Ethics Articles
Articles: Smoking
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CBC
Smoking is a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest resembles the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.
James I
Tobacco smoking was a relatively new phenomenon in Europe when England’s King James I, the world’s first prominent anti-smoker, made this pronouncement in the early 17th century.
The tobacco plant originated in what is now South America 8,000 years ago. People began ingesting it - pipes, chewing, sniffing, enemas - 2,000 years ago. Tobacco was used for medicinal and ceremonial purposes. When Christopher Columbus arrived at the end of the 15th century, the indigenous people presented him with the gift of dried tobacco leaves. Columbus had no idea what they were, but his sailors watched the locals smoking the tobacco and tried it themselves. By the time they returned to Europe many of the sailors were addicted to the weed.
Columbus took some leaves and seeds back with him to Europe, but tobacco smoking did not take hold in Europe in any significant way for another century. The French diplomat Jean Nicot, from whom nicotine got its name, introduced tobacco to France in 1556. It spread to Portugal, then Spain, reaching England in 1565. Worth noting, too, that James I may have been the first person to draw attention to the risks of secondhand smoke when he said, “The wife must either take up smoking or resolve to live in a perpetual smoking torment.”
There is anecdotal evidence that ingesting tobacco in any form was grounds for executionin ancient Mongolia, decapitation in China. In the mid-17th century, taking snuff in holy places could get one excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church because the Pope considered sneezing too similar to sexual ecstasy.
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It was not until well into the 20th century that the dangers of tobacco smoking became evident.
In the early 1900s, when cigarettes became fashionable and mass-produced, people had little idea that tobacco smoking did them any harm. More than half the population in North America and Europe smoked. There were some naysayers - a stern aunt might have warned that cigarettes will stunt your growth, a coach might suggest you don’t start smoking if you want to run the marathon - but before the 1950s smoking was pretty darn cool.
It made you a suave citizen of the adult world (chainsmoking Humphrey Bogart, James Dean’s pack of 20s stuffed in his t-shirt sleeve). Tobacco was considered a diet medicine (“Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet,” an ad for Lucky Strike cigarettes once advised). Tobacco had also been considered a treatment for migraines, a balm for stress, a mental stimulant, an efficient laxative, a remedy for toothache, worms, lockjaw, halitosis - even cancer.
A significant shift in society’s attitude to tobacco became apparent in the 1950s. Many seminal studies of the dangers of tobacco, primarily cigarette smoking, cite an article published in 1952 in Reader’s Digest titled “Cancer by the Carton.” The article described the dangers of smoking, detailing the risks of lung cancer and heart disease, which led to similar reports in other magazines. The fallout from the Reader’s Digest resulted the next year in the first decline in cigarette sales in more than 20 years.
The tobacco industry responded. Two years later, the major U.S. tobacco companies formed the Tobacco Industry Research Council to counter what they regarded as a serious and possibly growing threat to their business. This resulted in “safer” cigarettes, cigarettes with filters, low-tar cigarettes, with ongoing research into manufacturing “healthier” cigarettes.
Then came January 11, 1964 when Dr. Luther L. Terry, the Surgeon General of the United States Public Health Service, released the landmark report on “Smoking and Health.” After much study, Terry’s committee said cigarette smoking causes lung and laryngeal cancer in men, probably causes lung cancer in women, and is the major cause of chronic bronchitis. The report concluded: “Cigarette smoking is a health hazard of sufficient importance in the United States to warrant appropriate remedial action.”
It was big news, so big that the report was deliberately released on a Saturday morning so as not to cause apoplexy on the stock market. Officials chose a secure State Department auditorium, one President John F. Kennedy used for his press conferences (JFK had been assassinated weeks before).
But, what did “appropriate remedial action” mean?
No one was quite sure - no one is quite sure today - but as a result of the Surgeon General’s warning in 1964, the U.S. Congress enacted the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act in 1965 and the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act of 1969. The legislation mandated health warnings on cigarette packages and banned cigarette advertising in the broadcasting media.
The tobacco industry immediately went into tactical denial - deny, deny, deny. And litigate, litigate, litigate. Tobacco companies had zillions of dollars in their war chests, enough to win any lawsuits they faced, or simply to outspend and outlast anyone who dared litigate against them. For 35 years the tobacco industry won some 300 lawsuits, without losing one. They also lied, cheated, harassed, bullied and spin-doctored and PR’d their way over any serious opposition.
In a 1988 lawsuit against the tobacco industry in the United States, investigators uncovered a confidential document prepared by the Philip Morris Research Center that contained the phrase, “think of the cigarette as a dispenser for a dose of nicotine.” At another lawsuit trial, a confidential document from a tobacco company referred to young teenagers as “replacement smokers.”
