Tobacco Documents Online

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

Smooth Characters / 6 8 5 earIy "Nineties to try to revitalize its operations, was just too small a factor, with only a few percentage points of the market, to be influential. Increasingly, Philip Morris was running the show. ... The company's lobbying operations, almost certainly far larger than the To- bacco Institute's, were directed out of Washingto~ although itsNew York executives were constantly involved and retained the last word. Mastermind- hag the nationwide program was a small team of lawyers at Arnold & Por- ter headed by Jack Quinn and a tightly supervised satellite group at APCO Associates, a subsidiary providing business and political counsel but no legal services to clients, under Neal Cohen. The hush-hush Quinn-Cohen joint appa- ratus, devoted to monitoring Philip Morris's nationwide lobbying, was be- lieved to be costing the company several million dollars in fees a year by the early "Nineties, exclusive of the expenses to fun PM's own Washington lobby- ing office, a low-visibility layout on G Street. The battle was being waged in so many places that Philip Morris pressed its own workforce, an army now num- bering some 160,000, into service as its eyes and ears in the field. But the weapons were placed in the hands of outside paid lobbyists who prowled every state capital to block or blunt anfismoking measures. Details of this ongoing campaign were of course not made public, but its scope, methods, and cost could be inferred from documents anonymously de- liv,~,'*.d to Alan Blum's DOC headquarters in Dallas and dealing with Philip ! ;s I989 lobbying efforts in its Southwest region. That year in Missouri, fo, .^ample, PM spent $134,000 on campaign gifts to legislators and state po- liticai parties and $85,000 on its two leading lobbyists. For this investment the lobbying team succeeded in killing a proposed rise in the state cigarette tax and new restrictions on smoking, but it could not pry a proposed smokers' rights bill out of committee. PM's chief agent in Arizona, due to receive a fee of $53,000 in 1990, was commended for "a great job with his first session as our lobbyist. He is best friends with the Speaker and use[d] personal clout to kill our cigarette tax." The $13,000 spent on a gala reception for Arizona legisla- tors at the opening ses.sion seemed, a sound, inv. estment since.they later defeated p.roposed new public smoking restrictions, a ban on cigarette vending ma- chines, and an enlargement of the health warning on cigarette billboards. In Louisiana, where the company's top lobbyist was down for a $77,000 fee the following year, the report noted approvingly, "We are members of all the groups. Particularly helpful is the Association of Business and Industry, which fronted the products [tort reform] stuff." The PM group there was credited with keen tactical acumen for knowing when to back off after it decided not to push for designated smoking and nonsmoking areas in government buildings "because all legislation that would adversely affect smokers had been killed." The regional report card gave high marks, too, to the Oklahoma lobbying team, because it had both blocked a tax increase and manhged to have smoking

ASHES TO ASHES / 686 areas designated in all state buildings "and seems to be able to hold [the legis- lature's] leadership to coming out in the press against a cigarette tax every time the Govemor brings it up, which is often." These efforts were minuscule when compared with the Philip Morris pro° gram in Tex.as,.where it spent $441,000 in 1989 on lobbyists and consultants, aside from such off-the-books outlays as $10,000 for a "legislative buck hunt" and a similar amount on a dance honoring the African-American community in Dallas. By a quaint parliamentary maneuver adopted at the beginning of every term, no more than 11 votes in the 31-member Texas Senate were needed to block the call-up of any given piece of legislation for a vote by the upper chamber of the legislature, which was more liberal than the 150- member, strongly pro-business House and dominated by the influence of the consumer-oriented, litigiously disposed Texas Trial Lawyers Association. Thus, PM's chief lobbyist (proposed 1990 salary: $63,000) and his team "will always concentrate on the Senate," the company field report noted, "but there are things we can do in the House that will be of major benefit to us. We will continue to cater to the Speaker and his pet projects, as well as to the five or six committee chairs that hay6 [helped] and will help us .... " To win political influence with lawmakers, PAC contributions to their cam- paigns were only the most visible ploys, according to one former APCO em- ployee, "because there were so many other ways to approach the policymakers in a given state." Among these were entertainment, consulting fees, honoraria for speeches, and gifts to charities designated by the targeted lawmakers and other officials. A classic example of this last device was the Philip Morris phil- anthropic program in Wisconsin, where during the decade following U.S. Sen- ator Robert Kasten's 1981 arrival in Washington, the company spread around .5,000 charitable gifts worth $6 million. The fact that Kasten, who received more in campaign gifts from PM than any other senator, came from Milwau- kee, headquarters of the company's Miller Brewing operations, was probably not a coincidence. The key to purchasing influence at the state level was personal friendships. PM lobb~;ists and their Washington and New York overseers spent endless hours trying to identify the closest past and current associates of the power wielders in each capital "and how to get them on the APCO payroll," said the former operative, a lawyer on lease to the lobbying conlxollers. When neces- sary, these key contacts would be lured away from their previous positions, but if they were already private practitioners of the law or public relations, they would typically be put on retainer for a year at a time, even when the vital con- tact work might involve setting up only a single meeting. The process at its most painstaking and costly unfolded in Texas in the course of a six-year effort, from 1987 through 1993, when Philip Morris lob-

Smooth Characters / 6 8 7 byists engineered "tort reform" in the nation's second most populous state. To corral the right influence-peddlers, according to the APCO dropout who was on hand during part of this grueling effort, the company's.Washington opera- tives were heard to remark repeatedly, "We'll pay whatever's necessary." He added, "They never balked if the bill came to $20,000 instead of $10,000 to hire a strategic friend, and some went for more than that." During the Texas tort reform battle, as many as fifty "consultants" a year were enlisted to pro- mote the legislation, which was simultaneously advanced by an ad hoc front group dubbed the Texas Civil Justice League (TCJL), the nation's largest tort reform coalition, consisting at its peak of more than one hundred trade and professional organizations, chambers of commerce, and health-care providers. Their purpose was to revise the state's allegedly permissive personal injury claim code, which sometimes allowed plaintiffs to win huge damage awards from runaway, antibusiness juriesman injustice said to have cost the state some 80,000 jobs and $8 billion in corporate revenues because companies had either left Texas for that reason or declined to come to it. The TCJL's tort reform measure was put forward in 1987, the same year in which such bills were bustled through the California and New Jersey legislatures on the eve of their adjournments, providing in essence that products that could not be made safe ought not to be the manufacturers' responsibility after purchase by fore- warned customers. Consumer advocates assailed the "tort reform" proposal as a lobbyist-driven outrage, and the contest was joined. According to one knowledgeable Democratic member of the Texas House of Representatives, the TCJL "employed dozens of the highest paid, most ef- fective lobbyists in the state" to push the tort revision effort, freely spending millions over the course of the-project since under Texas law, it was not a lobby but a trade group and, as such, was not required to disclose where its funds came from, only approximately how much each lobbyist spent. The sys- tem all but invited abuse, and in the case of the TCJL, according to one of its foes, "served as nothing more-than a method for laundering the lobbying money paid by the pharmaceutical, insurance, .and tobacco industries, among others." Though claiming to be a broad-based coalition, the TCJL "was Philip Morris's show," said the ex-APCO man who witnessed its activities. The in- dustry leader's name was never mentioned in the press as the prime mover in the tort law drive. The TCJL effort achieved partial success during the 1987 legislative ses- sion: claimants held to be 50 percent or more responsible could not be awarded damages, and claims were capped at $2.00,000 or four times actual losses like hospital costs and lost wages, whichever was higher. But those limitations fell well short of a satisfying victory, and so the drive was renewed in 1989 under chief lobbyist Jack Gullahorn, a Dan Quayle look-alike anda disarmingly

ASHES TO ASHES / 688 smooth member of one of the most powerful law firms in Texas--Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld. Gullahorn had eighteen other clients beside the TCJL that he lobbied for at that time, including Texaco, several banks, the fire- works and billboard industries, and the Gulf Coast Conservation Association, and was so well connected around Austin, the state capital, that in the days be- fore mobile phones were commonplace, a pay telephone booth just outside the Texas House chamber was set aside largely for his personal use and deco- rated with flowers, family photos, and a deer head in humorous tribute to his influence. Gullahorn's key connection in the tort revision drive was Dallas attorney Dan Matheson, who during Republican Governor Bill Clements's first term (1978-82) headed the State's Washington office for federal relations. Clements, a somewhat laconic figure who some felt was more at home with his country club set than in the governor's office, lost his first bid for reelection, but won a second term in 1986. Matheson, though considered close to Clements, did not serve in his second administration, and during the regular 1989 session Gullahorn turned to him to lead the tort law revision effort. The TCJL lobbyists had failed to win strong support from the executive branch by the time Clements agreed to place the tort issue on the agenda for a special leg- islative session. In an August 4, 1989, memo marked "Highly Confidential" and addressed to Arnold & Porter's Quinn and Cohen in Washington and Philip Morris attorney David Zelkowitz at corporate headquarters in New York, Gullahorn oudined the proposed strategy, which began: 1. Educating the Governor and his staff. A. Choose a primary peer spokesman. Ed Vetter [chairman of the Texas Commerce Department] is the preferred choice. Dan [Matheson] would outline the best strategy for educating Ed and requesting that he lead the delegation to the Governor and explain the economic importance of the issue. Should Vetter decline, we would have identified an alternate leader.- After that, the memo proposed, the primary spokesman would head a team from business groups who would further educate the governor on the short- comings of the present law, after which a third contact group, drawn from the governor's friends and confidants, would personally call upon Clements to press the issue. Despite such elaborate planning, pro-consumer legislators blocked passage of the TCJL-backed bill: By the time the legislature reconvened in 1991, a new governor presided over Texas---moderat.e Democrat Ann Richards--and her lieutenant governor, Bob Bullock, who presided over the state Senate, had

Smooth Character~ / 6 8 9 once headed the Texas attorney general's consumer and antitrust division. Prospects for tort revision seemed bleak, and indeed got nowhere that term. But Gullahorn persevered. He added new groups to his coalition, got learned articles published seeming to authenticate the grim effect on Texas business of plump awards by juries to product liability claimants, and helped install as head of the TCJL the former chief deputy to Lieutenant Governor Bullock when he had served as state comptroller in the late 1970s. Bullock's parliamentarian, moreover, was the father of an RJR lobbyist, one of twenty- eight who were helping push the TCJL cause (including six for Philip Morris) by the time the legislature convened to consider what Ralph Nader had tagged "the 1993 Wrongdoers' Protection Bill." By then Bullock was not only aboard Gullahorn's wagon but pushing hard to turn tort revision into law--an ef- fort bolstered immeasurably by the defeat in the 1992 election of three pro- consumer members of the Senate, destroying the thin protective margin that had denied victory to the TCJL forces for four years. Fearing they would be overwhelmed and denied virtually all causes of product liability claims, the trial lawyers' association succumbed tO the Bullock-brokered deal that re- moved tobacco, liquor, and firearms from the list of actionable products. The victory probably cost the cigarette companies $5 to $10 million. '~l'his is the biggest gift any legislature has ever given the tobacco industry," declared DOC's Alan Blum, who went on to blast Bullock for having accepted campaign funds from the industry and proceeded to do its bidding. Bullock's spokeswoman replied that the $7,500 he had taken in tobacco PAC money in 1990 was peanuts compared to what others accepted, "and it would be incor- rect to conclude that it bought anything. Bob Bullock has always considered himself a consumer advocate." Such efforts as the Texas triumph served to safeguard tobacco companies' treasuries against raids by claimants but did not help smokers escape a spread- ing web of restriction.s by state and local authoritiez. The earlier wave of clean indoor air acts inevitably prompted a demand for more sweeping laws to create smoke-free environments. States on the cutting edge of social legislation, like California, New York, Washington, and Maryland, were banning or rigidly confining smoking almost everywhere people congregated, and many other states were moving in that direction. By 1995, according to Common Cause magazine, more than 600 local jurisdictions had joined in a patchwork quilt of antismoking restrictions across America. Some 100 communities hid banned the sale of cigarettes by vending machines. Columbus, Ohio, a conservative, midsize city, barred smoking in its stores, theaters, and bowling alleys, while New York City implemented perhaps the most stringent smoking control law of any U.S. metropolis, banning the practice in most public places except small restaurants, offices occupied by three or fewer people, and set-aside zones that met fixed high-ventilation levels. By then more than three-quarters of all

