Ashes to Ashes (48 page)

V

LIGGETT & MYERS
, still No. 3 in the cigarette business but fading now at an accelerated pace, was ahead of its competitors in research on the health issue and in its willingness to put out a technologically advanced product.
By holding itself aloof from the rest of the industry’s scattershot grant program and instead funding research by Arthur D. Little, Inc. (ADL), Liggett enjoyed the fruits of a focused effort by a first-rate industrial laboratory.

In the late ’Fifties and early ’Sixties, ADL scientists under Charles Kensler working with rabbit tissue discovered that cilia exposed to tobacco smoke were more affected by toxic substances in the gas phase than by those in the tarry materials that could be effectively blocked by cellulose acetate filters. To counteract this ciliatoxic effect, the ADL team developed a filter using granulated charcoal. Because the granules presented the smoke with an extensive surface area, due to the extremely porous structure of the charcoal, they trapped the gases rather like a sponge taking in water and scrubbed off the toxic molecules by absorbing them. When the charcoal granules were fit into a tiny compartment combined with the cellulose acetate filter designed by Duke chemist Charles Keith, the resulting product, which Liggett would dub its Lark brand, was said to remove an estimated 60 percent of the ciliatoxic materials in the smoke, according to a 1963 article in the
New England Journal of Medicine
by Kensler and colleagues. Without making explicit health claims, the article said that while the findings “may not be directly extrapolated to the effects of cigarette smoke on human pulmonary tissue, the use of the charcoal-granule filter will obviously reduce the level of exposure of … bronchial and alveolar cells to potentially harmful smoke components.”

But months before the article appeared—and a likely factor in its being written at all and submitted to a leading scientific journal, thereby disclosing the particulars of ADL’s confidential work-product for Liggett—Kensler had been contacted by Harvard’s Professor Louis F. Fieser, then serving as a member of the Surgeon General’s ten-man advisory committee on smoking and health, in the midst of its closed-door deliberations. Fieser, whose link to the tobacco industry as a consultant to ADL while it worked for Liggett was unknown to the Surgeon General’s office or to his colleagues on the special study panel, asked Kensler to submit, with Liggett’s full blessing, a detailed report on its work for the cigarette maker. In acquiescing, Liggett and ADL were open to suspicions that they hoped the new Lark would be commended in the report by the Surgeon General’s committee, thereby gaining a priceless advantage in the marketplace. In retrospect, Kensler said such a charge was “to impugn our motives and our integrity, and I deeply resented it.”

Whatever the motives, the ADL-Liggett documents submitted to the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee in 1963 were a classic example of the tobacco industry’s wanting it both ways—the right to deny that there was a real health problem due to smoking, but just in case there did happen to be one, to claim that it could be readily fixed, and indeed the manufacturers were doing so prophylactically. “We find much of the reported work relating cigarette smoke to death rates or lesser impairments to have been unreliably conducted,
“ the ADL-Liggett report stated gratuitously and went on to question the validity of Wynder’s mouse-skin-painting studies on the arguable ground that the dosages were equivalent to a thousand times what two-pack-a-day human smokers might absorb. This cavil begged the question why, if the Wynder investigation was so flawed conceptually, ADL-Liggett undertook to replicate it—and, to a significant degree, succeeded. And if smokers’ elevated mortality rates were based on such shaky methodological grounds, why was Liggett working so hard to develop the charcoal-granule filter?

One measure of the disingenuous nature of the ADL-Liggett report was that its extensive discussion of how ciliatoxicity could be combated with a charcoal filter failed to elaborate upon the deeply suspect relationship between the destruction of the cilia and the occurrence of lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. More pointedly, the ADL-Liggett document argued that the mortality rate studies behind the association between smoking and disease were “conducted upon populations using products significantly different from those used by most American smokers today.” But then it concluded that if the ciliatoxic substances in smoke have actually “contributed to a health hazard, the use of filter cigarettes should reduce the risk to the user, and would maximally benefit new smokers.” In short, the report conceded no health hazard while claiming that there was now a way to reduce it.

