Where I finish is where I started. More than three years ago, when I was a health and science reporter concentrating on issues of health policy in Washington and had done virtually no reporting on tobacco, I was approached by an old friend I used to work with at the Washington Post. We were both science reporters at the Post, but in the intervening time he had gone to work for a public relations firm in Washington to make real money. One of his clients was now R. J. Reynolds.
He called and said he had what he thought was a terrific story, not just the usual daily material, but something really interesting. Granted, it’s the evil empire, but hey, you’ll listen to the idea, right?
I went to dinner with the old Post colleague and Thomas C. Griscom, now a top executive for RJR, but who had before been a savvy political aide in Washington, working on Capitol Hill for Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee and in the Reagan and Bush administrations. We ate pasta, drank wine, and I listened to the pitch.
The company had a new product, not just a new cigarette, but a whole new type of cigarette. This one resembled a cigarette in appearance, and had a taste very much like the average cigarette. But there was virtually no smoke from it, and it would eliminate the hazardous compounds produced in smoking by far more than anything ever produced—in fact, people in the factory who had been smoking prototypes for some time looked to their doctors as if they had quit smoking.
I wasn’t worried about the seemingly excessive claims—they wouldn’t be pitching them to me if they weren’t prepared to show me data. That’s what I did all day, every day, look at data. I called it an “artificial cigarette” and Griscom blanched, but the proposition that a system to deliver some flavor and nicotine without the same high levels of disease-causing components seemed plausible.
What I really wanted to know was why they were leaking the story to me. Whether or not I could participate in writing a story leaked to me by the evil empire would be determined in large part by their motive. I had to know what they were doing, and why.
I gradually sorted out the issues. The reason they wanted to leak it,
and this is the usual reason for leaking any story, was that they wanted
to select the reporter and the newspaper to handle the story, either to
get someone they believed understood the subject, or to get someone who
didn’t understand the subject, or someone with a particular bias they’d
like to exploit. Selecting a reporter wouldn’t give them much additional
ability to shape the story, but if they were clever, their choice would
naturally be an asset. In this case, they wanted my biases—health
and science data—and my ignorances—the business picture.
In this case, what they wanted to suggest was that the main issue here was
a technical breakthrough which could create a significant health benefit
and a product which could conceivably take over the entire cigarette market
if things worked out. But that technical and health orientation would not
have been of much interest to business reporters, the likely reporters to
cover the story, who would think of it as some kind of clever new marketing
scheme and focus on the market dynamics. Worse, a previous product, the
Premier cigarette which they had launched in 1988 with a similar idea but
different cigarette design, had failed utterly as a market ploy. Business
reporters would want to analyze that product, compare the two, and spend
a fair amount of energy focusing on those issues. All this, of course,
is only for the first story, the announcement. After that, all reporters
write the story and even the first reporter is influenced by the approach
of the others writing the story. But the spin of the first day, old hands
will tell you, can make or break a story. It can often set reporters off
in a particular direction.
To a reporter about to be manipulated in this old game, these are thoughts not to be taken lightly. After listening to the pitch, will you allow yourself to be used, and to use the source? Is the story and the particular pitch they are offering legitimate? In particular, when working with tobacco companies, the likelihood of attempted deception is very high; I knew that even though at that time I knew essentially nothing of what I have written in this book.
But if I had good access to the people working on it, could get all my questions answered, and had time to study the ways the whole pitch might be legitimate or illegitimate, I felt it was worth doing. Besides, it was a hell of a story.
I spent time in Winston-Salem at the company headquarters, and sitting in on secret tests with smokers in Chattanooga. I reviewed some data and asked scientists and others familiar with the history of “safer” cigarettes about that history.
Ultimately, I came to believe that the story of tobacco, and the crisis the companies had got themselves in by their dishonesty, followed then by their political and social struggle, was one of the great stories of this century in America. The subject, to begin with, was quintessentially American, from the Native Americans to the rescue of the American colonies by this crop, to the discovery of cigarettes. Then, the story was about social mores, and how the nation had learned the hard way during Prohibition that personal vices cannot be eradicated without very great costs. And then finally, the health crisis, when it was discovered that cigarettes had essentially invented a massively lethal disease, creating a pandemic of illness and death where there had been none. In the time after the Vietnam War, when corporations began to get some of the blame they had escaped for social and environmental ills, here was the worst of all offenders, still alive and well and prospering, thank you. An odd story, it is. Now, finally, the industry is contemplating paying attention to its customers’ health for the first time, with a new “safer” cigarette. An addictive one, with carefully calibrated amounts of nicotine to keep smokers addicted. But still, one that actually offers a social benefit of some kind. The situation, actually, is comical and absurd. But a great story.
From the book, Smokescreen: The Truth Behind the Tobacco Industry Cover-up. Copyright (c) 1996 by Philip J. Hilts. Reprinted by permission of Addison-Wesley. All rights reserved.
Philip J. Hilts is currently a fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health and a contract writer for The New York Times, based in Brookline. MA.
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