ASHES TO ASHES / 690 American corporations with 750 or more employees had either banned smok- ing outfight or sharply limited it, even if state laws did not call for such mea- sures, and more than half of smaller businesses had done the same. III• ALTHOUGH the belief in secondhand smoke as a serious health menace had become the most potent contributor to the nation's deepening war on cigarettes, just how real a peril it was had not been definitively determined. The three authoritative reports in 1986~by the U.S. Surgeon General, the Na- tional Academy of Sciences, and the congressional Office of Technology Assessment--had all agreed that further serious research was needed before a true appraisal of the ETS risk could emerge. Smoking control advocates, though, their patience exhausted from decades of evasion and denial by the to- bacco industry about the health risks of direct smoking, would not wait for definitive evidence on ETS. The fact remained, however, that it was proving difficult to develop epi- demiological data on ETS drawn from real-life conditions. How ~heavy a dose of toxic substances smokers themselves directly ingested had long been readily calculable, but no one had been able to figure out practicable ways to deter- mine--except theoretically---dilution rates of ETS and how to classify just who was or wasn't exposed to it at least to some degree in a society where it was next to impossible to avoid the stuff. It was also questionable science, however tempting, to extrapolate risk ratios at low exposures from the effects observed at higher exposures. As a 1994 study for the Congressional Research Service noted, '°l'he existence of an exposure threshold for disease onset below which many passive smokers fall is not implausible. Many organisms have the capacity to cleanse themselves of some level of contaminants"~which was why public-health policymakers usually did not insist that every unit of air or water pollution .be scrubbed from the environment. By the late 'Eighties, the population studies on ETS remained few, involved a low number of subjects (usually fifty or fewer), and revealed relatively weak links to c.ancer--they consistently showed a 20 to 30 percent heightened risk for exposed nonsmokers, compared to the risk for those reporting no expo- sure from spouses or at their workplaces; an increased risk of 100 to 200 percent was generally regarded as significant evidence of causation by epi- demiologists. Few antismoking advocates candidly noted the disproportionate bases of the risks being claimed. Only one or two nonsmokers per thousand died of lung cancer, while fifty to one hundred smokers per thousand suc- cumbed to it; by stressing the risk of ETS exposure, the smoking control movement was effectively trivializing the risk from direct smoking, which was

Smooth Characters / 6 9 1 thirty to forty times greater. It was an incendiary, effective, but questionable tactic for those on the side of the angels. What the antismoking camp most needed was a finding by the Environmen- tal Protection Agency that ETS qualified as what the EPA termed a Group A carcinogen, meaning that it was found to cause at least 1 death per 11313,000, the measure by which asbestos, radon, and a dozen other substances were branded human killers and thus subject to government regulation. By such a finding, ETS would be elevated to an official public menace, given the all but universal exposure to it by the American public, and it would hardly matter how rela- tively slight the risk from it might be for any healthy individual; in the process, the industry's chief defense--that ETS had not been shown to be a legitimate health risk but was, for some, a source of annoyance, readily mitigated by courtesy on both sides---would be destroyed. Thus, as the EPA in the late 1980s undertook a formal risk assessment of ETS, the tobacco industry was much vexed at the prospect. If the agency pro- nounced secondhand smoke carcinogenic to man, the Labor Department's Oc- cupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would be standing by to issue smoking regulations, which the EPA was not empowered to do, for the proprietors and managers of the nation's businesses. To strengthen its hand, the tobacco industry decided to encourage research on ETS rather than just ~tand by helplessly---and, it would be charged, negligently--while unsympa- tic government investigators carried on the quest. If the companies had un- .,~rtaken the research in their own laboratories, had arrived at unfavorable findings, and then had suppressed them, they would have risked charges of fraudulently deceiving the public. If, on the other hand, their own findings ex- onerated ETS as a serious health peril, they would surely have been disparaged as the work of predisposed scientists. Their decision, therefore, implemented in 1988, was to establish the Center for Indoor Air Research (CIAR), in the du- bious tradition of the Council for Tobacco Research, overseen by an advisory board of scientists from leading universities who made grants to investigators unaffiliated with the industry. Maddeningly, as Philip Morris house counsel Steven Parrish e6mmented,"'[W]e get criticized for trying to buy off scientists, even though the grants are given with no strings attached." But CIAR did not function beyond the industry' s close surveillance, as one top Philip Morris sci- entist conceded, having served on the industry's "oversight committee" for ~ which he characterized as "a creature of the industry." CIAR's agenda was heavily laden with projects contending that many other factors besides ETS, such as faulty ventilation systems and a rogues' gallery of other contaminants less visible and aromatic than smoke, caused the real prob- lem with indoor air. But CIAR also sponsored studies of authentic value by reputable investigators, such as the American Health Foundation report "De- termination of Nicotine Metabolites by Immunochemical Methods," a step to-

ASHES TO ASHES / 692 ward measuring ETS dosages. The industry, though, also crossed to the shady side of the street by contributing millions of dollars, according to reports by NBC News and The New York Times, to a Fairfax County, Virginia-based pri- vate company called Healthy Buildings International, which ostensibly con- ducted objective indoor air pollution tests and reported the~ir findings to owners or tenants. A number of whistle-blowers once employed by the company charged .that the data gathered during its inspections, which almost never faulted ETS as a major pollutant, were routinely doctored to reduce the mea- sured level of ambient smoke and that its representatives, coached by tobacco industry personnel, made frequent public appearances during which they downplayed ETS as a serious health threat. Asked about these disclosures, the Tobacco Institute admitted that it had given funds to Healthy Buildings, which it called "a fine firm." In gearing up for its ETS evaluation, the EPA enlisted a sixteen-member panel of experts, including six who had received industry grants, to counsel its scientific advisory board. They gave every sign of approaching the task judi- ciously. The agency was then aspiring to Cabinet-level status and thus was ea- ger to be viewed not as a bunch of antibusiness, power-hungry bureaucrats but as prudent guardians of the public interest, in touch with everyday realities. One result was that over the ensuing four years of the Bush presidency, EPA allowed itself to be pressured and interfered with by tobacco industry lawyers and officials in what Michael Pertschuk, gum of the smoking control move- ment, called "a classic failure of bureaucratic nerve." But the delays and hesi- tations in issuing the EPA risk assessment on ETS were at least partly due to the seriousness of the tobacco industry's objections to the evaluation process. At first the EPA took pai.'ns to be warily cordial when the tobacco industry lawyers approached them and offered help in the ETS risk assessment. That the agency feared the industry's wolfish intent, though, was made clear when a high official wrote to the tobacco lawyers in February of 1988, "... We are neither seeking the advice of the tobacco industry nor opening a formal line of communication." Yet a month later, EPA sent industry lawyers the draft of a handbook the agency/Was drawing up for employers and institutional ad}ninis- trators entitled "Understanding Indoor Air Polhition"--a curious procedure in view of the agency's own concurrent risk assessment of ETS; why not wait for the completion of the latter before undertaking the former? The industry lawyers' reply to the invitation to review the handbook gave EPA officials a clearer understanding of what they were in for. Many of the as- sertions in the draft of the booklet were unfounded, the tobacco people said, and the suggestion that eliminating ETS will "get rid of relevant pollutants is simply wrong." On the contrary, a large number of studies "show that poor ventilation is by far the most important cause of indoor air pollution," the in- dustry spokesman added, and the 1986 Surgeon General's report had not con-

Smooth Characters / 6 9 3 cluded that ETS was "a leading cause of lung cancer in nonsmokers," as the EPA booklet said, and because of all the foregoing inaccuracies, it "seriously misrepresents the consensus of the scientific community." Later in the year, Tobacco Institute lawyers took further issue with the draft of an EPA "fact sheet"on ETS, part of the agency's series on indoor pollutants. They claimed to be particularly upset by the assertion, "'plainly without justification," that "ETS contributes 80 to 90 percent of the pollution present" in buildings where smoking was permitted, and pointed out that the Surgeon General had deter- mined that no previously healthy person was likely to develop chronic lung disease on the basis of "involuntary smoke exposure in adult life." The war of words escalated the following spring, when the TI enlisted Vir- ginia's U.S. Senator John Warner, who wrote EPA to ask why the handbook was being written by Robert Rosner, director of the Smoking Policy Institute in Seattle, whom Warner called "'an outspoken and vehement antismoking ad- vocate," and why both the handbook and the fact sheet were being written be- fore the risk assessment had been completed, implying a prejudicial mind-set on the part of the agency. An assistant administrator, William G. Rosenberg, replied to the senator that Rosner was familiar with the subject and that his writings would be closely edited but that "whether or not there are health ef- fects associated with ETS is no longer in question." Just how serious those e"" "s were, however, was precisely the question being investigated. ~sure on the agency grew and the exchanges became more pointed by n'aa-1989, when the Tobacco Institute's attorney, John Rupp of Covington & Burling, told Rosenberg that the TI had received "numerous calls from smok- ers around the country" who had lost their jobs, been shunted to undesirable locations, or been denied the opportunity to compete for a job because the per- son in charge of their office "had decided that ETS has been proven to be a health hazard." While it was true that the TI had been-allowed to comment on the handbook and fact sheet drafts, "at no time has there been an opportunity for a scientific discussion of fundamental issues regarding ETS," Rupp wrote, adding, "All opposing data and views are simply ignpred. We cannot under- stand how such an approach can be justified." The price the industry was now paying for all the years it had acted to confuse the public through its disinfor- mation efforts was revealed by Rosenberg's response: "Frankly, the tobacco industry's argument.., would be more credible if it were not so similar to the tobacco industry's position on direct smoking, despite the estimated 50,000 studies linldng smoking with disease in humans." But the two situations were not comparable..Public impressions to the con- trary, no investigator had produced evidence remotely approaching in strengtti and consistency findings like those incriminating direct smoking by Wynder, Hammond and Horn, Doll and Hill, and Auerbach. The-industry coiald thus retain the hope that a large-scale study might fail to show a correlation be-