This would all change within a decade.
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Thirty-five years after the Surgeon General’s warning, in October 1999, the world’s largest tobacco company, Philip Morris, acknowledged that tobacco smoking causes lung cancer, emphysema and heart disease, and that tobacco smoking is addictive. Philip Morris did it in the modern way, on the Internet.
Click up www.philipmorris.com and there it is:
Cigarette Smoking: Health Issues for SmokersCigarette Smoking and Disease in Smokers: There is an overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and other serious diseases in smokers. Smokers are far more likely to develop serious diseases, like lung cancer, than non-smokers. There is no “safe” cigarette. These are and have been the messages of public health authorities worldwide. Smokers and potential smokers should rely on these messages in making all smoking-related decisions.
The Philip Morris site even included a link “for information about quitting smoking,” which is like Coca-Cola throwing in the towel and telling its customers to switch to Pepsi.
Is Philip Morris being a good corporate citizen? Or is this dramatic about-turn a colossal instance of buyer beware? Did the tobacco giant admit their products are poisonous and addictive to thwart future lawsuits by diseased or dying smokers and their heirs? Asked this question, Philip Morris communications director Peggy Roberts said, “No, I wouldn’t say that’s true. I think what we are trying to do is reach out and be open and accessible to people in every way possible.”
A year ago, the U.S. tobacco industry, faced with class-action lawsuits from all 50 states, agreed to a settlement of $206 billion (US) to go toward the cost of treating smoking-related diseases, the money to be paid out over 25 years. This does not mean that new class-action lawsuits can’t be launched against the tobacco industry by individual smokers.
An ongoing landmark case involves 500,000 Florida smokers in a class-action against the tobacco industry. It could result in a mammoth punitive damage award against U.S. tobacco companies, enough to bankrupt the industry. In October, 1999, a Florida appeals court ruled that punitive damages can be awarded in a single lump sum instead of deciding cases one smoker at a time.
Last July, the jury in the Florida case found that the top five cigarette-makers in the U.S. produce a “defective” and “deadly” product. The jury is expected to set a figure for punitive damages in November, and the figure may be enormous - perhaps crippling to the tobacco industry.
“The stakes have suddenly become humongous,” said Richard Daynard, a law professor at Northeastern University in Boston. “The fate of the industry rests on this jury that has already found that the (tobacco) industry has behaved outrageously.” The response from Dan Webb, top lawyer for the tobacco companies, is if the Florida award is as big as people expect it to be it would cause an “enormous amount of irreparable harm to the industry.”
Could such a lawsuit bring the tobacco industry to its knees? A World Health Organization report in the mid-1990s says the tobacco industry worldwide makes $168 billion, more than the economies of 180 of the world’s 205 countries. The report also says, “Tobacco causes more deaths than all other forms of substance abuse combined,” killing three million people a year (one every ten seconds).
The admission by Philip Morris of the dangers of smoking, and its addictive nature, raises the issue of whether cigarettes should be declared an illegal substance. However, even many vehement opponents of cigarette smoking are reluctant to go this far, fearing the same consequences that resulted from the prohibition of alcohol.
In Canada, British Columbia is the first province to take on the tobacco industry. In November, 1998, the province enacted the Tobacco Damages and Health Care Costs Recovery Act, which allows lawsuits against tobacco companies to recover costs of treating diseased smokers. One of the lawyers representing the province is former B.C.Supreme Court Justice Thomas Berger.
Ontario announced early in 1999 it is planning a $40 billion (US) lawsuit against U.S. tobacco manufacturers selling cigarettes in Canada. The money would be used for health-care costs for the treatment of diseased cigarette smokers. In announcingthe planned lawsuit, Ontario Health Minister Elizabeth Witmer said, “We’re going to sue the tobacco industry for damages, based on the allegations of a criminal conspiracy.”
In October, 1999, a coalition of anti-smoking groups in Canada urged Ottawa and five provinces to raise taxes on cigarettes by at least $10 a carton. The coalition released a study that said since tobacco taxes were cut in 1994, the federal government has lost $2.87 billion in revenue, and the five provinces (Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island) that cut taxes lost about $2 billion. The coalition also argued that the cutback in taxes on cigarettes in Canada has encouraged more young people to start smoking.
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A World Health Organization table lists smoking frequency by country, in terms of cigarettes smoked per person per year, for smokers aged 15 years and older:
1. Poland (3,620)
2. Greece (3,590)
3. Hungary (3,260)
4. Japan (3,240)
5. Korean Republic (3,010)
6. Switzerland (2,910)
7. Iceland (2,860)
8. Netherlands (2,820)
9. Yugoslavia (2,800)
10. Australia (2,710)
11. United States (2,670)
12. Spain ((2,670)
13. Canada (2,540)
14. New Zealand (2,510)
15. Ireland (2,420)
16. Germany (2,360)
17. Belgium (2,310)
18. Israel (2,290)
19. Cuba (2,280)
20. Bulgaria (2,240)
21. United Kingdom (2,210)
22. Austria (2,210)
23. Saudi Arabia (2,130)
24. France (2,120)
25. Turkey (2,100)
At the bottom of the list of 100 countries is Guatemala (340).
