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ASHES TO ASHES America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris RICHARD KLUGER ALFRED A. KNOPF New York 1996

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. Copyright © 1996 by Richard Kluger All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright "Conve~t~ons. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York. http:/lwww.randomhouse.com/ Grateful acknowledgment is made to Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc. for per- mission to reprint an excerpt from "Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette" by Merle Travis & Tex Williams C0p)right © 1947 (Renewed) Unichappell Music Inc. (BM/) & Elvis Presley Music (BMI) All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc,, Miami FL 33014 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Klugcr, Richard. Ashes to ashes :Amcrica's hundred-year cigarette war, the public health, and the unabashed triumph of Philip Morris I Richard Kluger.--lst ed. p. Cmo Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-394-57076-6 1. Cigarette habit--United States--History. 2. Tobacco habit-- United States--History. 3. Cigarette industry--United States--History. 4. Tobacco industry--United States--History. I. Title. HV5760.K58' 1996 39~. 1'4---dc20 95-42103 CIP Manufactured in the United States of America Fhst Edition

Smooth Characters BY THE closing years of the twentieth century, the nonsmoking majority of Americans was wasting tittle sympathy on the 25 to 30 percent of their countrymen who continued to puff away, even as the Centers for Disease Con- trol were reporting that the habit stole twelve years of life from the average smoker taken by a tobacco-caused illness. Victims of smoking had been told, and told repeatedly, that their bodies might not withstand the systemic abuse that the indulgence inflicted upon them decade after decade. AIDS sufferers, by contrast, were widely mourned because most of them had not known of the peril when they contracted the disease, were stricken when young, and died long before their time. If Rose Cipollone had had a choice, as the cigarette manufacturers argued, in exposing herself to the well-known potential hazards of smoking, the in, dustry cbuld not claim as much for those ass&ulted by other people's smoke. However diluted it might be compared with active smoking and however ir/- conclusive the scientific data thus far on its effects, secondhand smoke was coming.to be widely viewed asan unacceptably antisocial imposition. Smok- ers almost everywhere were being reprimanded, restricted, and reviled as envi- ronmental polluters--assailants of innocent bystanders. A 1987 AMA survey found that 87 percent of nonsmokers and nearly half of smokers themselves believed that the former had the right to a smoke-free environment, even as smokers had the right to keep jeopardizing their own health in private. A poll that same year by the'Centers for Disease Conla-ol showed that 75 percent of the respondents believed that environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) was harm-

Smooth Characters / 679 ful to nonsmokers, and 70 percent said they were annoyed by other people's smoke. And a Gallup poll disclosed that 84 percent of the adult population fa- vored either separate smoking sections or a total ban on smoking in public areas; even two years earlier, according to a Gallup survey, 87 percent wanted smokers segregated at work sites--and four out of five smokers, probably guilt-ridden as much over the damage they might be doing to themselves as over what they might be inflicting on others, concurred. A U.S. government survey in 1987 found that 77 percent of smokers said they would like to quitw up from 66 percent a decade earlier. "Human behavior responds to context," remarked psychologist Ellen Gritz, a leading editor of the Surgeon General's reports during the 1980s, and the so- cial context by that decade's end had turned smoking into deviant conduct. Smokers found themselves more and more under assault everywhere they turned--by their loved ones, their friends, their doctors, their employers and workmates, the schools and churches in their communities, the media, and the government. They were suddenly being interfered with anyplace they went outside their homes--on almost all forms of public transportation on their way to work, at the workplace itself, whenever they dined out or shopped, wherever they went for cultural stimulation, and even at sporting events in the open air. Although the federal government, mn by deregulators during the dozen --ears of the Reagan and Bush administrations, mostly kept its hands off the ,arette makers, state and local governments were now launching a broad- tanged assault on smoking. By 1989, after a decade-long battle with tobacco interests whose position was championed by conservative Republican law- makers, the New York state legislature became the eleventh in the nation to pass a comprehensive clean air and smoking control act. Among the strongest in the U.S., the law confined smoking to set-aside areas in offices, restaurants, theaters, and transportation facilities and banned it in schools,hospitals, many retail stores, and indoor sports arenas. That same year, as a further disincentive to smoking, thirteen states raised their excise tax on cigarette sales. The prime arena for the smoking control movement was .the workplace. Here politicians were far more hesitant to tread, since for the most part it was private property, but by the end of the 1980s about half of all U.S. companies had established some sort of smoking rules on their premises. The old reasons, mostly to guard against fire and protect sensitive equipment, were now supple- mented by healtti considerations, as more and more firms contemplated a total ban on smoking. One of the first large companies to take that step---Boeing, the Seattle aircraft manufacturer--phased in the prohibition for its 85,000 workers over several years after its chief executive remarked, "When we pro- vide a better operating atmosphere for our high-tech machinery than for the people who operate [it], then it's time to reassess policies." Outright bans were believed to have the dual advantage of cutting maintenance and insurance