ASHES TO ASHES / 694 tween lung cancer occurrence and exposure to ETS among nonsmokers. Such results, however, might not find their way into scientific journals because of a phenomenon known as "publication bias"; studies that produced negative re-. suits or did not report a statistically significant relationship were generally as- signed a low priority among submissions. But in the spring of 1990, a Philip Morris scientist, Thomas J. Borelli, who bore the suggestive title of "manager of scientific issues," was scouring about for unpublished studies on ETS and, while consulting the University Micro- films International Dissertation Information Service, struck gold. Not only did he find a doctoral dissertation done at Yale by Luis Varella, a Mexican post- doctoral physician, but the study was larger, than any U.S. investigation yet re- ported in the scientific press. And the results were cause for joy within the tobacco industry. As Borelli noted, after making 300 copies of the dissertation and sending it to the EPA, ACS, HHS, and concerned scientists around the na- tion, "Varella looked at 439 lung cancer cases in nonsmokers"--implying that he had been the primary and original investigator, since no other names were cited--and found "no statistically significant increased risk of lung cancer in nonsmokers exposed to tobacco smoke in the workplace or in social situa- tions." Nor had Varella found any elevate.d risk among nonsmokers due to spousal smoking, which was the key measure of dosage in the Hirayama and other studies that had reported an elevated risk of, on average, about 30 percent above that for unexposed nonsmokers. The size of Varella's sampling and the Yale imprimatur gave his findings special cachet, and in mid-June, Philip Morris's John Nelson, vice president for corporate affairs, crowed in a letter published in The New York Times that Varella's study was the most prominent recent addition of evidence to the body of work on ETS in which "no study of exposure to tobacco smoke in the workplace or public places has demonstrated a scientifically significant risk to nonsmokers" and that eighteen of twenty-three studies that dealt with the ef- fects of spousal smoking had failed to report such a risk. It followed, to Nel- son's way of thinking, that the nonsmoking majority ought to willingly accommodate smokers' needs by. providing them with ample designated areas or i~roperly ventilated public places to carry away ETS. The full story about Varella's dissertation, which Borelli did not disclose, possibly because it did not alter the validity of its conclusions, was that it was derived entirely from data gathered during 1981-85 under an NCI grant to in- vestigators headed by Dwight T. Janerich, director of epidemiology for New York State before transferring in 1986 to Yale Medical School. There Varella approached him about the possibility of using his group's raw data for his own doctoral thesis. Since it was not unusual for students to work on part of large existing data sets, Janerich and the rest Of Varella's advisory committee ap- proved the arrangement. Varella finished his work in 1987; when it was judged tc

Smooth Characters / 6 9 5 to be of a high order, approved, and copied by University Microfilms for the benefit of mankind--if anyone was interested in looking it up. Janerich, mean- while, immersed in new assignments at Yale and without a grant to complete the ETS study, which had produced a great deal of raw data, was able to attend to it only sporadically, and so it had languished--until Borelli drew atten- tion to it somewhat indirectly by publicizing Varella's treatment of a portion of the data. -.. The Philip Morris scientist was not the only one keenly interested in Varella's dissertation. The year before Borelli came upon it, an EPA advisor, Kenneth G. Brown, working with the review panel involved in the ETS risk as- sessment, learned of its existetice and the surrounding circumstances and wrote to Janerich, identifying his rink to the EPA and asking for further data but without indicating any urgency or stressing the official nature of his in- quiry. Janerich, taking the request to be informal and somewhat offhand, was not eager to share his group's findings with a casual inquirer before they had been refined and published. Borelli learned from the EPA that Brown's request to Janedch had not been complied with and, unable to understand why the Yale epidemiologist had not published anything on the timely subject, grew "concerned that the data was being 'dredged' in order to find a statistical rela- ~onship," as he later put it. This concern seemed not entirely groundless after Janedch broke into print in the September 6, 1990, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine with an article entitled "Lung Cancer and Exposure to Tobacco Smoke in the Household." Its stress was entirely different from what Borelli had pulled out of Varella's thesis and circulated to the scientific world. About the only signif- icant added risk that Varella had reported from the Janerich group's data was due to expos_ure in the subjects' homes at the equivalent level of 150 "person- years," meaning the number of years a nonsmoker spent in a residence multi- plied by the number of smokers in that household, so that a nonsmoker who lived for fifteen years ina home with ten smokers or, say, thirty years with five- smokers--a lot of other people' s smoke, indeed--ran an elevated risk of con- tracting lung cancer. In Janerich's report, given wide press attention, this household exposure was broken down to show that while during adulthood nonsmokers enduring even as many as fifty to sev+nty-four "smoker years" (the term Janerich substituted for Varella's "person-years") of ETS exposure showed no increased risk of lung cancer, nonsmokers with twenty-five or more smoker years of exposure during childhood or adolescence showed a doubled risk of lung cancer. Janerich' s paper, citing nine co-authors including Varella, who had died by this time, attributed 17 percent of lung cancer cases in non- smokers to childhood and adolescent exposure to ETS, although he noted that "we know of no specific mechanism that would explain our findings." But other studies had shown children of smokers to be significantly more suscepti-

ASHES TO ASHES / 696 ble to respiratory diseases, and such exposure, Janerich et al. speculated, "might initiate changes that eventually lead to lung cancer when the exposed children become adults." Almost entirely lost sight of in the press reports on the Janerich study, no doubt because the study itself minimized the point, was that it contradicted most of the previous ETS studies with regard to the effects of spousal smok- ing. Not only was no heightened risk found attributable to either spousal smoking or workplace exposure, even at high levels, but "a statistically sig- nificant inverse association between ETS and lung cancer" was discovered in social settings. Janerich conceded, "The apparent protective effect of ex- posure in social settings is difficult to explain," and later speculated that smoke-susceptible people perhaps avoided, consciously or otherwise, smoky social situations. The thrust of the Janerich study, then, although neither it nor those reporting on it said as much, was that only reasonably heavy exposure to ETS during a nonsmoker's pre-adult years seemed linked to an increased risk of lung cancer. But even this finding, while potentially important and inviting follow-up studies, suffered from a serious shortcoming: the questionable accu- racy of the "smoker years" figures. Most of Janerich's subjects were close to seventy when interviewed and asked to remember who in their homes smoked for how many years during their childhood--no small feat of memory at a dis- tance of half a century or longer, and one that was possibly further skewed by the more acute sensations and reactions to surrounding phenomena during the childhood years of discovery. Janerich owned up on that score as well: "The possibility of recall bias and other methodological problems may influence the results." Still, he expressed confidence that his group's findings "support the conclusion that exposure to ETS can cause lung cancer." If the epidemiological evidence for that judgment remained hazy and am- biguous, other studies published by 1990 were suggesting biological mecha- nisms that might be traceable to ETS as a cause of various pulmonary and cardiac diseases. A University of Arizona researcher, exposing rabbits to ETS for only fifteen minutes a day over a twenty-day span, found that the animals' lung tissue had become permeable, opening the organ to microbes and toxins that promoted disease formation. Other investigators had found that exposure to unfiltered side-stream smoke made platelets, the tiny fragments in the blood that caused it to clot, grow less mobile and thus stickier and more prone to clot in plaque-clogged arteries. Toxins and carcinogens in ETS, moreover, were believed to cause abrasion, through chemical or mechanical interaction, in the inner linings of arterial walls, producing damage sites inviting to blood fats that could settle and cause blockage. Children exposed to smoke since birth were discovered to register elevated cholesterol levels and reduced HDL, a protein associated with a lowered incidence of heart disease. Based on the far greater frequency of heart ailments than of lung cancer and in view of both the

Smooth Characters / 6 9 7 plausibility of these triggering mechanisms in ETS and several population studies showing an elevated risk of heart disease in nonsmokers exposed to ETS, comparable to the risk levels found for lung cancer, epidemiologists and other public-health investigators were now attributing between 35,000 and 40,000 coronary deaths a year to secondhand smoke. This news served only to compound the tobacco industry's anxiety as the EPA began to circulate a preliminary draft of its ETS risk assessment, which the Tobacco Institute, in a December 4, 1990, broadside, attacked as "an critical condensation of only selected studies" and accused of falling to include the lately published Janerich study, which on balance seemed to the tobacco camp largely to exonerate ETS as a carcinogen. The elevated risk of lung can- cer found in the nine U.S. studies so far on nonsmokers exposed to ETS was just 8 percent when compared to unexposed nonsmokers, the TI said. Seeming to ignore the industry's scientific arguments, a revised draft of the EPA risk assessment was circulated in April 1991 and drew a careful, blister- ing fourteen-page letter, signed by U.S. Representative Thomas J. Bliley, Jr., a Republican from Richmond, manufacturing home of Philip Morris, whose hand was apparent in the congressman's letter. Bliley had run his family's "entury-old funeral home before serving as mayor of Richmond and moving i~to Congress in 198 I; antismoking advocates found it fitting that the tobacco aadustry's latest champion was a former undertaker. A ranking minority mem- ber of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, with its oversight of Henry Waxman's subcommittee on environment and health, Bliley protested in his letter that EPA had failed to apply a "weight of the evidence" test to the ETS question; that the agency had failed to factor in four recent major studies on the subject--two from China, one from Japan, and Janefich's--which did not support the EPA draft's claimed higher risk of lung cancer from ETS, and that he could not understand how spousal smoking could serve as the critical gauge of ETS exposure "when every epidemiological study published to date uses a different t~ormula for defining'~ wfiat constituted spousal exposure. Bliley's complaint could not be shrugged offlightly, and EPA said it would reconsider its data, thus further delaying the assessment. That many others in the public-health community had already made up their minds about the ETS danger, however, was suggested by a declaration two months after the Bliley letter by the National Institute on Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), part of the U.S. Public Health Service, that secondhand smoke was a work- place hazard that all employers ought to take steps to reduce to the lowest pos- sible level, preferably barfing it altogether, and offering workers who smoked classes and other incentives tO help them quit. But reports spread that at EPA itself, the industry's steady drumfire had taken its toll. The agency was said to be under growing pressure from within he Bush administration to bury or matedally soften the ETS risk appraisal,

ASHES TO ASHES ! 698 and new personnel had reportedly been assigned to take a fresh look at the data. In 1992 three large new studies appeared that could only further compli- cate the ongoing assessment. In the premier January issue of the journal Epi- deraiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, investigators headed by Louisiana State University epiderniologist Elizabeth T. H. Fontham studied 420 non- smoking women with lung cancer in five metropolitan areas--a subject group about ~s large as Janerich's--and reached almost exactly the opposite findings: no elevated risk from childhood exposure to ETS but a 30 percent rise from spousal smoking and slightly higher from work-site exposure. In the Septem- ber 16, 1992, number of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Florida investigator Heather Stockwell reported a small, statistically insignificant in- crease in lung cancer risk among 210 nonsmoking women subjects but a more than doubled risk for those with twenty-two smoker years of exposure in child- hood or forty years in adulthood, partially corroborating Janerich's data (which had shown no elevated risk from adulthood exposure). To add to the ever larger body of conflicting findings, Ross C. Brownson of the Missouri Department of Health examined 432 lifetime nonsmokers and discovered no increased lung cancer risk associated with childhood exposure to ETS, but at the high exposure level of forty or more "pack years" (meaning years of expo- sure to a pack-a-day smoker) found a 30 percent higher risk--yet none in a dose-related pattern at lower levels. If this round of new reports seemed to yield more conflict than agreement regarding cancer, far more uniform--and indictingmfindings were accumulat- ing with regard to ETS and heart disease. By 1994, a dozen epidemiological studies dating back to 1985 and involving 3,131 subjects, more than the total in the thirty lung ca0.cer studies on ETS exposure until then, showed a consistent 30 percent elevated risk of heart disease. Since there were ten times as many cardiac deaths as from lung cancer, the overall toll from ETS exposure was coming to be seen as much graver than previously supposed. The CDC was es- timating it to be on the order of 12 to 15 percent of the lives claimed by direct smoking. The likely underlying mechanisms, too, were coming to be better un- derstood in ETS-linked heart disease. The presence of endothelial cell car- casses detected in the blood of nonsmokers was attributed to carcinogenic agents found in ETS and held responsible for damage to the arterial walls where plaques were rooting. Studies found the loss of platelet activity in the blood, a condition which encouraged clotting, to be as high as 80 percent after repeated exposure to ETS. And eight weeks of exposure was enough to cut in half the efficacy of enzymes affecting the heart's ability to convert oxygen into "energy molecules" like adenosine triphosphate, which served as a little chem- ical battery to fuel the heart muscle's ability to contract. Rather than producing a diluted dosage of smoke and thus having a minimal pathological effect, ETS was now being charged by some investigators with

