPEAKER_00]: Within a few years, most of those seven executives had left their jobs or retired. [SPEAKER_00]: The Justice Department opened an investigation into whether they had lied to Congress, though in the end no charges were brought. [SPEAKER_00]: There was one more figure in this story who would step forward, a great personal cost, and his name was Jeffrey Wygend.

1:26:31 [SPEAKER_00]: Jeffrey Wygund was a biochemist. [SPEAKER_00]: He had worked in the healthcare industry for companies making medical products before he was hired by Brown and Williamson in 1989 as its vice president for research and development. [SPEAKER_00]: It was a senior position with a comfortable salary.

1:26:50 [SPEAKER_00]: He moved his family to Louisville. [SPEAKER_00]: and he was given the task as he understood it of developing a safer cigarette. [SPEAKER_00]: He soon became frustrated. [SPEAKER_00]: He later said that he found the company's lawyers deeply involved in the scientific work, reviewing and editing research reports and steering discussions away from sensitive subjects.

1:27:14 [SPEAKER_00]: He came to believe [SPEAKER_00]: that the company had no real interest in a safer cigarette. [SPEAKER_00]: He became concerned about certain additives used in tobacco products, including a flavoring compound called Cumerin, which had been linked to cancer in animals, and was banned as a food additive in the United States.

1:27:36 [SPEAKER_00]: And he believed that the company's chief executive, Thomas Sandifer, understood perfectly [SPEAKER_00]: In March of 1993, Wigend was fired. [SPEAKER_00]: Brown and Williamson had required him to sign a strict confidentiality agreement as part of his severance. [SPEAKER_00]: If he spoke about his work, he risked losing his severance pay and his health insurance, which his family depended on and being sued for a time he stayed silent.

1:28:11 [SPEAKER_00]: He took a job teaching chemistry and Japanese at a public high school in Louisville, earning a tiny fraction of his former salary. [SPEAKER_00]: But why didn't [SPEAKER_00]: had been approached by a producer for the CBS News program 60 minutes, a journalist named Lowe Bergman, who was working on a story about the tobacco industry and needed an expert to help him understand some technical documents.

1:28:37 [SPEAKER_00]: The two men came to trust each other. [SPEAKER_00]: Bergman encouraged Wigand to tell his full story on camera. [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, Wigand had also been quietly assisting the food and drug administration in its investigation. [SPEAKER_00]: And he became known to the lawyers who were building cases against the industry.

1:28:56 [SPEAKER_00]: In the summer of 1995, Wigand sat down with the veteran correspondent Mike Wallace and gave an interview for 60 minutes. [SPEAKER_00]: He described what he had seen at Brown and Williamson. [SPEAKER_00]: He said that the company understood nicotine to be addictive and treated cigarettes as a nicotine delivery system.

1:29:17 [SPEAKER_00]: He said that the company's chief executive had lied when he testified to Congress. [SPEAKER_00]: And then [SPEAKER_00]: In an episode that would become a famous scandal in American Journalism, CBS decided not to air the interview. [SPEAKER_00]: Lawyers for the network warned that Brown and Williamson might sue CBS for encouraging Wigan to break his confidentiality agreement, a legal claim known as torsious interference.

1:29:48 [SPEAKER_00]: The potential damages could be enormous. [SPEAKER_00]: and CBS was in the middle of being sold to another company at the time. [SPEAKER_00]: In November of 1995, the network broadcast a softened version of the story without wagons interview. [SPEAKER_00]: Mike Wallace and Lowbergman were furious and the decision was widely criticized.

1:30:10 [SPEAKER_00]: Wigon's story did not stay buried. [SPEAKER_00]: That same November, he traveled to Pasca-Gula, Mississippi and gave a sworn deposition in the state's lawsuit against the tobacco industry. [SPEAKER_00]: Despite a court order in Kentucky, that Brown and Williamson had obtained to try to stop him.

1:30:31 [SPEAKER_00]: In a deposition, his testimony was protected in a way that a television interview was not. [SPEAKER_00]: In it, he repeated what he had seen and heard inside [SPEAKER_00]: In January of 1996, the Wall Street Journal obtained and published the transcript of his testimony. [SPEAKER_00]: With the story now public, CBS finally aired the full 60 minutes interview in early February of 1996, the price for Wygend was enormous.

1:31:05 [SPEAKER_00]: He reported receiving anonymous death threats, and for a time he had armed protection, his marriage fell apart. [SPEAKER_00]: Brown and Williamson hired investigators and compiled a long dossier attacking his character and credibility, which was circulated to journalists in the hope of discrediting him.