ASHES TO ASHES / 680 costs and improving productivity, since smokers in offices with set-aside areas were often found to be. preoccupied by thoughts of their next cigarette break. Total bans ran into resistance, though, from unions and employee groups who objected to the loss of an activity they had long taken for granted. More enlightened companies seeking a smoke-free work environment offered smok- ers counseling and cessation programs. Pacific Northwest Bell, for example, 4,000 of whose !5,000 employees were smokers, found that 7.5 percent of them were off tobacco six months after availing themselves of the company- funded quitting clinics. Perhaps equally encouraging, smokers who continued the habit had cut their daily cqnsumption from twenty-three cigarettes to seventeen. This apparent fringe benefit was one of the chief, if rarely announced, pur- poses of the widening crusade against ETS. As the 1989 Surgeon General's report acknowledged, smoking restrictions, while serving to reduce the health risks for those involuntarily exposed, "may have the side effect of discourag- ing tobacco use by reducing opportunities to smoke and changing public atti- tudes about the social acceptability of smoking." Former OSH veteran officer Donald Shopland, by then coordinating smoking intervention programs for the National Cancer Institute, noted that one of the primary benefits of the new laws was to provide "a more supportive environment for people trying to quit." ASH's founder, John Banzhaf, added that if you were a smoker no longer sur- rounded by other smokers in a restricted workplace, "you're not getting visual and oral cues to smoke," and if every time you craved a cigarette, you had to get up, possibly ask permission, and take an inconvenient trek to a designated smoking area, you began to harbor serious doubts about the pleasures of your dependency. For many smokers who did not want to quit, the social pressures to do so went well beyond inconvenience and discouragement. A reporter for the Long Island newspaper Newsday, part of a trade in which serious dragging on a cig- arette was long a badge of hard-boiled grace under pressure, summed up the sentiment of all besieged smokers when the practice was banned in his city room: "This is a process of humiliation." ThroUghrut the country smokers felt the change. At social gatherings they slipped out onto balconies or into back- yards to indulge rather than face possible abuse for befouling the indoor air. At restaurants, even when obeying the separate seating rules, they hid their ciga- rettes under the table and waved away the smoke to avoid the dirty looks of smoke-sensitive patrons. And at offices and plants, those desperate for a ciga- rette were disappearing into hallways, stainvells, and rest rooms, hovering out- side building entrances, even hunching against outside" walls to avoid the raw elements, and if allowed to indulge in a ghettoized quadrant within the cafete- ria, some gulped down two or three cigarettes' worth of smoke within the time normally allotted for one. The Wall Street Journal reported that some execu-

Smooth Characters / 6 8 1 ves were finding their path to career advancement impeded by their smoking [fliction, which their superiors inclined to view as a symptom of deficient ~If-control or weak character. But at all levels, smokers sensed the growing nimosity. Said one employee at a New York publishing company devoted to radical journals: "People make you feel like you've got some filthy habit." This perception was reinforced by a television commercial produced by the lew York agency of Saatchi & Saatchi for Northwest Airlines. It showed a abinful of passengers standing and cheering the voice-over announcement aat the airline had gone entirely smoke-free. For this antic presentation, the dmaker was promptly fired by another of its accounts, RJR Nabisco, even aough the agency had been handling only food products for the big cigarette aaker. Such vengeful acts, however, could not change the prime sociological act of cigarette marketing a century after Buck Duke had introduced America a the joys of the little smokes: just as peer pressure had once worked to spread he cigarette habit across the land, and then the globe, now it was operating in everse. II F-.~VtrL for its livelihood, the tobacco industry counterattacked broadly declaring smoking to be a civil and human right that the cigarette- aaters were out to crush. In institutional advertisements that ignored the health issue, the ~dustry called out for tolerance of their customers' lifestyle prefer- races and "individual choice"--a thinly coded pitch to ally smokers witk other abused minorities and casting smoking control advocates as bullies, not just busybodies and killjoys. If their foes prevailed, said the Tobacco Institute's veteran spokesman Walker Merryman, "[w]e end up with a product that's too expensive to buy, too inconvenient to use, and that you can't tell anybody about.... [Y]ou might as well call that Prohibition." The strategic thrust of the cigarette manufacturers' counterattack was to present themselves as accommodationists and to campaign for soft "clean in- door air" laws that set aside no-smoking zones in virtually all public places statewide and thus reestablished smoking as socially acceptable. What the smoking control movement was after, of course, was precisely the opposite arrangement: all indoor areas to be declared smoke-free unless otherwise spec- flied. The industry-authored bills in their ideal form added a preemptive fea- ture, whereby the statewide smoking regulations, however tepid, superseded all local measures, thus allowing the tobacco lobbyists to fight one battle at a time in any given state and not to have to scatter their resources combating brushfires in every municipal and county jurisdiction. An instance of the industry's strategy at its most effective was the contest