Smooth Characters / 6 9 9 having a much greater systemic impact on nonsmokers than was implied by extrapolations in the form of equivalent do~es from smoked cigarettes-- usually put at one or two ultra-lights a day for the average nonsmoker. As Stanton Glantz stressed in testimony before OSHA officials in August 1994, whereas smokers' bodies adapted to the toxic and abrasive effects and reduced oxygen supply due to their chronic inhalation, nonsmokers' systems were more sensitive when exposed to ETS, even though absorbing much smaller doses. As an example, he noted that the tendency to greater stickiness and clot- formation in nonsmokers' blood often proved irreversible after even compara- tively brief exposures, because, as he put it, "The process saturates at low doses." As a result, the tobacco industry's fondness for minimizing the ETS peril by measuring it as a fraction of the doses from directly smoked cigarettes "will lead to gross underestimates of the risks of passive smoking to the car- diovascular system.'" IV ':ALTHOUG~ hard-core smokers remained the prime target of the tobacco *-*& • control movement, serious attention now began to be paid to how to halt adolescents from taking up the practice in the first place or, at the least, to make it harder for them to do so. Surveys confirmed the public-health commu- nity's worry that youngsters did not grasp the hazards involved. More than a third of them did not know that p~ck-a-day users ran a resulting high risk of se- rious illness, and 95 percent of teen smokers said they intended to quit in the foreseeable future when in fact only one-quarter of them would do so within eight years of first lighting up. Forty-four states had laws on the books, many of them long-standing, against the sale of tobacco products tO underage customers, with eighteen be- ing the most common cutoff age. But unlike the far more vigilantly exercised laws governing the sale of alcoholic beverages to minors, the curb on tobacco sales was laxly regarded, if at all. Signs declaring such sales illegal, required by eleven states, were rarely posted. Store clerks, often youngsters themselves, almost never bothered asking for identification cards. Witnesses to underage sales almost never reported such violations to the police, and in the thoroughly unlikely event that a purveyor was found in violation of the law, fines were minimal. What message was adult society sending to youngsters, furthermore, when it granted them easy access to cigarettes via freestanding, unattended vending machines but forbade the sale of beer and liquor in that fashion? Smoking, in short, was regarded as far less hazardous to the community than drinking was. To rectify this impression, public-health authorities in Massachusetts under-

ASHES TO ASHES / 700 took a "sting" experiment, sending an eleven-year-old to try to purchase ciga- rettes at one hundred locales around the state; the youngster succeeded at fifty- nine out of ninety-three stores and six out of seven vending-machine sites. And only four of the locations had signs posted saying such sales were prohibited, as the law required. Edward Sweda of the Massachusetts GASP took this in- structive effort one step further by sending two obviously underage children to buy cigarettes from a Store 24 chain outlet and, after they succeeded, brought suit on their behalf. The vendor settled out of court in 1990---the first such ac- knowledgment in the nation that tobacco sales to underage youngsters were no laughing matter--and led other such chains, like Southland Corporation's big 7-Eleven convenience stores, to announce new monitoring procedures. The Massachusetts legislature put through a far tougher version of the roles, requir- ing the licensing of tobacco vendors, steeper fines for underage sales, and li- cense suspension for repeated offenders. President Bush's Secretary of Health and Human Services, Louis Sullivan, called on the states to emulate the Mass- achusetts model and urged public-health offi-cials rather than police authori- ties to enforce bans on cigarette sales to minors, but no federal initiative, such as a national age limit on cigarette sales, was contemplated. Sampling, too, was now subjected to consciousness-raising. Giveaways had become increasingly favored in the cigarette companies' promotional budgets as advertising allocations continued their relative decline. Most state laws ap- plied only to sales, not gifts, of cigarettes to youngsters, so the manufacturers handed them out with impunity, often in settings such as outside rock concerts and not far from schools, where the samplers, usually under contract to the to- bacco companies (and thus not in their direct employ), were sure to encounter the.next generation of smokers and speed them on their way. Joe Tye's organi- zation, Stop Teenage Addiction to Tobacco (STAT), caught Lorillard in the act of sampling youngsters with Newports from a van painted green and orange and bearing the brand's slogan, "Aliye with Pleasure," in large, equally atten- tion-getting letters on the streets of the nation's capital. When Tye repbrted his carefully documented sighfings to the cigarette company, it declined to re- spond .at first~ but when Tye persisted, Lodllard stated, "We do not give ciga- rettes to children," and blamed the incident on the carelessness of its hired dispensers. Slowly recognizing the indefensibility of the practice and the im- possibility of screening out underage recipients, the companies began to drop the marketing scheme in the early 1990s, just as governmental bodies were starting to bar it. Although the tobacco companies devoted a growing portion of their market- ing expenditures to display allowances for retailers, incentive payments to wholesalers for monitoring out-of-stock shortages, and price-cutting rebates to buyers, cigarette advertising still served as a primal lure to young customers who would replace those who died or quit. The ad message, whatever its varia-

Smooth Characters / 7 0 1 tions, was always the same: smoking makes you beautiful, adventurous, and sexy, provides pleasure without penalty or pain, and turns kids into grown-ups. And as psychologists William McCarthy and Ellen Gri~ noted in a joint 1988 paper, "'[t]he sheer ubiquitousness" of tobacco ads--in the press, on billboards, and at sports arenas--"encourages the teenager to think that smoking is a nearly universal phenomenon." By far the most popular brand in the twenty-four-and-under sector of the cigarette market, winning about seven out of every ten sales, Marlboro had built its appeal to youth by tirelessly projecting its cowboy imagery, a manifes- tation of independence from the programmed adult world. To challenge Marl- boro's youth appeal, the key to the-brand's command of one-quarter of the entire U.S. cigarette market, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco decided in 1988 to reju- venate its moribund pioneer brand, Camel, then celebrating its seventy-fifth birthday. With little more than 3 percent of the market, Camel was favored mostly by older, blue-collar, and rural smokers. The company offered milder line extensions and flip-top box versions of the brand and then hit upon the most arresting advertising campaign since Philip Morris discovered "Marlboro Country". • To get around a French government ban on the use of human figures in cig- ~ ads in the early "Seventies, RJR Used a cartoon version of the listless .el on the front of the brand pack--known as Old Joe in company lore (see chapter 3, section I)---and gave him a friskier persona. While Old Joe, as a dashing dromedary in French Foreign Legion garb, had not done wonders for Camel in the French market, R JR now trotted out the cartoon camel to appeal to younger U.S. smokers by turning him into a "smooth character," as the ad copy called him---the quintessential party animal, done up in a tuxedo and sun- glasses, with a cigarette adangle from his pendulous lips and a bevy of adoring (human) beauties nearby. The sexual overtones of the can~paign were underscored by the none too subtle resemblance of smooth Joe's face to the male genitalia. It was all as "plain as the nose on your face," wrote a Harvard professor, expert in Freudian iconography, on The New York Times op-ed page. Reynolds officials professed bewilderment that the creature was being taken for anything other than a hero- ieally posed gadabout, a lover of sun 'n' surf, a flashy racing-car driver, or the leader of a five-camel blues band known--suggestively, according to Joe's critics--as the Hard Pack. "I was not amused by it," James Johnston, fired a decade earlier but recalled in 1989 by the takeover Kravis management to run the ILIR domestic tobacco operation, said of the uproar the ad campaign was causing. Johnston ordered Old Joe's looks to be made less testicular, but when the ad agency artists presented him deawings of a fifteen-stage evolution of the animal, his phallic appearance had not notably changed. "That's what camels --,lly look like," Johnston was told, and he decided Old Joe was not about to

ASHES TO ASHES / 702 be tampered with to placate puritanical fantasies. Besides, Madison Avenue loved the lively rou6. The .n..ew Old Joe was odd-looking and amusing enough to win high marks fi:om the creative end of the business for breaking out of the sameness that had long dulled cigarette advertising. Reynolds budgeted $75 million a year to advertise and promote Joe Camel. A huge, illuminated "smooth character" billboard went up in Times Square, a block from where the famous Camel sign with its wafting smoke rings had gone up early in World War II and had remained for a generation. And the company aggressively promoted Joe's likeness in a whole line of such youth- oriented merchandise as T-shirts and sweatshirts, posters, mugs, and beach sandals, purchasable with "C-Notes," bills featuring Joe in a George Washing- ton wig and available in exchange for empty packs of Camel. Tobacco control advocates pounced on the Joe'Camel campaign as evi- dence of the industry's contempt for public concern about the health issue and a transparent pitch to young people--surely the cartoon character and his like- ness adorning low-priced recreational gear were not targeted at adult buyers, they argued. The Coalition on Smoking or Health petitioned the bTC to halt the Joe Camel ads as unfair advertising, luring the underaged to purchase a hazardous product. And Surgeon General Koop's successor, Antonia Novello, urged Reynolds to rein in Old Joe as a public-health menace and called upon the nation's newspaper and magazine publishers to turn down Camel ads and upon retailers not to display point-of-sales materials featuring the lusty pitch- man. But RJR steadfastly denied that the campaign was aimed at underage buyers--to concede as much would have been to plead guilty to fostering ille- gal sales--and granted only that the marketing program was directed toward young adults whom it was trying to switch from rival brands. Nobody could prove otherwise. Protestations of intent aside, Reynolds was succeeding fabulously in win- ning recognition for its cheeky cm-toon Camel mascot among youngsters well under the legal smoking age. Several studies reaching that conclusion in the December 11,199.1, issue of JAMA showed, among other findings, that 30 per- cent of three-year-olds and 90 percent of six-year-olds questioned knew that the Joe Camel image was connected with cigarettes, and that 98 percent of high schoolers grasped Joe's link to the Camel brand (compared with 67 per- cent of adults who made the linkage). Still, RJR's Johnston insisted, "Adver- tising is irrelevant to a young person's decision to begin smoking," and his ad agency executives argued that cartoon characters like the "Jolly Green Giant" and Owens Corning's "Pink Panther" were used to push products without gen- erating a passion for string beans or insulating material among children. Still, for whatever reason, beginning smokers were found by surveys to favor over- whelmingly the most heavily advertised brands. If the effectiveness of the Joe Camel campaign was measured not by the no-