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The battle against tobacco giants is escalating. It’s a story of secret documents and studies of private files made public, and of a famous whistle blower who has shaken the whole industry. Now Canada’s anti-smoking lobby has some new ammunition. On November 22, 1999, the federal government released 1,200 pages of tobacco industry documents, and they paint a disturbing picture; revealing how tobacco companies researched ways to reinforce addiction, and how they target young people.
The Magazine’s Leslie MacKinnon reported:
Dr. Jeffrey Wigand was once a top tobacco scientist at Brown and Williamson Tobacco in Louisville, Kentucky. He’s in Canada now to aid health groups in deciphering a windfall of tobacco documents released by Health Canada. He has become an international celebrity since his tortured disclosure of tobacco company secrets in 1993 turned into the gripping plot-line of a major Hollywood movie, The Insider.
The Insider begins with Wigand’s pursuit by CBS 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman, played by Al Pacino. And it culminated with a dramatic interview with host Mike Wallace, played by Christopher Plummer.
Later it was, in part, Wigand’s detailed and knowledgable testimony that led to the five big tobacco companies in the U.S. paying out billions of dollars in settlement in the face of lawsuits filed by the attorneys general of dozens of U.S. states, as well as numerous lawsuits filed by victims of smoking. Documents used or released in those lawsuits revealed, for the first time, that tobacco companies did market cigarettes to youth and carefully studied addiction and disease, but kept their information secret. This was in the U.S.; not a lot was known about Canadian tobacco companies --until now.
British American tobacco, or BATCO, the parent company of Canada’s Imperial Tobacco, was forced by a U.S. court to release millions of documents. Health Canada has culled 1,200 of them. Some shed light on research and into manipulation of nicotine by cigarette makers, including Imperial.
One document shows that Imperial Tobacco, as early as 1971, studied what it called “fortification of nicotine.” The research recommends the addition of chemicals, especially ammonia,
“to increase the acceptable physiological satisfaction of smoke from normal cigarette blends by increasing the transfer to smoke of total and extractable nicotine.”
Another Imperial document from 1985 describes its interest in “breeding varieties of tobacco in which the nicotine content can be controlled. The primary use of such tobacco would be as a source of high nicotine in our blends.”
Jeffrey Wigand became well versed in tobacco companies’ eagerness to boost the nicotine impact of cigarettes. As a tobacco scientist, he attended a research meeting in 1989 in Vancouver, which included Imperial Tobacco scientists. The conference discussed the adding of ammonia to tobacco to enhance nicotine and the development of a high nicotine yielding tobacco plant, known as Y-1. But later, according to Wigand, tobacco company lawyers dictated that most of the minutes of that meeting be destroyed.
“This was document management, or removal of documents that could become controversial in litigation,” Wigand said.
On November 23, Wigand was appointed a special adviser to Health Canada on tobacco-related issues.
Imperial Tobacco has denied the allegations that it markets to young children and manipulates the nicotine levels in cigarettes. The company says the documents are being taken out of context by anti-smoking groups.
On November 22, Brian Stewart interviewed Wigand.
BRIAN STEWART: Now joining us is the real insider, Dr. Jeffrey Wigand. Dr. Wigand, you were at that meeting in Vancouver. How evident was this, what appears to be a culture of deception, throughout the conference?
DR. JEFFREY WIGAND / FORMER TOBACCO EXECUTIVE: Well I think you have -- well I don’t say, don’t say there’s a cultural deception throughout the conference. I think the conference really reflected the opinions and thoughts of the sciences of each of the company. I think what you see is the end product, which reflects their concern about having controversial topics discussed by their science -- scientists, that would ultimately, maybe disclosed or produced in litigation, is a different form of deception. I mean clearly there’s a difference between the original Minutes and what was, I think, is a clearly sanitized or “vanilla meeting” minutes that were done by somebody who did not participate in the meeting and who was a lawyer.
STEWART: You have, you said in the, earlier on, we heard you say that there really was no difference between the Canadian industries and Americans, in terms of the manipulation of nicotine and the practices. Were you aware of that all along, and did it cause you some wry amusement to think that the Canadians were taking this high horse?