ASHES TO ASHES / 682 played out in the late 'Eighties in Pennsylvania, where Pittsburgh had led the way in antismoking regulations with a strong law limiting the practice in of- rices, restaurants, and other public places and requiting employers to provide sizable smoke-free areas. Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and Erie, among other cities in the state, adopted versions of the Pittsburgh restrictions. Bat after the tobacco lobby pressured the legislators, Pennsylvania put on its books a statewide law preempting every municipal antismoking regulation except Pittsburgh's and obliging only restaurants with seventy-five or more seats to set aside a no-smoking section and employers to set some sort of smoking policy, even if it amounted to minimal restrictions or none whatever. One Pennsylvania Democratic state senator who had fought for nine years for meaningful smoking controls called the industry-backed law "a marshmallow but better than nothing." More farsighted anti,rooking advocates saw such compromises as surrender. Whenever possible, the industry tried to tack on to the state clean indoor air laws--or to push separately for--statutorily guaranteed "smokers' rights," in- tended to prevent infrequent but disturbing instances of discrimination by em- ployers who refused to hire smokers, even if they agreed to abide by company smoking rules while on the job, or fired them if they were discovered to smoke during non-working hours., even in their own homes. Such displays of intoler- ance, rationalized as economically prudent, provided the tobacco interests with a perfect opportunity to shove aside legitimate concerns about secondhand smoke and to plead instead for justice for victimized smokers. Nearly one- third of the states passed some form of "smokers' rights" legislation, including New Jersey, where Philip Morris lobbyists wrote the law, which included bar- fing insurance companies from charging higher premiums to smokers. One measure of the shrewdness of this industry.tactic was the way it split elements within the smoking control movement. While the New Jersey chapter of the Coalition on Smoking or Health, made up of the three big health voluntaries in that state, and the vigorous GASP organization there strongly opposed the smokers' rights bill as the legislature was considering it, others in the anti- smoking camp feared that the industry lobbyists might succeed in trapping health advocates by tarring them as biased militants. Over the Advocacy Insti- tute's electronic internet, for example, John Slade, a professor at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and a leader of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, warned his colleagues: In conceding this issue to the tobacco ind~astry, we give them what they other- wise have a hard time finding: .a credible issue .... Sure, many people, includ- ing most news organizations, see their rhetoric as transparently emanating from 120 Park Avenue [Philip Morris's New York headquarters], but that does not rob the issue of the kernel of truth that we advocate discrimination against

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR Richard Kluger began a career in journalism at The Wall Street Journal, and was a writer for Forbes magazine and then the New York Post before becoming literary editor of the New York Her- ald Tribune during its final years. In book publishing he served as executive editor at Simon and Schuster and editor in chief at Atheneum. A full-time writer since 1974, he is the author of two other works of social history---Simple Justice, an account of the epochal 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing school segrega- tion, and The Paper, on the life and death of the Herald Tribune; each was nominated for the National Book Award. The best known of his six novels are Members of the Tribe and The Sher- iff of Nottingham. Kluger and his wife, Phyllis, have two sons, have written two novels together, and live near Princeton, New Jersey, where they met while he was attending the university as a member of the class of 1956.