1:31:26 [SPEAKER_00]: But when reporters at the Wall Street Journal examined the claims in that dossier, [SPEAKER_00]: they found many of them to be exaggerated or unsupported and the attempt to destroy his reputation largely backfired. [SPEAKER_00]: His story would later be told in the 1999 film The Insider.

1:31:46 [SPEAKER_00]: with Russell Crowe playing Wygend and Al Pacino as Lowell Bergman. [SPEAKER_00]: By the end of 1995, the wall of secrecy that had stood for 40 years was cracking open from every direction. [SPEAKER_00]: There were the documents Merrill Williams had carried out of Louisville. [SPEAKER_00]: now public at the University of California Library and on the Internet.

1:32:09 [SPEAKER_00]: There were the seven executives on videotape, swearing that nicotine was not addictive. [SPEAKER_00]: There was the testimony of Victor Denobel describing the laboratory that had been closed. [SPEAKER_00]: There was the food and drug administration investigating nicotine as a drug, and there was Jeffrey Wigand, the highest ranking tobacco company inside it ever to speak out, telling the world what he had seen.

1:32:35 [SPEAKER_00]: In July of 1995, just weeks after the documents were made public. [SPEAKER_00]: The Journal of the American Medical Association published a series of articles by Stanton Glance and his colleagues analyzing the Brown and Williamson papers. [SPEAKER_00]: It was a highly unusual step for a medical journal.

1:32:55 [SPEAKER_00]: The journal's editors also published an editorial alongside the articles, declaring that the evidence revealed in the documents was damning and calling on the medical profession and the government to act. [SPEAKER_00]: The industry, in response, pointed out that the documents were old and selected, and that they had been obtained without permission, but the floodgates had opened.

1:33:18 [SPEAKER_00]: The question was no longer whether the industry had known. [SPEAKER_00]: The question now was what the country would do about it. [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 5, the reckoning [SPEAKER_00]: In 1996, the documents that had arrived in that cardboard box became a book. [SPEAKER_00]: It was published by the University of California Press, and it was called simply the cigarette papers.

1:33:47 [SPEAKER_00]: Stanton Glance was its lead author, joined by his colleagues John Slade, Lisa Beiro, Peter Hanauer and Deborah Barnes. [SPEAKER_00]: The book walked readers patiently through the brown and Williamson files, from the early research on carcinogens, through the Batell studies, and the Yemen memo, to the long collaboration between scientists and lawyers.

1:34:15 [SPEAKER_00]: It quoted the industry's own words back to it, and it set those words beside what the companies had been telling the public for 40 years. [SPEAKER_00]: but its conclusion was hard to escape. [SPEAKER_00]: The companies had known. [SPEAKER_00]: They had known about the cancer-causing substances in their smoke.

1:34:38 [SPEAKER_00]: They had known that nicotine was addictive. [SPEAKER_00]: They had known that their public position was not supported by their own science. [SPEAKER_00]: and they had chosen deliberately and over many decades to keep that knowledge from the people who were buying and smoking their product.

1:34:56 [SPEAKER_00]: But books, however powerful, do not change laws or move money on their own. [SPEAKER_00]: The real reckoning would come through a strategy that no one had ever tried before. [SPEAKER_00]: And it began in a small coastal town on the Gulf of Mexico. [SPEAKER_00]: Mike Moore was the attorney general of Mississippi, a young and energetic politician who had grown up on the Gulf Coast.

1:35:22 [SPEAKER_00]: In the early 1990s, a lawyer named Michael Lewis, an old friend of his, came to him with an idea. [SPEAKER_00]: Lewis had watched a woman in his town, the mother of a friend, dying of a smoking-related illness, her care paid for by the state's Medicaid program, [SPEAKER_00]: and it struck him that the taxpayers of Mississippi were paying enormous sums every year to treat diseases caused by cigarettes.

1:35:55 [SPEAKER_00]: Every previous lawsuit against the tobacco companies had been brought by an individual smoker and in every one of those cases, the companies had been able to argue [SPEAKER_00]: that the smoker had made a free choice. [SPEAKER_00]: But what if the plaintiff was not a smoker at all? [SPEAKER_00]: What if the plaintiff was the state of Mississippi itself, which had never chosen to smoke, but had been left to pay the medical bills?

1:36:23 [SPEAKER_00]: The free choice argument, the industry's most reliable shield, would simply not apply. [SPEAKER_00]: more like to the idea. [SPEAKER_00]: He turned to his old friend Dickie Scrooks, the wealthy Pascagula trial lawyer, who agreed to help lead the case and to finance much of it himself. [SPEAKER_00]: On the 23rd of May 1994, only a few weeks after the seven executives testified in Washington.