Smooth Characters / 7 0 3 toriety it aroused but by its effect on sales, then the effort was proving hardly worth the antagonism it engendered and the fuel it provided for those calling on Congress to ban cigarette advertising altogether. Camel's market share in the twenty-four-and-under sector climbed from 4.4 percent to 7.9 percent at its height, but in 1993, five years into the cartoon campaign, the brand's overall share had risen only about 1 percentage point to just over 4. By the following year, when the FTC finally decided not to act against Reynolds's use of Joe Camel, pfiapic or not, the brand's share was back under 4 percent. To counter the cigarette companies' efforts to shore up their eroding con- sumer base--between 400,000 and 500,000 were said to be dying from smoking or ETS every year, more than a million quit annually, and 15 million tried to---by enlisting young smokers, preventive medicine authorities urged a more aggressive intervention and educational campaign. By far the most suc- cessful effort along these lines was undertaken in California, where tobacco control advocates had long been stymied by state lawmakers indifferent to the problem, or worse. "When the tobacco industry says 'Jump,' "remarked Mark Pertschuk of the Berkeley-based Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights (ANR), "the California Legislature says, 'How high?' " Its most powerful figure, As- sembly Speaker Willie Brown, accepted some $200,000 from tobacco-funded political action committees over a five-year period in the late 'Eighties and. early "Nineties and was known to have worked closely with industry officials to help foil antismoking legislation. Thus, while California led the nation in the number of local smoking restrictions, there was no substantive statewide pro- gram in place. To end this bottleneck, nonsmokers' rights groups framed Proposition 99, to be passed on directlyby California voters in 1988. "Prop 99" called for rais- ing California's low ten-cent-a-pack cigarette tax by twenty-five cents, the largest tobacco excise increase ever contemplated by any U.S. governmental jurisdiction. The revenues from it were to be devoted to an antismoking educa- tional campaign, cancer research, medical services for indigents, and reforesta- tion of areas ravaged by cigarette-ignited fires. The cigarette manufacturers, with 10 percent of their domestic market imperiled by the threatened huge tax rise, responded with a war chest esti- mated at $15 million and a no-holds-barred advertising campaign. In a typical industry-paid ad, an alleged undercover police officer stated that the big ciga- rette tax jump "will create major crime" by increasing tobacco smuggling from out of state through gangs who could clear $13,000 per vanload of contraband smokes, enough-to buy "thirty-two pounds of marijuana, enough crack for 4

ASHES TO ASHES / 704 1,280 kids, or 185 handguns." But the invention of such bogeymen boomer- anged. California law enforcement officers who had initially opposed the ciga- rette tax hike objected to the tobacco industry's fabricated argument and withdrew their opposition. More to the point, the nonsmoking public, heavily in the majority, liked the tax increase because its burden fell entirely on smok- ers and its yield would be a windfall for the state's public-health and environ- mental protection needs. Prop 99 sailed to victory with 58 percent of the voters in favor. The smoking control movement, starved for funding nationwide and surviv- ing through the dedication of a handful of workers, suddenly found itself awash in California gold. The twenty-five-cent tax increase produced $150 million to educate state residents on the perils of smoking and help them quit--a figure fifty times as high as the total for those purposes in the other forty-nine states. And the money, astonishingly, was put to effective use. Three hundred public-health officers went on the payroll statewide to train and oversee local health workers in tobacco control programs set up in each of Cal- ifornia's fifty-eight counties and 1,000 school districts. Nothing like this had ever been attempted. A fourteen-month advertising campaign budgeted at al- most $30 million and supervised by California's Department of Health Ser- vices was launched in 1990; conducted in eight languages, it involved 69 television stations, 147 radio stations, 130 newspapers, and 775 billboards. Antismoking activists had feared that these public-service ads would prove bland and stingless, but t~ey displayed imagination and wit, and contained scalding criticism of the cigarette companies, whose executives were portrayed in them as cynical and manipulative. Perhaps the most notable of the commer- cials showed a simulated, smoke-wreathed conference of tobacco officials, one of whom was saying that they had a multibillion-dollar problem on their hands: "We need more. ~igarette smokers. Pure. and simple. Every day 2,000 Americansstop smoking, and another 1,100 also quit. Actually, technically, they die. That means that this business needs 3,000 fresh, new volunteers every day .... " The unseen speaker then gave a laugh and added, "We're not in this for our health." Some of the commercials were beamed-at ethnic com- munities, like one in Spanish that said simply, "Our children grow up wanting to be like us .... Don't let them inherit our bad habits. For your family's sake don't smoke." Youngsters in the black community were appealed to with an antismoking recitation in rap, which went in part: "We used to pick it/now they want us to smoke it.../tobacco blacks it's killin' many/the ages start from fifteen to twenty/cancer it be givin'/keeping brothers from livin'/six feet under the ground/they are diggin'.../cigarettes are killing black men/faster than whites." Such a head-on assault alarmed the cigarette makers, not least of all because of how it vilified them as well as thei~ product. Asserted the Tobacco Insti-

Smooth Characters / 7 0 5 tute's veteran spear-carrier, Walker Merryman, "This is a very nasty, scan- dalous personal attack on people in the tobacco industry," and he went on to complain that the state government of California was spending millions of the public's tax dollars on "a propaganda campaign". The shoe was plainly on the other foot now, and it fit. The California antismoking attack was indeed per- sonal---that was part of the point of it--for if Rose Cipollone, to cite one of hundreds of thousands who succumbed annually to smoking-related diseases, had exercised her personal choice in electing to smoke and paid the price for it, so, too, did tobacco industry executives make a personal choice in devoting their careers to the manufacture and marketing of a product known to be a grave health menace. Why should these highly paid businessmen have been immune to the consequences of their actions and have escaped public scorn? And if California's antismoking ads were tax-funded propaganda, then what was the tobacco industry's own advertising--and wasn't it being paid for in part by tax-deductible dollars that amounted to a public subsidy in the billions? The effects of the big cigarette tax rise and the antismoking drive it paid for were immediate and sensational. California smokers began quitting at twice the national rate, and by 1991 the percentage of smokers in the state had dropped from 25 to 21, one of the lowest figures in the nation. Indeed, the anti- ",smoking effort was proving so successful that the industry began putting on .the heat every way it could to undermine the program. One result was that the state's new governor, Pete Wilson, with the connivance of tobacco industry friends in the legislature, acted to plug his budgetary shortfall by commandeer- ing some of the cigarette tax revenues--a move that antismoking forces went to court to challenge. But Wilson" soon proved to be no friend of the tobacco industry. In 1993, he issued an executive order banning smoking in all build- ings owned or leased by the state, and the foliowing year signed one of the most restrictive smoking control measures in the hation. Philip Morris moved at once to try to blunt the sweeping bill, which marked the end of the tobacco lobby's long dominance over the legislature in Sacramento, by spending.mil- lions to mount a referendum on what Was styled the California Uniform To- bacco Control Act, a euphemism for snuffing out all local smoking laws and replacing them with a single, statewide, and much-watered-down measure. With a 71 percent vote against, California voters that fall kept the nation's most populous state in the antismoking vanguard. vI AT the national level, the smoking control e~fort languished. Eighteen years were to pass between the first significant federal regulatory mea- sure--the 1970 broadcast ban on cigarette advertising--and the next one--a

ASHES TO ASHES ) 706 ban on smoking by airplane passengers on flights of two hours or shorter. And even then, the new restriction was something of a fluke, a nearly spontaneous display of congressional pique that cut across party lines and traditional alliances. Reagan appointees at the Federal Aviation Administration and Department of Transportation had been sitting on the idea of an in-flight smoking ban for several years when spadework to take the concept out of the hands of the deregulators and present it to Congress for enactment was begun by Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights, which viewed midair smoking as a classic instance of nonsmokers' victimization. But ANR, while growing in numbers and effec. tiveness, was still small and far away from Washington, so it leagued with the Coalition on Smoking or Health and the 50,000-member flight attendants union, which saw itself as uniquely vulnerable to the smoke in the recirculated air that crews had to breathe throughout their workweek. The in-flight smoking ban got nowhere, though, until the spring of 1988 when a stalwart advocate arose in the person of U.S. Representative Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Dem- ocrat in his third term in the House. A Springfield attorney and skilled parliamentarian, Durbin without warning tacked on an amendment to an appropriations bill being considered by the House transportation subcommittee, on which he sat, calling for a cutoff of federal funds to any airport servicing planes that did not impose a smoking ban on domestic flights of two hours or under. Durbin's amendment failed in sub- committee, five votes to three, and was buried by a twenty-three-to-eleven tally when he proposed it to the full Appropriations Committee. And since the idea had no backing from the House's Democratic leadership, it was left for dead, and the tobacco lobby breathed easy. But Durbin heard informally from many House colleagues, who were among the nation's most frequent fliers, shuttling between Washifigton and their home constituencies almost every weekend, that his proposal appealed to them. No one had to lecture them on the unpleasantness of ETS, and no bom- bardment of technical data from tobacco lobbyists could convince them that tl~e stuff, however much filtered in flight, was harmless. Durbin went to his friend Claude Pepper, chairman of the House Rules Committee, and obtained a procedural waiver so that his amendment could be brought directly to the House floor for a two-hour debate and vote. He had four days before the sched- uled airing to gather a majority for the ban. ANR's directors, Mark Pertschuk and Julia Carol in Berkeley, went to work on their membership list of 15,000, telephoning and sending express letters to try to generate an instant cascade of appeals by nonsmokers to their congress- men. The whole network of GASP units across the country was similarly mo- bilized, and by the time Durbin took the House. floor to push his amendment, the message had been delivered. Throughout his remarks Durbin pointed to

Smooth Characters / 7 0 7 members of the flight attendants union, present in their uniforms in the House gallery, whose health concerns gave the measure an urgency that outweighed the discomfort of congressmen. The ban passed, 198 to 193, and went to the Senate, where, despite a three-month lull during which the tobacco lobby fevefishiy worked its wiles, the antismoking sentiment was ascendant. Key to this surprising development was New Jersey Democrat Frank Lautenberg, chairman of the Senate's transportation subcommittee, who made clear to his colleagues that the in-flight smoking ban was a priority item for him and that those who bucked him in the matter risked a lean diet of pork when transporta- tion projects in their home districts came up for Senate funding. The measure, to last for two years and then face reconsideration in view of the public's re- sponse, carded by a vote of 84 to 10. The ban, despite the loud lamentations of some smokers, was made permanent in 1990 and was extended to all domestic flights. Just how remarkable the airborne ban was could be gauged by the congres- sional response to a report it received, in the same month it outlawed smoking on planes, from a fifteen-member federal study commission, which for three years had been considering the feasibility of manufacturing fire-safe cigarettes. Five of the commission members represented the. tobacco companies, which had insisted that cigarettes that burned at low enough temperatures to reduce the ignition hazard when coming into contact with flammable materials could not be produced without the introduction of new and costly equipment. But the federal study commission was able to achieve its goal by no more exotic means than experimental cigarettes with a reduced circumference, a lower than normal density of tobacco, less porous paper, and no citrate additive to speed up burning. The cumulative effect of these features was to drop the ignition temperature to the point where, as the commission report concluded, "lilt is technically feasible and may be commercially feasible to develop cigarettes that will have a significantly reduced propensity to ignite upholstered furniture or mat~sses.'* Even so, the tobacco companies still argued that such a fire-safe cigarette would be burdensome to market because it was hard to draw on-~one com- pany man likened it to trying to drink a milk shake through five straws laid end to end~and had an unsatisfactory taste. Another three years ought to be allot- ted for the manufacturers to test-market the experimental cigarette, the indus- try said. Commission member Andrew McGuire, head of San Francisco's Trauma Foundation and the moving force behind the fire-retardant cigarette ef- fort, called this "an unconscionable delay" and pointed out that the tobacco in- dustry had raised precisely th~ same objections about reduced draw and taste before introducing filt~r and lowered-tar brands when medical evidence threat- ened its very survival. But cigarette-ignited fires in the late 'Eighties were tak- ing a relatively low 1,500 lives a year and causing some 7,000 serious injuries