All of which availed Liggett little. The final report by the Surgeon General’s panel barely alluded to the claims for the new charcoal-granule filter and did not mention Lark by name. Even so, Lark sales for 1964 reached nearly 10 billion units, some 20 percent of Liggett’s total for the year, but ebbed thereafter, and it never became a major U.S. brand, though it would achieve that rank in Japan, where the charcoal filter became a national cultural preference.

VI

WHILE
Liggett’s presentation to the Surgeon General’s panel may have lacked candor, it did not take the path that the managers of Brown & Williamson elected, revealing nothing whatever to the government committee about what it knew of the perils of smoking as a result of recent studies undertaken for it and its parent company, British-American Tobacco (BAT), by Battelle Laboratories in Switzerland.

By the late spring of 1963 BAT had shared with B&W executives in Louisville the mixed bag of findings by Battalle. The British-owned tobacco giant’s scientists had probably delved deeper into the psychopharmacological aspects of smoking than any other company up to that time. Among its studies was one entitled “A Tentative Hypothesis on Nicotine Addiction,” noting the need for chronic intake of the drugging element in cigarettes to maintain the
user’s physiological and emotional equilibrium. Other in-house studies ventured that cigarettes “cause or predispose” their users to lung cancer, “may well be truly causative in emphysema,” and might initiate or exacerbate heart disease. But BAT researchers saw a silver lining. Research executive Charles Ellis, for example, in conceding the addictive nature of nicotine at a 1962 company conference in Southampton, also characterized it as “a very remarkable beneficent drug that both helps the body to resist external stress and can also as a result show a pronounced tranquilizing effect.”

This claimed therapeutic aspect of smoking was seized upon by Brown & Williamson’s general counsel and senior vice president Addison Yeaman as a justification for the habit that might carry weight with the Surgeon General’s advisory committee. “We are, then, in the business of selling nicotine, an addictive drug effective in the release of stress mechanisms,” he wrote in a memo to his company colleagues, and asked permission of his company’s overseers in London to share the Battelle lab’s candid findings with the SGAC, along with news of a new filter B&W was developing, which like Liggett’s Lark could screen out various toxic substances. If it was forthcoming in this bold manner, Yeaman suggested, the company would then be able to speak out in public about its health-oriented research and be free to analyze and criticize the report to the Surgeon General when it materialized, although such a step would run the risk of exposing the company to liability suits that charged it with knowingly marketing a hazardous product.

When BAT’s cautious directors turned down the idea, Yeaman drafted an extraordinary internal memorandum in which he urged the company to abandon its defensive policy of asserting that the health charges against cigarettes were unproven and, instead, to “accept its responsibility” by conceding the problems with the product and disclosing everything it was doing to try to solve them; the alternative was to remain largely silent. Dismissing the Tobacco Industry Research Committee as “a public relations operation,” he proposed that it be replaced by a “massive and impressively financed” research program that would be “self-perpetuating and uncontrolled” by the industry and that it enlist the cooperation of the American Cancer Society and other public-health organizations; the goal would be to discover and eliminate the chemical compounds in tobacco smoke that caused disease.

Nothing came of Yeaman’s ideas until they surfaced before a congressional committee thirty years later to document what tobacco industry officials knew about the dangers of their wares and when they knew it. Probably the most extreme disparity, though, between what cigarette manufacturers were saying about the health problem and what they knew and were doing about it was the case of American Tobacco, laggard in the filter field while resting on its laurels in the wake of Pall Mall’s rise as the best-selling brand.