1:36:52 [SPEAKER_00]: Mississippi filed its lawsuit in the chance to record of Jackson County in Paschagula, a chance to record in Mississippi heard cases without a jury, and more and scrugs believed that a judge would weigh their arguments more favorably than a jury of smokers might. [SPEAKER_00]: The state demanded that the industry repay the money Mississippi had spent treating six smokers.

1:37:17 [SPEAKER_00]: Other states soon followed. [SPEAKER_00]: Minnesota filed suit later that same year, joined by the state's blue cross and blue shield health insurer, under its attorney general, Hubert Humphrey III, the son of the former vice president, West Virginia filed. [SPEAKER_00]: Florida passed a special law to make its own case easier, and then filed.

1:37:40 [SPEAKER_00]: Massachusetts, Texas, and many others joined in. [SPEAKER_00]: Within a few years, around 40 states had sued the tobacco industry. [SPEAKER_00]: For the first time, the company's faced opponents with resources to match their own, who could not be worn down. [SPEAKER_00]: and who would never run out of money and give up.

1:38:01 [SPEAKER_00]: The leaked documents became weapons in these cases. [SPEAKER_00]: The papers from Merrill Williams, the testimony of Jeffrey Wiggand, and the growing number of internal records forced into the open through discovery, all strengthened the state's claims. [SPEAKER_00]: And in March of 1996, the industry's united front, finally cracked.

1:38:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Bennett LeBau, [SPEAKER_00]: But the financier who controlled Ligit, the smallest of the major cigarette makers, broke ranks and settled with several states. [SPEAKER_00]: A year later, Ligit went further. [SPEAKER_00]: It publicly admitted that smoking caused cancer and other diseases that nicotine was addictive and that the industry had marked its cigarettes to young people.

1:38:48 [SPEAKER_00]: It agreed to hand over its internal documents. [SPEAKER_00]: After more than 40 years of silence, [SPEAKER_00]: One of the companies had finally said aloud what all of them had known. [SPEAKER_00]: The other companies began to negotiate. [SPEAKER_00]: In June of 1997, the industry and the state attorneys general announced a sweeping proposed national settlement, worth more than $360 billion over 25 years.

1:39:18 [SPEAKER_00]: which would have given the food and drug administration authority over tobacco and granted the company some protection from future lawsuits, but because it required an act of Congress, it had to pass through the capital and there it's slowly fell apart. [SPEAKER_00]: A bill sponsored by Senator John McCain, grew tougher.

1:39:39 [SPEAKER_00]: The industry spent heavily on advertising to oppose it and in June of 1998, [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, the individual state case is moved forward. [SPEAKER_00]: In July of 1997, Mississippi, the state that had started it all, settled its case for about $3.6 billion. [SPEAKER_00]: Florida settled the following month for more than $11 billion.

1:40:08 [SPEAKER_00]: Texas settled in January of 1998 for more than $15 billion. [SPEAKER_00]: As part of that trial, the companies were forced to turn over many millions of pages of internal documents, which were placed in a public depository near Minneapolis. [SPEAKER_00]: In May of 1998, just before the jury was to begin deliberating, the industry settled with Minnesota for more than $6 billion.

1:40:41 [SPEAKER_00]: That left the remaining states. [SPEAKER_00]: the attorney's general and the four largest tobacco companies, Philip Morris, Reynolds, Brown and Williamson, and Laurelard, negotiated a single comprehensive agreement. [SPEAKER_00]: It was announced in November. [SPEAKER_00]: and it became known as the Master Settlement Agreement.

1:41:07 [SPEAKER_00]: The Master Settlement Agreement was signed on the 23rd of November, 1998, by 46 states, along with the District of Columbia and five United States territories. [SPEAKER_00]: The four states that had already settled on their own, Mississippi, Florida, Texas, and Minnesota were not part of it.

1:41:33 [SPEAKER_00]: The companies agreed to pay the states roughly 206 billion dollars over the first 25 years, and to keep making annual payments for as long as they sold cigarettes in the United States. [SPEAKER_00]: Those payments continue to this day. [SPEAKER_00]: The agreement did more than move money.

1:41:54 [SPEAKER_00]: It placed new limits on how cigarettes could be marketed. [SPEAKER_00]: Joe Camel, the cool cartoon Camel that Reynolds had used for years, and that critics said appealed to children, had already been retired the year before, but the agreement made such characters off limits for good. [SPEAKER_00]: The company is agreed to end most billboard advertising and to stop putting their brand names on clothing and merchandise.