ASHES TO ASHES ! 708 (although McGuire contended that the toll was much higher, citing a seven- year Maryland study that traced almost half of all fire deaths to cigarette smok- ing). For such a modest reduction in mortality, the industry was reluctant to risk introducing a manufacturing technique that would rerriirid consumers of still one more way that smoking imperiled human life. The tobacco companies had bought political clout, moreover, through sizable contributions to such groups as the National Volunteer Fire Council, which stood with the industry in stressing the need for public education, not a new cigarette design, in the war to reduce fire hazards. Congress caved in and granted the additional de- lay, stalling any meaningful industry response to the safety need well into the 1990s. If Congress mostly malingered in the matter of serious strictures on the manufacture, sale, and use of cigarettes, the tobacco industry was the benefi- ciary of a yet more pleasing indifference by the executive branch during the dozen years that deregulatory fundamentalism prevailed at the Reagan-Bush White House. Neither President lifted a finger to encourage smoking control legislation, and the ardent antitobacco preachments of the Surgeon Generals who served them were permitted so long as they were understood to be merely prescriptive for healthful private behavior, not a call for action by government. The only detectable difference between the two administrations on smoking policy was that dinner guests in the Reagan White House were still offered cig- arettes when the meal was over, while Barbara Bush did not extend that ques- tionable kindness. Evidence of the Reagan-Bush unconcern about the tobacco issue abounded. In 1987, for example, the FTC shut down the laboratory it had run for twenty years to monitor the tar and nicotine yields of most cigarette brands, ostensibly to save the $750,00t3 a y.ear it cost to provide the public with the only re- liable measurement of those toxic substances. The task was handed over to an industry-run laboratory--the equivalent of assigning the fox to guard the hen coop--with an occasional checkup visit by a government inspector. The FDA and EPA were hardly more-vigorous .in their policing of tobacco products. In 1990, for example, the two agencies moved swiftly and jointly to order Perrier mineral water off the nation's retail shelves when it was discovered that each bottle contained minute amounts of toxic benzene. Cigarette packs, mean- while, which the 1986 Surgeon General's report stated had up to 2,000 times more benzene than each Perrier bottle, remained exempt from such preventive measures. The EPA had by then formulated nine rules and OSHA had put out six regulations governing pollution by carcinogenic substances believed to claim, among them, a total of 1,000 lives a year, but neither agency had formu- lated anything to deal with secondhand tobacco smoke, which public-health investigators said took from 3,000 to 5,000 lives annually by lung cancer alone. The EPA did finally undertake reviews to determine if ETS could in fact 1 I ! t

Smooth Characters / 7 0 9 be lethal, but would not declare its findings until literally the final hours of the Bush administration. The only Cabinet member who registered concern about smoking in those years was Bush's HHS Secretary, Dr. Louis Sullivan, an African-American, who would manage an outburst now and then about how unscrupulous cigarette makers were targeting minorities with their advertising and promotion, but he publicly proposed no federal legislation to modify these or any other practices by the industry. When Sullivan did grow bold enough to fashion a government-wide executive order that would have made all federal office buildings smoke-free except for certain designated areas, his proposal sat in the White House awaiting presidential implementation that never came. The closest the Reagan-Bush executive branch did come to an antismoking initiative was its countenancing a program at the National Cancer Institute, un- der the leadership of a skilled and passionate bureaucrat, veteran public-health officer Joseph Cullen, who guided a series of sixty studies on why smokers take up the habit and how best to help them stop it. Based on the results, NCI in 1991 launched the costliest ever federal antismoking effort, a seven-year, seventeen-state, $135 million drive aimed at cutting the adult smoking popula- tion from around 28 percent to 15 by th6 century's end. It was a project that *,omehow fell between the cracks, escaping congressional ire largely because it ~as aimed at modifying the behavior of smokers and not the conduct of the cigarette business. And it was abundantly compensated for, to the extent that it menaced the tobacco companies' fortunes, by the highly active role played by Reagan-Bush federal trade officials in prying open large, lucrative, and previ- ously impenetrable Asian markets for U.S. brands. Even as U.S. cigarette consumption ebbed by one or two percentage points ~t year over the last two decades of the twentieth century, the industry ever more hungrily scouted and infiltrated markets abroad. Pacesetting Philip Mor- ris sold two cigarettes overseas for every one that it peddled domestically. Some 70 percent of PM's foreign sales were in Western Europe, where by the mid-'Eighties i~ had become the contirient's leading Cigarette purveyor. But it was fast becoming a saturated market, fiercely contested by international and domestic manufacturers; the future lay elsewhere. American cigarette makers were doing well enough in the open markets of the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore, but the rest of the Pa- cific Rim nations remained out of their reach, practically speaking, due to high tariff barriers and punitive excise taxes on imported brands. These East Asian countries--Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Thailandwwith a combined pop- ulation larger than the U.S., were. prosperous, smoked cigarettes heavily, and, thanks in large part to th.e cheapn~~ii.~f:their labor, were flooding American shores with quality goods that.cpn~_xl to an-ever-widening unfavorable balance of U.S. trade and helped tran~f~ America into a debtor nation. By Reagan's second term, his economic masterminds were receptive to any

ASHES TO ASHES / 710 plan that might ease the nation's trade imbalance and spiraling U.S. debt--and the tobacco companies, deepiy devoted to a laissez-faire government policy to- ward their domestic operations, were only too eager to enlist federal officials to help them penetrate the alluring East Asian markets. The effort began in earnest with the enlistment of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) of a wealthy Nebraskan, Clayton K. Yeutter, who had held high posts in the Nixon- Ford Agriculture and Transportation departments before becoming president of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Yeutter's chief weapon to aid the Amer- ican tobacco industry was Section 301 of the 1974 revision of the U.S. Trade Act, empowering the President to slap retaliatory tariffs on imports from na- tions that discriminated against U.S. goods seeking access to their markets. Between 1985 and 1990 the USTR's office processed seventy-nine Section 301 complaints, and none more ardently than the six it brought in behalf of U.S. cigarette exporters. That he retained, among other assets (including a 2,500-acre ranch), tobacco company stocks or options worth between $30,000 to $100,000 at the time he was promoting U.S. cigarette sales abroad did not rise to the level of a conflict of interest, USTR Yeutter would explain when he was appointed Secretary of Agriculture by President Bush and given an elabo- rate Inauguration Week party in 1989 by a grateful Philip Morris. Yeutter's prime target was Japan, a smoker's paradise and the second largest cigarette market in the non-Communist world. Two-thirds of its men (but a mere 7 percent of its women) used cigarettes at a per capita rate as high as Americans did. Japan Tobacco, Inc., the monopoly owned by the national finance ministry, turned over 60 percent of the retail price as an excise tax-- three times the .tax bite for U.S. cigarettes. The government also issued statements commendatory of smoking, e.g., that it helped smokers think more clearly and suffer less stress in a nation with a compulsive Work ethic and a large population on a tightly packed archipelago. Not surprisingly, Japanese cigarettes bore the most tepid of warning labels: "For your health don't smoke too much." The government sponsored no research on the subject; television advertising of cigarettes was permitted, and nearly half of Japan's doctors smoked. As a huge tax producer, Japan's native tobacco industry was closely pro- tected. Facing a 90 percent tariff, foreign brands held only 2 percent of the market. The state monopoly was obliged to buy up every leaf raised by Japan's 13,000 politically potent tobacco growers, at a cost two to three times that of U.S. leaf, which seemed a bargain to Japan Tobacco, buyer of 20 percent of American raw-tobacco exports. This sizable purchase, however, scarcely made a dent in the huge trade surplus, reaching some $20 billion a year by the mid- 'Eighties, that Japan's automotive and electronics industries were piling up by imports to the U.S., with a tariff levied at only 20 percent. When the USTR leaned gently on the Japanese government, asking the courtesy of a reciprocal

Smooth Characters / 7 1 1 tariff level for American cigarettes, Tokyo replied by lowering its levy to 35 percent and increasing the number of retail outlets available to foreign brands by one-third. But it also imposed a 57 percent excise tax on imp6rted cigarettes on top of a 20 percent surcharge Japan Tobacco demanded for its handling and distribution costs, and U.S. brands were still not allowed access to the ubiqui- tous vending machines on Japan's city streets. This transparent evasiveness prompted Yeutter to enlist one of the U.S. to- bacco industry's foremost congressional defenders, Senator Jesse Helms, then the ranking Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who in July 1986 wrote directly to Japanese PrimeMinister Yasuhiro Naka- sone reminding him of the cost to the American people of maintaining a de- fense umbrella over the Pacific Rim and adding pointedly that his allies in Congress "will have a better chance to stem the tide of anti-Japanese trade sen- timent if and when they can cite tangible examples of your doors being opened to American products." But he mentioned only one: "I urge that you establish a timetable for allowing U.S. cigarettes a specific share of your market. I suggest a total of 20 percent .... '" Given what it had to lose, Japan chose to open its cigarette market to for- eigners. Some 95 percent of the imported brands' sales were AmeriCan, in large part because the U.S. companies were more inventive and intensive users ~ advertising. The typical Japanese cigarette commercial showed a soli- .~ 'smoker savoring his brand; the American makers stressed the social as- pects of smoking, as in groups singing while puffing away, or juxtaposed it with sports prowess, such as auto-racing drivers who lighted up after the finish. Philip Mords's leading brand in Japan:---Larkmwas linked with adventure and intrigue, and Marlboro was given a charcoal-filter version to meet Japanese tastes. Some Japanese grumbled that their government had made a blood sacri- fice of its people to assuage the American tobacco predators, as U.S. brands grabbed almost 10 percent of the market within the first year of the opening, and the number kept growing, though at a slowed rate. Overall cigarette con- sumption rose, especially among those under twefity, whose smokihg rat~ jumped sixfold between 1978 and 1990, by which time Philip Morris had a sales and promotion staff of 400 working the country. Four years later it was selling 44 billion units there, representing more than one-eighth of the Japa- nese market and the equivalent of nearly 20 percent of its U.S. sales. Taiwan, a nation one-seventh as populous as Japan but blessed by a trade surplus with the U.S. proportionately far larger, was thus still more dependent on American friendship for its prosperity and survival in the shadow of maih- land China. But its cigarette market was even more tightly closed than Japan's to foreign brands, which held a scant 1 percent of the trade and sold for three times the price of the government monopoly brands. While Taiwan could not risk threatened reprisals from the USTR if it did not relent, it fought hard to

