When Media Swooned In the Arms of Tobacco
Cigarette peddlers lethally succeed in convincing people to suck smoke into their lungs non-stop, decade after decade. We have accumulated mountains of evidence, millions of publicly available documents, court proceedings, leaked internal industry documents, movies, journal articles, lawsuits, and books. One in five deaths in the US is smoking-related according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) - all preventable deaths, tragically wasted lives. Despite the evidence the tobacco is the culprit of a major health problem, however, we are still trying to dissuade people from smoking.
Most of us understand the deceptive business strategies that the cigarette industry uses to reap profits from its killer product, in fact tobacco is the standard by which deception around other science issues is measured. Tobacco industry history informs current discussion on other health concerns such as global warming, diabetes, asbestos and cell phones. Comparisons between the issues are frequent, sometimes pertinent, but too often facile.
Like tobacco, all seem to have a single corporate culprit. But in order to successfully continue profiting from cigarettes, many parties collaborate, including stockholders, scientists, legislators, presidents, and the media. Tobacco captured the media for decades, in movies that romanticized smoking, in prolific cigarette advertising, and in dubious reporting informed by lobbyists that minimized the known health hazards thereby insuring the continued sale and consumption of cigarettes.
"Investigative" Reporting, Wink, Wink
One of many interesting stories in the history of tobacco is how the industry influenced news reports back in the 1990's when reporters started uncovering the "dirty secrets" of the cigarette business. Major TV stations squelched stories when reporters divulged the tobacco companies' knowledge about the health dangers of smoking. Tobacco companies took advantage of the networks' business aspirations and fears about getting sued, while certain media companies, motivated by profit, complied by shutting down controversial investigative reporting. Together, the tobacco industry and the media industry stifled public knowledge about the risks of smoking.
The 1990's was only last decade, just yesterday, but people tend to forget. Pieces of this story can be found on internet, for instance here and here and here. In his recent book The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (2007).1, Allan Brandt chronicles the story of how two major television stations capitulated to the tobacco industry.
In 1994 ABC News show Day One, aired a report called "Smoke Screen". One trick was to "spike" cigarettes with extra doses of tobacco, adding reconstituted tobacco plant stems and leaves along with extracted nicotine to its cigarettes. This doctoring effectively controlled the dose of nicotine in cigarettes, and incidentally maintained the level of nicotine in the "low-tar" cigarettes, assuring addiction. Jack E. Henningfield, an expert on addiction from the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the NIH, called cigarettes the "crack cocaine form of nicotine delivery". This wasn't stunning news since the Surgeon General had declared nicotine addictive in 1988.
However Phillip Morris promptly sued ABC for libel and $10 billion dollars in compensatory and punitive damages. Phillip Morris was particularly defensive about ABC's assertion that cigarettes were "spiked". They kept insisting that nicotine was not a drug, rather, as their scientists put it, a "product" that gave people "a pleasing sensory experience with mild pharmacology".
Many experts thought the network would win the case. ABC's report hadn't specifically implicated any company, and Phillip Morris's libel claim was not clear-cut, since the company would have had to prove both intent and malice. ABC defended Day One in court for months, spending millions in legal fees.
Also Taking Tobacco On, CBS
Meanwhile, Lowell Bergman of CBS's 60 Minutes was putting together another story, this one featuring Jeffrey Wigand, a biochemist from Brown & Williamson. Wigand was one of many company whistleblowers who had begun to speak out about the tobacco industry and worked with the FDA on their investigation of the industry.
When Mike Wallace interviewed Wigand for CBS, the CEO's of seven major cigarette companies had just testified before Congressman Henry Waxman's (D-CA) Subcommittee on Health and the Environment. Each had said in almost identical statements: "Nicotine is not addictive". But Wigand knew otherwise. He had headed up various research projects at Brown & Williamson and lobbied within his company, B&W, for safe cigarettes. He told Wallace that the CEO Thomas Sandefur had lied to Waxman's committee. B&W management knew that cigarettes were addictive, Wigand said, and used every opportunity to leverage research data that proved their addictiveness to sell the product. He also described how scientists added ammonia to the cigarettes to assure that the lungs absorbed the nicotine more easily, and how carcinogenic additives like coumarin (one of 700 cigarette additives at the time) were added to cigarettes despite known toxicity.
The Weak-Kneed Fourth Estate
Right before CBS aired its show, ABC shocked its employers, its lawyers, and onlookers by settling its lawsuit with Phillip Morris. The surprise settlement was motivated by ABC's pending business deal with Walt Disney Company. Disney wanted the liability of the lawsuit off the table. Phillip Morris had also threatened to pull advertising worth $100 million dollars a year.
As part of the settlement, ABC apologized to R.J. Reynolds and Phillip Morris and paid 15 million dollars in legal fees. Phillip Morris took out full page ads in national publications to advertise the network's apology.
Shortly after ABC's settlement with Phillip Morris, CBS canceled the 60 Minutes show featuring the interview with Wigand. CBS revealed that they were in the midst of finalizing a $5.4 billion dollar merger with Westinghouse Electric Corporation. Many in and outside the media agreed that the Phillip Morris lawsuit was about intimidation and that it effectively dampened investigative journalism.
Business interests had once again prevailed. Coincidentally or not, Laurence Tisch, the CEO of CBS, was the father of Andrew Tisch, CEO of Lorillard, who testified at the Waxman hearings. In the industry's well established pattern of denying science and math when it was inconvenient, Tisch told the subcommittee that he did not believe that cigarettes caused death, because death rates were generate by computers therefore only statistical".