New blood arrived in the AT executive suite, once occupied by Buck Duke
and George Washington Hill, in the person of Robert Barney Walker, a rough-and-ready sort without formal education beyond high school, who had begun with the company as a route salesman in the Bronx and had worked his way up the sales side to win the presidency in early 1963 at the age of forty-nine, succeeding the less robust Paul Hahn. Possessed of good looks that were said to have advanced him well beyond where his brains and brassy manner might have carried him, Walker habitually wore a pink rose in his buttonhole—an incongruous adornment for a tough-talking Luckies chain-smoker. “There isn’t a mounting weight of evidence,” he said of the health charges against smoking in an interview with Thomas Whiteside of
The New Yorker
not long after taking charge at American Tobacco. “There is a mounting wave of propaganda.” He and his fellow tobaccomen were “dedicated to the good of the country” and had “made a contribution to humanity,” which entitled the industry to fair play and a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. After all, he added, “Cholesterol may be the killer of us all. But until it’s proved, should the whole dairy industry be condemned?” The question, intended to liken the two industries, facilely disregarded the essential differences between them: dairy products, however problematical, had high nutritional value and could be consumed in moderate portions; the redeeming value of cigarettes resided, if anywhere, in the mind of the smoker, and they were, by pharmacological conditioning, consumed immoderately.

Shortly after winning the top job at AT, Walker dispatched his resident intellectual, former
Forbes
writer Robert Heimann, who held a doctorate in sociology from New York University and was later named executive vice president, to address the New York Society of Security Analysts. Heimann was a master dispenser of denial and disinformation. The health issue was a red herring, he asserted, “and clinical and experimental research do not bear out the anticigarette theory. … Nor has any substance been found in cigarette smoke in any quantity known to cause cancer in humans.” This argument glossed over the dire possibility that no single substance but a combination of substances lurking in the product was lethal over time and, furthermore, that nobody knew the threshold, if any, of carcinogenic activity for the substances in smoke. The industry, nevertheless, had slashed the tar and nicotine content of its filter brands by some 40 percent in the past several years, Heimann noted, and then proceeded to make Tight of the health charge by describing to the Wall Streeters a study that had followed 11,000 American Tobacco employees for nearly fifteen years and found that the mortality rate for the cohort, who smoked more heavily than the national average, nonetheless showed a mortality rate 29 percent below the national norm. But the study of AT employees flew in the teeth of what epidemiologists called the “healthy workers’ rule,” which held it invalid to base sickness and death rates on any fully employed group of subjects for the simple reason that employers tend not to hire workers
with acute or chronic diseases, while those who develop them in the course of their employment or become otherwise handicapped are usually discharged or retire early. Thus, the most health-imperiled have been stripped away from any group of the actively employed, who would naturally show a lower mortality rate than the average for all people in the same age bracket. And at any rate, smokers in all studies showed notably higher lung cancer rates than the non-smokers within their respective cohorts—which Heimann failed to point out.

Whether mere artifice or, to judge them less charitably, prodigies of deceit, such public disclaimers would have been easier to justify as partisan advocacy in defense of its realm if American Tobacco had not at the same time been laboring strenuously to develop a cigarette much milder than any competitor’s. Barney Walker was eager from the first to make up the ground lost to his company due to its past failure to exploit smokers’ health concerns by offering them an attractive and effective filter brand. “We should have come into the filter market with both feet,” he told
The New York Times
.

To win its fair share of the filter market, American Tobacco throughout the ’Sixties launched an unprecedented number of new entries to compensate for the slipping sales of Luckies and Pall Malls. The effort seemed so frenzied at times that the industry took to calling Walker “Brand-a-Month Barney.” His first attempt, while never a big hit, was the most daring and would prove the only enduring brand launched under his presidency. Debuting at the end of 1963, on the eve of the anxiously awaited report from the Surgeon General’s committee, Carlton had the least tar and nicotine of any popularly available cigarette. By combining all the new technology—high-porosity paper, a dual cellulose acetate and charcoal filter, a heavy paper overwrap to secure the filter and create a longer butt, and two rows of tiny vent holes in the overwrap to allow greater air dilution of the passing smoke—AT got the Carlton yield down to 2.4 mg. of tar and 0.4 mg. of nicotine, about one-sixth of the Kent numbers. To circumvent the FTC ruling against advertising the yield numbers lest the smoking public infer a health benefit that was only wishful so far as science knew, Walker ordered the sensationally low figures to be printed on the Carlton package itself.