ASHES TO ASHES / 712 preserve a ban on television adverti.sing of cigarettes and sharply limited their visibility in print media. Despite Taiwanese expressions of concern that young people not be tar- geted by the foreign tobacco companies, their promotional blitz seemed to pin- point the youth market. Stickers, signage, and billboards for foreign brands were plastered over storefronts and kiosks, seventeen cigarette posters were counted at one time on walls close to Taipei's largest high school, and sam- piing among teenagers was widespread at video game arcades, disco night spots, and fashion shows. Nor could the state tobacco monopoly match such marketing innovations as direct-drop delivery to retailers by the U.S. compa- nies while the government required shopkeepers to make a time-consuming trip to a central depot to pick up their cigarette supply. Within the first year of open access, Taiwan's leading domestic brand, called Long Life, dropped in market share from 90 percent to 72; within two years, high school smoking had increased 50 percent. And when aroused Taiwanese health officials pushed hard to crack down on promotional efforts by U.S. importers, calling for an end to sampling, a ban on cigarette ads in magazines aimed at young readers, and larger warning labels to appear on the front instead of the sides of packages, the USTR argued that such a proposal was intended to limit access by foreign competitors and represented an unacceptable revision of the wade pact U.S. officials had extracted. Carla Hills, Yeutter's successor at USTR, wrote to authorities in Taipei in 1992 that they would be wise to discontinue their efforts to rein in American tobacco promotion "at a time when Taiwan is seeking active consideration of its GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] application," and added they ought also to be mindful that "cigarette exports have made a significant contribution to reducing the global U.S. trade deficit." Behind such thinly veiled bullying was constant pressure by the to- bacco companies, exemplified by Philip Morris's director of international trade relations, Donald Nelson, who suggested that the Taiwanese were protesting aggressiv~ U.S. marketing practices "not because they have an infe- rior product but because we are doing something insidious. It's just not true." South Korea, whose citizens were subject to the equivalent of a $1,000 fine if caught smoking an American cigarette, was far more resistant to USTR ef- forts to allow in U.S. brands. To arm themselves for the siege, RJR Tobacco signed up President Reagan's former national security advisor, Richard Allen, and Philip Morris followed by enlisting ex-Reagan White House deputy staff chief Michael Deaver for a fee of $250,000 to lobby the South Koreans, whose military security against their bristling North Korean neighbors was assured by the sizable presence of American troops. In a happy coincidence of interests, Deaver, an intimate of the Reagans, was perceived as useful to the government in Seoul, which paid him nearly half a million dollars to lobby Congress and the White House against passage of legislation intended to protect the U.S. tex-

Smooth Characters / 7 1 3 tile industry from the likes of cheap Korean goods. Several years of hard nego- tiating were required before tariffs and taxes were lowered enough to allow U.S. cigarettes to compete with South Korean government brands. Within a year of the American incursion, unprecedented cigarette promotion in the form of sports sponsorships, sampling, and magazine advertising helped drive up smoking among South Korean boys from 18 to 30 percent. When the textile protection bill aimed at Asian imports reached President Reagan's desk, he vetoed it. In pushing their complaint against barriers to U.S. cigarettes in Thailand, with a population 40 percent as large as Japan's but with far lower per capita cigarette consumption, the U.S. tobacco companies would not settle for the same passive sales customs as the-Thai state monopoly; instead, they wrote in their petition to USTR Hills, "Sufficient advertising and promotion will be necessary to repair the results of previous unfair Thai practices as well as pro- viding a commercially competitive environment." Hills took up their cause, explaining to tobacco control advocates, "We are not pushing cigarettes on other countries, but where they allow cigarette consumption we say they ought not to ban ours .... As long as cigarettes remain a legal commodity in the United States and abroad, there is no legal basis to deny cigarette manufactur- ers assistance in gaining market access." Fearful that sophisticated forms of consumer persuasion would be loosed on ~eir vulnerable society, the incensed Thais took their case to antismoking forces in Washington, where they found ready allies. "Free trade is not a li- cense to export lung cancer and ride roughshod over the antismoking laws of other nations," declared Ted Kennedy, chairman of the Senate Labor and Hu- man Resources Committee, and Michael Pertschuk's Advocacy Institute asked in print, by way of an analogy, how the American people would feel if the Colombian government, in behalf of its enterprising drug cartel, insisted that the U.S. government allow advertising and promotion of cocaine as well as Juan Valdez's coffee. Only when the Thais proposed that the issue be resolved by GAT'F officials did Hills relent under pressure from tobacco control forces at home. In 1990, GAfF ruled that Thailand had to admit foreign cigarette brands but could restrict marketing techniques in light of public-health consid- erations, provided that the rules were applied uniformly to domestic as well as foreign brands. The sole sembIance of conscience manifested within the Reagan adminis- tration over the leagued efforts by government and industry to bring the. plea- sures and perils of American cigarettes to Asia's multitudes was Everett Koop's passionate protest. "There is a higher good," the Surgeon General de- dared in 1988, "than the greed market. I think it is reprehensible for this wealthy nation to export disability, disease, and death to the Third World." Later that year the chief facilitator of that enterpdse, Clayton Yeutter, corn-

ASHES TO ASHES / 714 mended Koop in writing for his ~'aggressive efforts to sensitize the American people to the health dangers of this troublesome habit" and said that he himself believed addiction to smoking to be "a terrible human tragedy." The USTR then concluded his patronizing moral instruction to Koop, "However, what we are about in our trade relationships is something entirely different." Yeutter had apparently meant that addiction to smoking by Americans was "a terrible human tragedy"--or he was a shameless hypocrite--for two years later, dur- ing a press conference while he was Secretary of Agriculture, he commented about one of his apparently favorite crops, "I just saw the figures on tobacco exports a few days ago, and, my, have they turned out to be a marvelous sue- cess StOry." Bush's top health officials proved craven and impotent in the face of such boosterism. Koop's successor as Surgeon General, Antonia Novello, occasion- ally flayed the tobacco companies for pursuing the youth market, but her prior- itics were apparent when she stated, in answer to press inquiries about why she had not opposed the USTR efforts to spread the sale of U.S. cigarettes to previously restricted markets, that such intrusiveness by the nation's ranking pubLic-health officer would have been "disrespectful to my party.':Travcling to Perth, Australia, in 1990 for the triennial World Conference on Tobacco and Health, Assistant HHS Secretary James O. Mason delivered a rousing keynote address, charging U.S. cigarette makers with playing "our free-trade laws and expor~ policies like a Stradivarius violin" and calling it "unconscionable" for them "to be peddling their poison abroad." But when summoned by Congress- man Waxman to repeat the charge before his House health subcommittee, Ma- son canceled his appearance and a departmental letter arrived instead, explaining that it was not appropriate for a health official to discuss trade matters. When Mason's boss, HHS Secretary Sullivan, who had approved his subordinate's 'speech in Perth, was asked on "Meet the Press" to explain the apparent policy reversal, he said that the issue was "one of equity in trade. What Dr. Mason has said in Australia is entirely consistent with what I have said." More truthfully reflecting the smoking policies of the Bush presidency, Vice President Dan Quayle told a North Carolina audience in July 1990 that "Tobacco exports should be expanded aggressively because Americans are smoking less .... We're not going to back away from what public health offi- cials say and what reports say. But on the other hand, we're not going to deny a country an export from our country because of that policy." Thus was a gen- eration of findings that smoking was deslructive of human health degraded by two American Presidents while actively carrying the banner of U.S. tobacco companies into foreign parts when ample humanitarian.grounds existed for pressing their cause less fervently, if at all. This unseemly overseas initiative by the government compounded the in-

Smooth Characters / 7 1 5 jury then being dealt to the antismoking campaign domestically by official fed- eral indifference. The most hurtful setback at the national level was the 1989 departure of Surgeon General Koop, who had brought moral weight and a be- lievable voice to the issue. Only Henry Waxman in Congress played a compa- rable, if less audible, role in the broad public airing of the hazards of smoking throughout the 'Eighties. But for all his skills in the pulpit, Koop had been un- able or unwilling to persuade the White House to undertake control measures. Eighteen months after Koop's departure, the only other forceful antismok- ing advocate in the federal administration, Ronald Davis, director of th~ Office on Smoking and Health, ended four years of frustration in that job and soon held the ranking public-health post for the state of Michigan. A team player, Davis had nonetheless bridled under the executive branch's disdain for his mission, typified by a budget that did not event allow him to carry out studies into the possible dangers of the tobacco additives that the industry was using, according to lists it provided to his office under the 1984 cigarette labeling law. His role was limited to cross-pollinating among the myriad of private an- tismoking organizations--ASH, GASP, AN'R, DOC, STAT, AMA, the Advo- cacy Institute, the American Council on Science and Health, the American Health Foundation, and the Coalition of the ACS, AHA, and ALA, among oth- ers, which formed a movement Davis felt was hopelessly dispersed and du- plicative-and urging state and local lawmakers and health officials to deal more vigorously with smoking, even if the federal government he worked for was doing next to nothing about the peril. "Anything that would have required federal legislation was tossed out," Davis said in recounting the strictures on him. "It was a pass-the-buck approach. It' s much easier to make recommend~i- tions to the states than to Congress." Practically speaking, there was no nationally coordinated smoking control movement, only a lot of groups with their own agendas, membership lists, newsletters, fund drives, and egos. Together, they generated a considerable din, orchestrated only occasionally (as in the push for the airline smoking ban), but mostly they were in disarray. The oldest entity, John Banzhaf's ASH, was by now relatively well funded but had become peripheral and idiosyncratic in approach; younger, poorer antismoking groups wanted Banzhaf to exercise real leadership by turning ASH into the legal .area of the tobacco control move- ment---or get out of the way. Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights was growing in skill and reach but lacked funding and an ongoing presence in Washington. After nearly ten years of existence, the coalition of the big three health volun- taries remained "a case of arrested development," in the opinion of the Advo- cacy Institute's Michael Pertschuk, the coach of and father confessor to the tobacco control movement but not an activelobbyist himself. The Coalition's three parents had proven unwilling to cede to it any policymaking power of its own, kept its operating budget to a pitiable $150,000 a year, and declined to

ASHES TO ASHES / 716 broaden its membership, claiming that any such increase would make its work- ings cumbersome but in truth worrying that the large voluntaries' identities would be submerged in the process. The Coalition's skilled lobbyist, Matthew Myers, had his hands tied by its steering committee, and even when he pro- posed a modest and seemingly unexceptionable step, like a drive to outlaw the brazen circumvention of the 1970 federal ban on cigarette advertising in the broadcast media by preventing tobacco signage at arenas and stadiums where sports events were regularly televised, his overseers said no. The one organization that might have lent meaningful muscle to the Coali- tion was the American Medical Association. But the AMA did not relish the prospect of seeing its star dimmed within a larger constellation, while the health voluntaries felt that the AMA's commitment to the smoking issue was mostly lip service. In fact, it had done no follow-up lobbying in behalf of the total cigarette ad ban it had urged on Congress in 1986. To try to forge coher- ence within the muddled smoking control community and to fashion national legislative priorities to present to the 101st Congress, the AMA funded a weekend-long conference in Houston at the end of January 1989 attended by all the major antismoking activists and a number of enlistees in the newly formed Tobacco Task Force, composed of fifty-two congressmen. "Never be- fore has such a broad-based coalition assembled," declared U.S. Representa- tive Michael Anderson, Texas Democrat and a host of the affair. After all the brave talk, though, what emerged was another long shopping list of goals; too many bills with too mahy unattainable provisions got introduced, and while this multiplicity kept the tobacco lobbyists scrambling, never knowing which proposal congressional sentiment might coalesce behind, it also failed to nar- row the playing field to a manageable size. Particularly divisive was the high priority assigned to a ban on all tobacco advertising--an idea that split the lib- eral community, usually more antismoking than not, over First Amendment concerns~ The result was disastrous. Instead of seeking half a loaf or even a quarter, the usually skilled Henry Waxman loaded up an omnibus Tobacco Control and Health Protection Act that he introduced in 1990. The immense package would have limited cigarette advertising to the black-and-white-only "tombstone" format (without human or cartoon figures), banned sponsorship of cultural and sports events using cigarette brand names, added a warning label about addic- tion, listed the toxic content on every pack as well as the tobacco additives, and funded antismoking commercials on television. But Waxman could not muster a majority for the bill within his subcommittee. A slimmed version of the bill, including the addiction label, a ban on cigarette sampling and vending ma- chines unless under visual supervision, and reduced funding for alcohol and drug abuse programs in states that did not seriously enforce a federal age limit of eighteen on the sale of tobacco pr6ducts, did gain a subcommittee majority.