Tobacco Testifies
The CEO's sworn denials of their knowledge of tobacco's dangers were wearing thin and did not endear them to legislators. When James Johnston, CEO of R.J. Reynolds, compared cigarettes to ordinary sweets like Twinkies, Waxman tersely pointed out the stark difference between the two:"Death". Waxman was not swayed then, and of course today, cigarette company denials elicit aghast indignation across the world, especially in the US and EU. We're wise to deceptive marketing, legislative finagling, and payments to scientists in mid-life/career crises made pliable about science with money. Cigarette companies lie, obviously.
But this doesn't help people who are addicted, or people who aren't educated about tobacco's addictive and dangerous nature, or those who think smoking is fashionable, will bring prosperity, joie de vive, and independence -- don't laugh, this is what cigarette marketing sells. Many people have quit smoking and many people never start, but many more people continue to inhale and die. True, this is a devastating public health problem, but its also an undying, successful business strategy.
Tobacco Industry Solutions for Today's Business Executives: A Case Study
Tobacco's marketing strategies are highly successful, as Harvard Business Review (HBR) highlighted in their February 2008 issue, where Michael Sheehan tutored HBR reading executives on "Understanding Opposition".
Along with other business techniques, he advised: "[s]omewhere between co-option and tug-of-war lies what I call a deflection strategy." The tobacco industry used "deflection strategy", Sheehan wrote, to deal with pressures to reduce second hand smoke in the 1980's. The tobacco industry reframed the issue as a "sick-building" problem, which was caused by energy efficient buildings.
Cigarette companies blamed the energy efficient buildings for trapping indoor pollutants in furniture, office machines and carpets. This was the solution wasn't banning smoking, Sheehan said, describing how the tobacco industry reframed or "deflected" the issue. "The solution was to engineer efficient ways of bringing more fresh air into facilities", and although the "strategy wasn't ultimately successful", he wrote, it successfully "stymied [smoking] bans for several years."
It's all about business, therefore all is fair, the article reasons. "Understanding Opposition" was on page 24 of HBS. Three pages before that article, on page 21, was an article on ethics, titled "How Honest People Cheat", a report on supposedly "honest" people's propensities towards dishonesty. It was nice to have close at hand in HBR because it explained some of the rationale of both the cigarette companies who deceived, and their would be emulators.
"It's clear that we have an incredible ability to rationalize our dishonesty and that justifying it becomes substantially easier when cheating is one step removed from cash. Nonmonetary exchanges allow people greater psychological latitude to cheat -- leading to crimes that go well beyond pilfered pens to backdated stock options, falsified financial reports, and crony deals."
The Harvard Business Review editors ironically and neatly compartmentalize tobacco industry's "deflection" on page 24, from "cheating", on page 21. Your average businessman should now be able to successfully walk this line. It's fine to stymie a ban on smoking; but one should never, ever, backdate stock options.
Worldwide Opportunities
The tobacco story spans a hundred years and is a complex mix of sociology, science, business and politics. While the number of smokers in the United States began to decrease in the 60's, there are still large numbers of addicts, especially among poorer populations and those in inner cities who are especially susceptible to tobacco's marketing. The companies long ago saw the writing on the wall in the US with the rash of lawsuits and public health activism, and adapted to the business challenge by expanding their global strategy.
Companies today market aggressively in foreign countries, skillfully navigating each country's laws and seducing young smokers using the same tools they perfected during the 20th century in the US. Advertisements spin notions of individuality, prosperity, freedom and cool factor. The messages appeal to the poorest populations who are naive to the addiction and health consequences.
At every stage, cigarette makers seem to master all the tricks. Yesterday, the organization Corporate Accountability accused Phillip Morris, British American Tobacco and Japan Tobacco of colluding with smugglers to gain entry into markets.
So, Knowing Tobacco's Record, Fewer People Smoke?
According to The World Health Organization, tobacco use causes more than 5 million deaths per year worldwide. Tobacco use will cause more than 8 million deaths annually by 2030. The increase will occur mostly among lower income people, especially in developing countries. [updated link 11/12]
In moment of enthusiasm in 1996, former Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) said to a reporter: "I was with some Vietnamese recently, and some of them were smoking two cigarettes at the same time. That's the kind of customers we need!" Then perhaps realizing how that sounded, he added: "Well, not exactly". A Vietnamese official queried by the same reporter said, "We'll smoke for 10 more years, until we are a more developed country." Then, perhaps not realizing the power of addiction he added, "Then we'll quit, just like you." (NYT April 12, 1996) More realistically, one doctor commented a decade ago about China's growing tobacco addiction: "If the Chinese smoke like Americans, then they will die like Americans"
For all the hand-wringing about tobacco's health effects, it remains highly profitable and therefore capable of keeping potential naysayers at bay regardless of the form of of government. China illustrates the economic benefit of this strategy especially well. The state owned tobacco industry in China contributes $30 billion to government coffers a year, tax revenue that comprises 7% of government revenue (a few years ago it was 12-14%). 350 million people smoke in China, and 1 million people a year die. The country racks up $5 billion in medical costs per year. But government officials have balked at tobacco control, noting that it would "destabilize" the country. To drive the point home, a recent WHO study found that "governments around the world collect 500 times more money in tobacco taxes each year than they spend on anti-tobacco efforts."
It's easy to pick a primary culprit to blame problems on. But while society struggles with smoking as a major public health problem, governments simultaneously allow complex business, government, civilian, and not-for profit interactions and infiltrations between industry, the media, entertainment, and policy-making institutions.
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1 This post is not a review of the book, which is excellent, captivating, and highly recommended. Brandt's analysis and perspectives on the tobacco industry are thorough and insightful. The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (2007)
Acronym Required previously wrote about tobacco industry funding of science research in "My Lab Thanks You For Smoking", and UC Senate Smokes RE-89. Lowell Bergman was one of the producers of last years four part PBS Frontline series called "News War" that we wrote about here.