1:42:27 [SPEAKER_00]: They could no longer pay to place their products in films. [SPEAKER_00]: And the agreement did something else, something that matters deeply to this story. [SPEAKER_00]: It dissolved the tobacco institute and the council for tobacco research. [SPEAKER_00]: the two organisations that had carried the industry's message for four decades.

1:42:48 [SPEAKER_00]: The voice that had insisted for so long that the science was unsettled was quietly switched off. [SPEAKER_00]: The agreement also funded a new national foundation dedicated to preventing youth smoking, which went on to produce the bold anti-smoking advertising campaign known as Truth. [SPEAKER_00]: And it required the companies to make their internal documents publicly available.

1:43:13 [SPEAKER_00]: Those documents, together with the Minnesota Depository, and the papers from other cases. [SPEAKER_00]: were eventually gathered into a vast online library hosted at the University of California, San Francisco, the same university where the box from Mr. Butts had arrived. [SPEAKER_00]: Today, that archive now known as the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents holds more than 14 million documents.

1:43:42 [SPEAKER_00]: Historians, scientists, journalists, and students still use it every day. [SPEAKER_00]: What began as 4,000 photocopy pages in a cardboard box became one of the largest collections of internal corporate records ever made public. [SPEAKER_00]: Still, the story was not quite over. [SPEAKER_00]: The master settlement agreement had resolved the claims of the states, but the federal government had not yet had it same.

1:44:13 [SPEAKER_00]: In September of 1999, the United States Department of Justice filed its own lawsuit against the major tobacco companies and their former research and lobbying organizations. [SPEAKER_00]: It did not sue [SPEAKER_00]: and an ordinary product liability law. [SPEAKER_00]: It sued under a law originally designed to fight organized crime.

1:44:38 [SPEAKER_00]: The racketeer influenced and corrupt organizations act, known by its acronym as the RICO Act. [SPEAKER_00]: The government argued that the companies had worked together for decades in a coordinated scheme to deceive the public about the dangers of smoking. [SPEAKER_00]: the trial itself began in September of 2004 in the federal courthouse in Washington before Judge Gladys Kessler and it lasted roughly nine months.

1:45:12 [SPEAKER_00]: The court heard from scores of witnesses and many thousands of exhibits were entered into evidence among them the very memos we have heard about tonight. [SPEAKER_00]: On the 17th of August 2006 Judge Kessler issued her decision. [SPEAKER_00]: It ran to more than 1600 pages, and it was one of the most sweeping judgments ever handed down against an American industry.

1:45:39 [SPEAKER_00]: She found that the companies had violated the RICO Act. [SPEAKER_00]: In her opinion, she concluded that over the course of more than 50 years, the defendants had lied, misrepresented, and deceived the American public about the devastating health effects of smoking. [SPEAKER_00]: She found that they had falsely denied that nicotine was addictive and that they manipulated its delivery.

1:46:05 [SPEAKER_00]: She found that they had falsely marketed light and low-tarr cigarettes as less harmful. [SPEAKER_00]: She found that they had denied the dangers of second-hand smoke, despite their own knowledge. [SPEAKER_00]: And she found that they had marketed to young people while publicly denying it.

1:46:27 [SPEAKER_00]: that the companies had done all of this with zeal, with deception, and with a single-minded focus on their financial success, without regard for the human tragedy or social costs that success exacted. [SPEAKER_00]: But the remedies available to her were limited. [SPEAKER_00]: A federal appeals court had already ruled before the verdict, that the government could not force the companies [SPEAKER_00]: which would have amounted to hundreds of billions of dollars.

1:47:01 [SPEAKER_00]: So the judge ordered something else. [SPEAKER_00]: She ordered the companies to stop using misleading terms like light and low tar. [SPEAKER_00]: And she ordered them to publish corrective statements, admitting the truth about their products, in newspapers, on television, on their websites, and eventually on their cigarette packs.

1:47:22 [SPEAKER_00]: And in the stores where cigarettes were sold, what followed was a long, slow coder. [SPEAKER_00]: The company's appeal. [SPEAKER_00]: A federal appeals court upheld the core of the verdict in 2009 and the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the case in 2010. [SPEAKER_00]: Then came years of arguments over the precise wording of the corrective statements.

1:47:47 [SPEAKER_00]: The companies objected to language [SPEAKER_00]: that would have them admit they had deliberately deceived the public. [SPEAKER_00]: The courts eventually agreed that the statements should be factual and forward-looking, stating the truth about smoking, without requiring the companies to confess their past conduct in those exact words.

