This is Chapter 21 of my new book, working title “The Industry Playbook: Corporate Cartels, Corruption and Crimes Against Humanity” that is being published online chapter by chapter.
If it weren’t for whistleblowers, we may never had learned the truth about Big Tobacco. Legally, a whistleblower is an insider of a business or political body that reveals crime. In the popular culture, it has come to mean any insider that shows wrongdoing whether illegal or just immoral. Big Tobacco had many whistleblowers over the years.
James Mold was a research scientist at Liggett. He had worked on the XA cigarette which was designed to be safer. As one of the first whistleblowers to come out, a deposition showed him testifying that Liggett had suppressed this safer cigarette even though it worked. Why? To roll out a safer cigarette would be to acknowledge the truth about the lack of safety of their other products.
Because of the size of the companies that make up Big Tobacco it is not like any one whistleblower can reveal the whole truth. Instead, each one may just reveal certain documents, one piece of the puzzle.
In February 1994, ABC’s Day One news program featured an anonymous whistle blower nicknamed “Deep Cough” from R.J. Reynolds. He revealed that tobacco companies knowingly added more nicotine to cigarettes to increase addictiveness.
It was this that got the attention of the FDA and Congress. During this program, former Surgeon General Everett Koop said, “I would think that if I were the administrator of FDA and I learned that nicotine was being added to cigarettes to increase the amount of nicotine present that I would view that cigarette as a delivery device for the use of nicotine which is, under ordinary circumstances, a prescription drug. And I would think that demanded regulation.”
Merrell Williams was a paralegal at Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs who had been working for Brown & Williamson from 1988 to 1992 when he was laid off. He went through quintuple bypass surgery, likely a result of being a lifelong smoker. He would go on to become a whistleblower revealing a treasure trove of documents, more than 4,000 pages containing damning materials, from Brown & Williamson. And this was not easy to do.
Brandt writes, “Williams and [his attorney] Scruggs had each pushed the margins of law and ethics in their efforts to get the [documents] into the public domain…They had conspired to break a remarkable conspiracy…In retrospect, the documents might very well have remained locked within the fortress of Big Tobacco; so much of what we have come to know about the history of the tobacco industry might have remained cloaked by attorney-client privilege.”
In 1994, The New York Times published “Tobacco Company Was Silent on Hazards” which featured some of the leaked documents from Merrell Williams. This news piece said, “the executives of the…Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation chose to remain silent, to keep their research results secret, to stop work on a safer cigarette and to pursue a legal and public relations strategy of admitting nothing.”
The Cigarette Papers, as they came to be called where placed online in June 1995 by University of California in San Francisco. These can still be found online along with many other industry documents.
As a result of this, the following month, a series of five peer-reviewed articles appear in JAMA detailing what Big Tobacco knew and did. The whistleblower leaks helped to bolster scientific fact.
Brown & Williamson senior research scientist Jeffrey Wigand became a principal informant to the FDA. He shared nicotine delivery was enhanced with the use of ammonia-based compounds. He shared how different tobacco plants were blended together to ensure high enough nicotine content. He even shared how genetic engineering was being used to increase nicotine levels.
In August 1995, Wigand was interviewed by Mike Wallace for CBS’ 60 Minutes. Unfortunately, Big Tobacco was able to put tremendous pressure on CBS not to air this. In October, CBS decided to cancel the 60 Minutes broadcast featuring Wigand. Daniel Schoor of CBS said, “The tobacco industry…has apparently settled on the threat of lawsuit as a key weapon in its defense against an increasingly unfavorable press. “
But more leaking helped this to get this story out. In 1996, CBS’ Wigand interview got leaked to the New York Daily News and Wall Street Journal which published parts of the transcript. With the threat of legal action reduced 60 Minutes issues a revised version of its original story. You can watch that here.
This story is beautifully told by the movie, The Insider. This features Jeffrey Wigand, played by Russell Crowe and 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman, played by Al Pacino. This story not only covers the threats and smearing that comes with being a whistleblower, but a look at the threats that come with daring to cover the truth in a news program.
This story fairly accurately portrays just how close Big Tobacco came to stopping the revelations of Wigand through their multi-pronged attack.
There were plenty of others. Some Philip Morris scientist whistleblowers included William Farone, Victor DeNoble, and Paul Mele.
While most of the whistleblowers were scientists, we do see others involved, such as the paralegal Williams. We can even see a CEO step into this role.
Bennett LeBow, CEO of the Liggett Group, was a leverage buyout entrepreneur. In other words, he didn’t rise up withing Big Tobacco like other executives did. He took a different track than the rest of Big Tobacco, including settling cases with the states while other tobacco companies fought against them.
LeBow signed an agreement for immunity in exchange for turning over Liggett and other company documents. He even publicly admitted tobacco caused cancer and that companies had knowingly marketed to children. It is telling to contrast this position to that of every other tobacco CEO.
We can see that whistleblowers were many of the key positions in the fight against Big Tobacco regarding science, but even more so in the courts and the courts of public opinion, mediated primarily through journalists.
We know about these examples because Big Tobacco wasn’t able to stop them. Unfortunately, there is a chilling thought about all this. How many would-be whistleblowers that were successfully stopped by Big Tobacco’s reach when they saw what Wigand and others went through?
Key Takeaways on Whistleblowers and the Media
- Several whistleblowers were the ones to reveal the science that Big Tobacco kept under lock and key, including how they added nicotine to cigarettes, had made a safer cigarette and more.
- Getting internal documents into the public domain was key to having the mass media give them coverage further getting the information out to the public.
- Even a CEO could act as a whistleblower, working in opposition to the rest of Big Tobacco.
- Big Tobacco would pull out every stop to dissuade and silence whistleblowers and stop them from being able to get favorable coverage in the news. While they were unsuccessful with those detailed in this chapter, there may be many more we don’t know about where they were successful for one reason or another.
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Links to all published chapters of The Industry Playbook can be found here.
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