The Insider Debate

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.

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.

Health Minister Allan Rock said Wigand will help his department analyze and interpret the thousands of pages of internal tobacco documents.

Rock says the documents are filled with code words that Wigand can help decipher. He says Wigand will also work with Health Canada officials on developing strategies to keep teenagers away from cigarettes.

"Canadian companies, just like the American companies, have been manipulating people, have been doing research to focus on the young and to focus on people who might want to quit smoking," Rock said.

But unlike the United States, the federal government doesn't plan to launch any lawsuits against the tobacco industry. (British Columbia is suing).

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 Dr Jeffrey Wigand and Michel Descoteaux:

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.

WIGAND: Thank you Brian.

STEWART: It's been a pleasure.

STEWART: Mr. Descoteaux, thank you for joining us on a busy day. It seems document after document makes it very clear that the industry was trying to manipulate nicotine to keep people hooked and also to draw on younger smokers. How do you react?

MICHEL DESCOTEAUX / IMPERIAL TOBACCO: Yes, that's true; you're right. I mean this is the portrayal of our documents that has been made in the media, thanks to the activities and the interpretations given these documents by anti- tobacco activists. Unfortunately, these interpretations are wrong.

STEWART: Well where are they wrong?

DESCOTEAUX: And they mislead the public. Well they are wrong because we never, for example, spiked our tobacco -- our cigarettes -- with extra nicotine. We never targeted, in our marketing activities, smokers who were below the legal age for smoking. All of that is wrong.

STEWART: I'm looking at one document here, a research document prepared for Imperial Tobacco in the mid-80's, suggesting a target group: men, 12 to 17. I mean if that's not children, youth, what is?

DESCOTEAUX: No. Well thank you very much for bringing that up, because this is exactly a typical example of the kind of misrepresentations that have been made by anti-tobacco activists. This very document -- and I know for sure that it is the one because, because of this 12 to 17 age bracket that you give -- has been explained before the courts about 10 years ago, in public and under oath, by our vice- president of marketing, Mr. Don Brown. And he said, at the time, that this was not our target for our advertising campaigns. In effect, what he explained to the judge, at the time, is that even before we would apply these age brackets, which dealt with the readership of various publications; even before we applied that in our activities, we had removed from the list of possible publications to use any one that was directed at people who were not at least of the legal age status, in those days, 16 years.

STEWART: What do you make of allegations by those like Dr. Wigand, which say it was very clearly the industry was targeting young smokers, because if you didn't get them young, you weren't going to get them at all and that this has been a consistent strategy for decades?

DESCOTEAUX: Frankly, I don't know where Dr. Wigand gets his information, because he never worked for Imperial Tobacco; he doesn't know how Imperial Tobacco works and frankly, I would question his knowledge of our policies and of our activities. We never did it.

STEWART: What about the government's role in this? They're very clearly disturbed; they very clearly believe these documents point to a record of attempted deception.

DESCOTEAUX: Well I am surprised. You say they are "clearly disturbed." I don't know why they would be disturbed, because frankly there are no secrets in the way we conduct our affair. I mean we have been releasing to the federal government for at least 10 years; both any additives that might be used in our products and the smoke measurements that appear on the sides of the tobacco packages. We have released smoke components in cigarettes sold in BC in 1998, following in that the requirements of local legislation, and we've put it on the Internet for everyone to see. And I invite you to visit our site and check on that.

STEWART: Do you know the document which points out, at one point here, "the expense of an exercise to eliminate material from existing research files which might be detrimental to the group if it was required to be produced in an American court." In other words, attempts by the industry to hide documents from the courts.

DESCOTEAUX: Well you cannot hide documents from the court. And if -- I don't know specifically what it is you're referring to, but I have heard previous accusations that have been made that we had destroyed research documents. We responded to that, because we were concerned about that. And what we did at the time is we were simply cleaning up our files. And we destroyed copies of scientific research, but only after we assured ourselves that the originals continued to be available somewhere in the world.

STEWART: Mr. Descoteaux, we're very short on time now, but I'd like to ask you a question. Suit after suit against the tobacco industry; document after document hammering it; where is the industry going to go from here and how can it respond to this barrage of attack?

DESCOTEAUX: Well frankly, today's press conference is a step in the right direction. We are setting the record straight and we're going to continue setting the record straight anytime we're going to be falsely accused of anything. As to court cases, as you say, if any of these documents come up in any of the court cases, we will explain them. And frankly, we're not worried about having to explain our documents because we know that we have conducted our affairs in accordance with all the laws that are applicable and according to the ethics of business.

STEWART: Mr. Descoteaux, thanks a lot for joining us.

DESCOTEAUX: Thank you, and I hope this is going to be useful to your viewers.