WIGAND: Well I think the industry as a whole, whether it be Canadian, American or European, have the same intent; they want to deliver an addictive substance in a controlled fashion, which is nicotine to consumers. And the more consumers they addict -- and the way they manipulate or design a cigarette is to deliver nicotine, an addictive substance.
STEWART: They’re talking, at times, about getting a sort of ‘optimal level’ of nicotine. What exactly does that mean and how is that done?
WIGAND: There are many ways to do it. In the States, they do it through chemicals, additives such as ammonia. Other ways of doing it is by selection of leaf blends or different leaf that goes into the cigarette that have different concentrations of nicotine. The industry has nurtured a belief that all a cigarette is, is a natural product; you know, kind of grown in the ground, harvested, wrapped in paper. Well it’s not. It’s a meticulously engineered design product. It has ventilation; it has packing density; it has lip release; it has lots of design characteristics that facilitate the delivery of nicotine.
STEWART: The documents seem to suggest, certainly today’s documents, that they had two basic objectives they were quite concerned about in the, by the early ‘80’s. And that is you had the older smokers; how to keep them hooked, and how to get new recruits. What was that -- how was that developed?
WIGAND: Well I think the industry survives by capturing young smokers. And young smokers, I mean under 18. And they know that 85 per cent of today’s smokers in Canada and the United States come from people under the age of 18. And in fact if you hook them young, you hook them for life. And that’s the philosophy they use; they prey on the children. Children are the future sales, future profits.
STEWART: Was there an attempt, though, to also introduce sort of light tobaccos in the belief that that would somehow be safer and so was okay, so you can get them younger that way.
WIGAND: Well, there is that. There is a myth that a light is better. I mean the moniker has been really exploited. That is, as we know, we’re in a nicotine delivery business and tar is the negative baggage. Tar is the negative component; that’s the one that’s involved in really dramatic diseases. As you reduce tar, you’re supposed to reduce risk, biological risk. Well tar goes down and when you talk about light tar, you talk less tar. Ultra light; less tar. However, what’s designed into a cigarette is the ability for a cigarette to give more than what is reported in a normal machine and it has what is called elasticity, such that the smoker needs to take a deeper puff, take more frequent puffs, smoke more cigarettes to feed their addiction. And that’s designed into the cigarette. And lights communicate reduced health risk, but in truly, they’re not a reduced health risk.
STEWART:If you go through the documents, there’s area after area -- one here in particular, where they talk about the need to get rid of some existing files that could be used in lawsuits in the United States. There was a willing attempt here to hide, forever, these discussions, these minutes that were going on, correct?
WIGAND: That’s correct.
STEWART: They never believed it would come out?
WIGAND: I don’t think so, I think the industry had had, or has had, an arrogance that they would never be called to be responsible.
STEWART: When you became the famous whistleblower, how tough did it get on you? For those that don’t know your story, how hard were they prepared to play?
WIGAND: They played very hard. They tried to intimidate me; they held me hostage to my severance and healthcare benefits. They had every facet of my life investigated.
STEWART: There were physical threats against you even, I gather?
WIGAND: There were physical threats, even though we couldn’t find out who was responsible for those physical threats. But just being sued and having my First Amendment rights in the United States taken away in a Kentucky court without being represented by a counsel to me is, is intimidating; to be followed is intimidating; to have my divorce attorney’s office broken into is intimidating; to have my lawyer’s car broken into in Washington DC and have the records pertaining to my lawsuit removed, when there was other valuables in the care. To have my briefcase, during depositions in Louisville, Kentucky removed by a Brown And Williamson attorney; that’s intimidating.
STEWART: It’s very rare that one meets somebody who is a subject of a film. I mean “The Insider” that so many people are going to see now. What did you make of it? What do you feel about it, when you see it?
WIGAND: Well my initial reaction was a little bit of apprehension. When I finally saw it in June of this year with my 13-year-old daughter, I was very pleased that it accurately prevailed over the fidelity of the time events. I mean it takes three years plus and it compresses it into two and a half hours. It deals with the truth. Did a tobacco company intimidate a media company -- CBS at this case --with a multi-billion dollar suit to avoid telling the truth? Yes, that happened. Are there multiple people in there responsible? I think so. I think Lowell Bergman fought a unique battle within CBS to get the story aired. I think Attorney General Moore fought a battle in his own state. The attorneys, in the beginning, were classified as fools. And to have a movie in the end is kind of like the icing on the cake, the ultimate vindication.
STEWART:We have very little time, but I would like to ask you at the end, after all the hell you’ve been through in this, do you ever wish that you just kept your mouth shut?
WIGAND: No.
STEWART: Just gone away?
WIGAND: No.
STEWART: No regrets at all from this?
WIGAND: I have no regrets. I think it will build a healthy and better future for our children.
STEWART: Doctor, thanks very much for joining us.
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