Smooth Characters ! 7 1 7 But the measure never reached the House floor, where it might well have carried, because Commerce Committee Chairman John D]ngell, Waxman's nemesis, sat on it. Waxman's astute aide on smoking legislation, Ripley Forbes, commented in the wake of this glaring failure by the public-health community to check - the tobacco forces, "There is an almost terminal problem of focuswand there hadn't been sufficient tactical thinking on how to mount and put through legis- lation.'" Without genuine White House support, moreover, the prospect for substantive federal antismoking regulation was dim to invisible at the begin- ning of the final decade of the twentieth century. VII Tr~E cigarette makers were cheered as well by an epochal political up- heaval abroad that fired up their expansionist impulses. Eastern Europe and the great Soviet Eurasian land mass had yielded capitalist tobacco manu- facturers a sorry harvest despite two decades of assiduous cultivatibn, and then • so swiftly did the old order crumble at the opening of the 1990s that the inter- ~ national tobacco companies at first found the situation nearly too good to be tree. Although the Communist nations, which couldn't get enough to smoke, had now sent their commissars packing, free-market corporations were natu- rally wary of investing in the suddenly liberated societies before the roots of political democracy and economic stability could take hold. But that meta- morphosis might take years, decades, generations even; meanwhile, a lot of cigarettes could be sold by whoever got there quickly. In contrast to East Asia, where invading U.S. cigarette makers faced wide- spread resentment on grounds of imperiling public health and wounding na- tional pride, the masses within the former Soviet bloc were starved for consumer goods and welcomed the early arriva~ of U.S. products as syml~ols of their spiritual emancipation and hope for a more materially abundant future. Under the Soviet economy, cigarette production had been hampered by anti- quated plants, a shortage of replacement parts, undertrained and poorly mo- tivated labor, and inefficient manufacturing logisticsminstead of going to self-contained factories, for example, harvested tobacco was sent by rail over vast distances for processing at a single.site and then reshipped to widely dis- persed cigarette-making facilities. Thus, even in a society desperately ghort of creature comforts, hungry for almost any form of solace under tyranny, and unfazed by health fears about smoking when severe environmental contami- nants of every kind were rampant, the Soviet system could not sustain cigarette production at its rated 400 billion units a year. Output had fallen to about half that figure in the last years of the Red empire, causing a cigarette shortage so

ASHES TO ASHES / 718 severe that Soviet ruler Mikhail Gorbachev was forced to stave off rioting by emergency bulk purchases from foreign manufacturers--20 billion units from Philip Morris was the largest single order--paid for with Russian oil, gold, and diamonds. As the Iron Curtain disintegrated, no outside tobacco manufacturer was bet- ter positioned to exploit the event than Philip Morris, which had tirelessly pur- sued licensing arrangements throughout the Soviet bloc, if only to show its flag and win good will. But rather than charging in to seize any advantage it could, PM moved selectively, adapting strategies to the often chaotic circumstances. The effort began in the spring of 1990 in East Germany, a market about one- quarter the size of West Germany's, where Philip Morals had achieved the largest share. Its chief German rival, Reemtsma, anxious to reestablish its to- bacco hegemony in a soon-to-be-reunified Germany, bought up the leading East German brand, Cabinet, took away jobs by moving its manufacturing to facilities in West Germany, and prompdy altered its taste to the American- style blend that had gained dominance there. Sensing that East German smok- ers would need time to acquire a taste for the milder U.S. blend, Philip Morris formulated a different plan. It bought out the Dresden factory with which it had long had a licensing arrangement--a run-down, turn-of-the-century fac- tory with stained-glass windows and iron stairway railings--and made it more cost-effective but kept its top brand, called f/6, intact, even its strong taste and stodgy packaging, on the premise that with the moorings torn loose from so many other aspects of their daily lives, East Germans would like to cling to at least one pleasurable part of their past. With the slogan."F/6: The Taste Re- mains," Philip Morris, on a minimal investment, soon seized first place in the East German market with a 45 percent share while slowly nurturing a taste for Marlboro and its other U.S. brands. In Czechoslovakia, a market about the same size as East Germany, PM took a bolder tack. It paid a steep $413 million, one-third more than RJR's bid, for AS Tabak, the state monopoly, and gained a commanding position in a Middle European locale that could give it a tactical advantage geographically if and when a large, centralized manufacturing facility became practical. Here, too, PM pushed the leading domestic brand, Start, but smartened up the package. In Hungary, however, where it faced more competition, Philip Morris let Reemtsma and BAT buy up more costly plants, settled on a $30 million outlay for its former licensee and, in that more Western-oriented society, vigorously promoted Marlboro. Kiosks all over Budapest were festooned in Marlboro red, white, and black. At a big rock concert in the Hungarian capital, girls clad in the brand's colors merrily handed out samples--and anyone who lit up on the spot got a pair of white sunglasses as an added premium. In Poland, with the highest per capita consumption of cigarettes in Europe, RJR staked a large

Smooth Characters / 7 1 9 claim by investing $50 million in a plant of its own; Philip Morris, meanwhile, reinforced its fifteen-year licensing agreement with a plant in Cracow, stand- ing ready to invest in it whenever the Polish government might elect to pdva- tize its state-owned tobacco industry. In the smaller adjacent Baltic states market, though, PM made a $40 million commitment to upgrade and control two-thirds of Lithuania's largest cigarette factory. In contrast to a level of euphoria in the Eastern European states over their release from thralldom under the Soviet yoke, the mood was darker and the sense of political and economic disarray deeper in the former USSR. When Philip Morris tried to fill the void left by malfunctioning local factories with imported Marlboros, it drove down the old black-market price, and soon kiosks around Moscow that were offering the top U.S. brand went up in flames--the handiwork of organized thugs who emerged as a frightening real- ity in the former police state. Rather than relying on extortionate payoffs to the new Russian mob, PM and other foreign companies began to invest in the struggling new market economy by buying and renovating old plants or, in a far riskier move, building new ones. Outspending all its Western rivals--BAT, Rothmans, RJR, and Reemtsma--Philip Morris allocated some $1.5 billion among eight manufacturing sites within the first four years after the breakup of the Soviet empire. National health officials, more humane than their Communist predecessors, began to insist early on that cigarette purveyors be reined in. But while West- ern Europe, under its newly functioning economic union, was imposing a sin- gle standard of tobacco regulations, including advertising bans and a phased mandatory reduction in the tar yield to 12 milligrams per cigarette by the late 'Nineties, the fledgling democratic governments of Eastern Europe set down widely varying rules and standards, with enforcement lax at first in most coun- tries. Soon, though, there was a perceptible tightening, as in Russia, where cig- arette commercials were being taken off television by 1995 as an unwelcome by-product of the nation's still fragile freedom of speech. Meanwhile, cigarett~ sales proliferated, and Philip Morris was shortly reporting a narrow profit on its new operations and quantum leaps in sales (tripling in Eastern Europe, for example, from 1993 to 1994). Indeed, the company's international tobacco 0p- erafions were posting unit gains of 10 percent a year, far more than compensat- ing for the erosion of its American market. PM's overseas net seemed likely to surpass its domestic cigarette profits before the year 2000. For all that, the most prized cigarette market of all---China, with one- quarter of its 1.2 billion people believed to be smokers and comprising more than 30 percent of the world's smoking population by the early 1990s-- remained tantalizingly out of reach to the international tobacco companies. Only a trickle of foreign brands was sold under close government scrutiny,

ASHES TO ASHES ! 720 mostly to tourists, as the Chinese Communist leaders jealously guarded the cigarette trade as their largest single source of tax revenues and prime fount of capital formation. The ambitions of American and other tobacco companies to part the Bam- boo Curtain served'as a standing reminder to the Chinese of the vicious prac- tices of British merchants in the first half of the nineteenth century to finance their purchases of tea and silk by persuading their government to help them foist imported opium on a resistant and still largely feudal society. Shooting their way into the Chinese market when necessary in what became known as the Opium Wars, London entrepreneurs, like their latter-day counterparts in the U.S. cigarette business, justified their incursions into often hostile Asian .... markets as contributions to their own nation's balance of trade. Nicotine had replaced opium as the best-selling drug in China by the early part of the twen- tieth century, when British-American Tobacco crushed the native cigarette industry through ruthless pricing practices, dubious legal maneuvers, and purchased political influence. BAT dominated the market until World War II forced it to close down, and the Communist takeover thereafter ended foreign economic activity altogether. But smoking knew no political favorites nor was its economic exploitation restricted to predatory capitalism. The leaders of Red China, in particular chairman Mao Tse-tung and Premier Chou En,lai, were legendary smokers, and cigarettes were one of the few consumer products kept in cheap and ready supply, though by no means adequate to fulfill the demand for a mild opiate by a vast populace struggling for national cohesion and social justice within a rigidly conformist state. And it had long since become a widespread sign of ci- vility in China to pass around cigarettes at the beginning of state, community, and family functions. It scarcely mattered that the leaf raised by some 90,000 Chinese tobacco growers made for a harsh smoke, with twice the tar and nico- fine levels of U.S. cigarettes and rarely mitigated by filter tips. They came in pretty packs with a thousand different names, like Panda, Peony, Butterfly, Golden Orchid, and S~ling Boat, produced by nearly a hundred clanking old factories run by the national Ministry of Light Industry and sold in the 1980s at the subsidized price of twenty to thirty cents a pack. Even so, the tobacco habit, practiced mostly by men in a resolutely sexist society, claimed 15 per- cent or so of the typical Chinese household's income. Enlisting technological assistance from American tobacco companies anxious for any toehold in that immense but closed market, China succeeded in doubling its cigarette output between 1978 and 1986 and once again by the early 'Nineties, as production reached a reported 1.7 trillion units a year, three and a half times total U.S. consumption. Far from inviting foreign capitalists to dip into this seemingly bottomless market, China's economic ministers began casting eyes on the

ASHES TO ASHES / 722 rooms, meeting halls, and sports stadiums. Health warnings were being drafted for inclusion on all cigarette packs, and the government amiounced that in 1997 Beijing would be the site of the tenth world conference on smoking and health, with the theme "Tobacco--the Growing Epidemic." Even so, Western tobacco companies were hopeful. As Philip Mon'is's Geoffrey Bible, a veteran of the international tobacco wars, confidently noted, "There is already much awareness of branded products in Chinanand people everywhere aspire to the gold standard." The door to the world' s largest smok- ing market was opening, if only a millimeter at a time. The immediate problem of cultivating it would not be government resections so much as low Chinese incomes, a dire shortage of hard currency to pay for imports, and the wide- spread piracy of famous foreign products. Such problems would persist even if commuPAsm withered and a market economy replaced it in the new millen- nium. But sooner or later, access would come, assuring the proliferation of U.S. and other global brands, sustaining tobacco profits, and seducing millions more to an early death. to o~ P t~ 1 I, I ( I ] (