1:48:09 [SPEAKER_00]: The arguments went on and on, through appeals and demands and revisions. [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, the world went on around the case. [SPEAKER_00]: In 2009, Congress finally passed a law, giving the food and drug administration authority to regulate tobacco products. [SPEAKER_00]: Something David Kessler had tried to do in the 1990s before the Supreme Court ruled [SPEAKER_00]: Smoking rates continued their long decline, and then, at last, on the 26th of November 2017, more than 11 years after the judge's ruling, and more than 60 years after the Frank statement appeared in newspapers across the country, the corrective statements began to run.

1:49:01 [SPEAKER_00]: They appeared as full-page advertisements in dozens of major newspapers, [SPEAKER_00]: on several Sundays. [SPEAKER_00]: They ran as television commercials on the major networks during primetime, several times a week for a year. [SPEAKER_00]: They were plain and stark, black text on a white background, with no images.

1:49:21 [SPEAKER_00]: no music and no flourish. [SPEAKER_00]: Each began by stating that a federal court had ordered the companies to make the statement. [SPEAKER_00]: And then each one simply told the truth. [SPEAKER_00]: The statements covered five subjects. [SPEAKER_00]: They described the health effects of smoking, stating that more people die every year from smoking than from murder, AIDS, suicide, drugs, car crashes and alcohol combined.

1:49:51 [SPEAKER_00]: They explained that smoking is highly addictive and that nicotine is the addictive drug in tobacco. [SPEAKER_00]: They said that there is no health benefit to smoking light or low-tar cigarettes instead of regular ones. [SPEAKER_00]: With their acknowledged that the companies had intentionally designed cigarettes to make them more addictive, controlling the delivery of nicotine, and they stated that second-hand smoke kills, causing lung cancer and heart disease in adults who do not smoke.

1:50:23 [SPEAKER_00]: There is something remarkable about those advertisements. [SPEAKER_00]: In January of 1954, the industry had bought full-page newspaper advertisements to tell the public that its products were not injurious to health and that it accepted an interest in people's health. [SPEAKER_00]: as its first responsibility.

1:50:43 [SPEAKER_00]: In November of 2017, under the order of a federal court, the same industry bought full-page newspaper advertisements to tell the public the opposite. [SPEAKER_00]: It had taken 63 years to travel from one page to the other. [SPEAKER_00]: Many of the people in this story did not live to see that day.

1:51:04 [SPEAKER_00]: Austin Bradford Hill died in 1991. [SPEAKER_00]: Ernst Winder, the medical student who first went to a Varts Graham with his idea, died in 1999. [SPEAKER_00]: Richard Doll, who continued to follow the British doctors for half a century, lived until 2005, long enough to report that smokers who quit, even in middle age, could avoid much of the risk.

1:51:32 [SPEAKER_00]: Jeffrey Weigand went on to found an organization devoted to educating young people about tobacco and spoke about his experience for many years. [SPEAKER_00]: Stanton Glance continued his work at the University of California until his retirement. [SPEAKER_00]: And as for Merrill Williams, the paralegal who sat in a Louisville office reading the files, it is worth remembering that the whole long chain of events, the book, the archive, the documents that turned courtrooms began in part with one man who read something he could not forget and decided that it should not stay hidden.

1:52:13 [SPEAKER_00]: Today, far fewer American smoke than in the days of the Plaza Hotel meeting. [SPEAKER_00]: In the 1950s, around half of all American men smoked. [SPEAKER_00]: By the early 2020s, the share of American adults who smoked cigarettes had fallen to around 1 in 9, the lowest level ever recorded.

1:52:35 [SPEAKER_00]: Smoking still causes enormous harm, and it remains one of the leading preventable causes of death in the United States and around the world. [SPEAKER_00]: But the long, careful campaign of doubt, [SPEAKER_00]: is over. [SPEAKER_00]: The question. [SPEAKER_00]: that the industry works so hard to keep open has been closed by science, by the company's own papers, and finally by the company's own words.

1:53:01 [SPEAKER_00]: And so our story comes to its end. [SPEAKER_00]: From the hospital wards of 1950, where curious doctors began to count, to the tar painted mice of Sloan Kettering, to the snow outside the Plaza Hotel, to the long rows of filing cabinets in Louisville. [SPEAKER_00]: to a cardboard box addressed from a cartoon cigarette.

1:53:23 [SPEAKER_00]: And finally, to a plain white page in a Sunday newspaper. [SPEAKER_00]: Telling the truth at last. [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for spending this time with me tonight on Sleepless History. [SPEAKER_00]: Sleep well.