Smooth Characters / 6 8 3 people who smoke simply because-they smoke .... Why are we advocating less protection for people addicted to nicotine? Do we imagine that people are not really hooked?... There are important strategic, legal, humane, and public health reasons to shift gears and to advocate job protection for people who are handicapped by nicotine addiction. Big tobacco did not hesitate to dig into its deep pockets to resist the social e through the purchase and manipulation of the political process. Although ~ae in the antismoking movement were in awe of the industry's reputedly roit lobbying operations, Congressman Henry Waxman's legislative aide pley Forbes, who often crossed swords with the industry's hired hands, re- trked, "There's no magic in it, it's a very basic issueutheir power and influ- ce starts and ends with their money." Just how much money the industry spent in this connection can only be essed at based on clues provided by the few disclosure rules imposed on the abying game. Probably the least of the expenditures were the campaign con- butions through political action committees (PACs), intended to assure to- coo lobbyists of a hearing by, if not the votes of, their congressional .'ipients. While cigarette PACs contributed a reported $2.5 million to con- essmen during the 1991-92 term, for the same period Philip Morris alone ent about half that much on its Washington-based federal lobbyists, and the ~" ',llnstitute, with a headquarters staff of around 75 and an additional 125 ~t. r~lobbyists in the states, cost the industry another $5 to $10 million a :ar. Its lobbying bill in the states, where antismoking forces were proving ore active and successful than in Washington, was much higher cumula- gely. In California alone during the 1989-90 term of the state legislature, the garette companies spent a reported $4 million on campaign gifts and fees to tore than two dozen lobbyists working the statehouse in Sacramento. The 500,000 reportedly spent by the industry during the 1993 session of the New 'ork statz legislature amounted to more than any.other industry or special in- ,.rest group devoted to political persuasion in Albany. Bulging war chests ,ere also provided to finance fights against challenges deemed critical to the tdustry, like the $3.3 million spent in 1994 on trying to stave off a tripling of te cigarette tax in Michigan and an estimated $12.5 million the same year in ~lifomia to win an industry-initiated referendum for a statewide smoking ontroI program that would have overridden all 300 or so [ocal regulations. the industry lost both fights.) With such resources readily available, tobacco lobbyists could throw lavish ntertainments like the annual "legislative conference" at deluxe goli' resorts in 'aim Springs, California, where congressmen were offered what amounted to aree- or four-day, all-expenses-paid vacations worth $3,000 to $5,000 in .re- xrn for an hour or two devoted to political science. These outings regularly at- ,i

ASHES TO ASHES ! 684 tracted three or four dozen congressmen, among them House Speaker Jim Wright, Ways and Means(i.e.. tax-writing) Committee Chairman Dan Ros- tenkowski, and minority leader Robert Michel. The Congressional Black Cau- cus received $155,000 in tobacco money in 1993, and large gifts went as well to the Hi~pan!¢ caucus and the Senate Employees Child Care Center. The in- dustry could also pinpoint its friends and enemies in state and local legislative bodies and reward or punish them accordingly, as, for example, when it helped pay for plane and limousine travel for California Assembly Speaker and to- bacco ally Willie Brown (in addition to campaign contributions that W~uld have embarrassed some elected officials) and mounted a recall campaign against an Albuquerque councilman who had sponsored the passage of a strong smoking restriction law in New Mexico's largest city (the councilman survived). On top of its pursuit of favor with public officeholders, the industry stepped up its efforts to enlist political, cultural, and ideological allies wherever it could find them, ranging from antigovernment libertarians to labor unions to abortion-rights advocates---"choice" had been their bannered slogan before the tobacco lobby seized upon it--to the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU claimed not to have been swayed by the $500,000 it had received from tobacco companies between 1987 and 1992, when that supposedly most prin- cipled of organizations sent its spokesmen before congressional committees to oppose a contemplated ban on cigarette advertising and, in the process, to ar- gue that there was no evidence that advertising encouraged smoking or that its suppression would discourage it. The Tobacco Institute, while continuing as a clearinghouse for intelligence reports on antismoking sentiment and legislative activities around the nation, served less and less as the spearhead for the industry's defensive efforts. TI continued to host weekly skull sessions run by lawyers from Covington & Burling on how to target the industry's lobbying, but the shape, pace, and lo- cus of the industry's lobbying operations were now being largely determined by its market leader. - Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds between them held nearly three-quarters of the American cigarette market. PM, though, was selling half again as many cigarettes asRJR by the 1990smby 1995, it was selling twice as many--and the latter was temporarily in the hands of New York financiers, preoccupied with reducing their immense debt burden before it crashed them. Third-place Brown & Williamson had quit the Tobacco Institute for a number of years, partly out of pique over the Barclay brand squabble, and so remained outside the industry's councils. American Tobacco and the Lorillard division of Loews maintained their long-standing policies of saying virtually nothing about the controversial aspects of the cigarette business. And the Liggett Group, though it brought in the combative former R JR tobacco chief Edward Horrigan in the