Philip Hilts reveals abuses by tobacco companies

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

In April 1994, Philip Hilts got the kind of break that reporters dream about.

A government official called him at his office at The New York Times and asked, off the record, whether he would be interested in seeing some top-secret documents from the tobacco industry.

Hilts agreed to come to the man's house that evening, where he was shown a six-inch stack of papers from the files of the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Co. The papers documented allegations which, for many years, anti-smoking litigators had been trying unsuccessfully to prove in court.

Among other things, the papers showed that, since at least 1963, Brown and Williamson had acknowledged that cigarettes were addictive, a fact that seven top tobacco executives had denied in a congressional hearing only days before the papers came to Hilts's attention.

Based on what he had learned from the Brown and Williamson documents, Hilts, currently a fellow at the School of Public Health, wrote an article titled "Tobacco Company Was Silent on Hazards," which appeared in the May 7, 1994, New York Times.

Soon afterward, he received a box in the mail containing 4,000 to 5,000 pages of additional Brown and Williamson memos, reports, minutes of meetings, and other information never intended for public examination.

Their source (and that of the first group of papers) turned out to be a former drama professor named Merrell Williams who had been employed as a paralegal by Brown and Williamson. Williams and others were assigned the task of combing through the company's papers and weeding out those that might produce legal or public relations difficulties. Williams decided that the dictates of conscience outweighed his promise to maintain confidentiality.

Hilts used the papers as the basis of a series of articles exposing the tobacco industry's long cover-up, not only of its knowledge of tobacco's addictive qualities and threats to health, but of its deliberate efforts to direct its cigarette advertising at children.

He has since expanded those articles into a book, Smoke Screen: The Truth Behind the Tobacco Industry Cover-Up (Addison-Wesley, 1996).

A Formidable Opponent

The exposure of the Brown and Williamson documents has already had a negative impact on the tobacco industry, paving the way for President Clinton's executive order of Aug. 24, which gives the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authority to regulate tobacco as an addictive drug and curtail tobacco advertising aimed at children. But Hilts points out that the tobacco industry is still a formidable opponent.

"They're aware that they've lost the battle here. It's just a question of when the regulations come on. They're just trying to hold off every extra day because the profits are very large, about six to eight times larger than other Fortune 500 companies, so every day they put it off, they've done very well. They've been doing that since 1953, and so far, it's worked."

Hilts adds that although the industry recognizes that it is fighting a losing battle in the United States, the war is far from lost in the rest of the world, where the bulk of its advertising dollars are now directed.

Part of the industry's arsenal in fighting this holding action is the technique of evading direct questions, whether posed by members of Congress, lawyers, or journalists. In his book, Hilts quotes pages of testimony which amply illustrates the tobacco executives' tenacity in employing this strategy.

"It can take hours and hours to ask a simple question and get an answer, or not get an answer. It's very tiring. And after they've failed to answer eight times, do you have the energy to go back and ask them nine or ten or twelve times?" he said.

Even the industry documents that started Hilts on his journalistic quest presented a formidable challenge, over and above their sheer volume.

"All of it was essentially in Greek," he said. "They were full of unfamiliar names, terms, abbreviations. It took quite a bit of work to figure out what was going on."

Some of the papers even used code words. In one, cancer was referred to as "zephyr." Another called nicotine "compound W." To make matters even more difficult, some of the most sensitive documents were not written on letterhead and were undated.

Children and Smoking

Among the industry's most closely guarded secrets, Hilts contends, is the fact that its advertising deliberately targets young smokers, a fact that is supported by the Brown and Williamson documents but is at variance with the position stated by industry spokespersons. In fact, Hilts said, this targeting of the youth market is something the industry must do or perish.

"If they didn't recruit new smokers every year, their market would shrink away to zero. The research shows that adults generally don't adopt the cigarette habit. If you don't start when you're a teenager, chances are you're not going to be a smoker. So the ones who are the real potential customers are under 18. If you don't get them, you've got nothing."

This realization prompted the tobacco industry to come up with the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel ad campaigns, both of them carefully tailored through extensive market research to appeal to the youth market, and both extremely successful.

"The kind of image you're presenting is really critical because cigarettes, after all, are a badge. It's a mode of expression that says I'm independent, I'm dangerous, I'm nobody's child. There aren't many badges around that work well for that, and cigarettes are a badge that really work," Hilts said.

A Paradoxical Industry

In conducting his research, Hilts found that the story of tobacco contains great paradoxes. On the one hand, its chief product, cigarettes, is the number one killer of the century. Before cigarettes were introduced, lung cancer was an extremely rare disease. By the 1950s, when almost half the population of the U.S. smoked cigarettes, the disease accounted for 18,000 deaths per year, a full-blown epidemic.

"But on the other hand, you're talking about an epidemic caused by one of America's great businesses," Hilts said.

It was an industry that saved the American colonies in the 17th century when tobacco proved to be the one product grown in America that could be exported profitably to Europe. During the early part of the 20th century, America's love affair with cigarettes rose to passionate heights. Endorsed by movie stars, sports heroes, even doctors, cigarettes were distributed free to hospital patients, flood victims, and soldiers on the battlefield.

It was in the 1950s that medical evidence began to surface linking cigarette smoking with lung cancer and other diseases. These findings caused many people to quit, leading to a significant drop in sales. It was at this time that the tobacco industry began fighting its long desperate battle to keep people from learning the truth about smoking.

This effort involved the establishment of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, which conducted its own investigations into the health effects of tobacco, the results of which were often suppressed because they did not support the desired conclusions.

It also involved an extensive and highly effective public relations campaign aimed at undermining the credibility of independent studies that linked smoking with cancer. In the face of steadily mounting evidence, the industry continually countered with the claim that the link "had not been proved."

Now with the exposure of the Brown and Williamson documents, that claim is becoming harder and harder to maintain, and in fact the industry's whole disinformation campaign seems to be coming apart. If the courts uphold President Clinton's decision, nicotine will be treated for the first time as an addictive drug, which is how the industry itself has regarded it all along.

But to Hilts, the most serious blow to the tobacco industry will not be federal regulation, but the already growing grassroots movement to ban cigarette smoking from public places.

"About 900 local town and county ordinances have banned smoking in workplaces or in public buildings. That's about 23 percent of the country, and it's growing, so eventually that's what's going to matter, not the federal regulations. If adults want to smoke, they can, as long as they don't do it in somebody else's face."