Tobacco Documents Online

2/20/91 DR. HELMUT WANEHAM 1. I would appreciate a brief biographical sketch on your educa- tional and professional background before joining Philip Morris. It's my understanding that your father taught chemistry at the college level. 2. Why did you join Philip Morris? What was the extent and nature of the R&D program at PM when you arrived there? 3. To what extent did your readings in the field concern you about the possible health implications of smoking in the half-dozen years preceding the first report by the Surgeon General's Advisory Com- mittee in 1964? 4. In general, how well do you feel PM responded over the ensuing three decades tolthe growing body of testimony and allegation by the scientific/medical community that cigarette smoking is a grave peril to the public? Has it been a responsible response? 5. In my first interview with Mr. Jos. C ullman, he summed up the position of most of the company's executives with regard to the health question by saying to me, "When they tell us what ingredients in cigarettes are definitely, provably harmful, we'11 remove them." Why should it be "they" that does the telling rather than the com- panies themselves that do the discovering of the risks to health? 6. To carry the above question one step farther, I would submit to you that PM, along with most of its competitors, has indeed done just what Mr. Cullman suggests but without conceding the point -- namely, modified the cigarette over the past quarter-century by significantly reducing the tar & nicotine yields and ventilating the gas phase. Yet to point out or concede as much, I'm told by company officials with a constant eye on the peril of litigation, would be tantamount to a health claim, forbidden by the FTC unless clinically proven. As a result, it seems to me, the company -- and the whole industry -- looks rather callous. I have trouble grasping why PM can't say, in effect, that "Nobody knows yet for certain~i.f or how cigarette smoking causes organic damage to human beings,~but to the extent that grave suspicions have been raised -- e.g., that ciliatoxicity may be traceable to one or more compounds in smoke, thus possibly impairing.the prime defense mechanism of the lungs, or that the blood's apparent capacity to absorb carbon monoxide and thus reduce its ability to deliver oxygen may have any number of systemic implications -- we have tried to improve the modern cigarette in any number of ways from leaf selection to filter design." Why is this tantamount to a confession that the product is le thal? 7. In a memo from the PM Research Center of 2/18/64 on the signif- icance of the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee report of the previous month, note was made of what strikes me as the central glaring weakness of the document, namely, omission of evidence of what your memo called the "possible ameliorating effects of filters," which, after all, had become the dominant form of cigarette smoking by that time. Indeed, Surgeon General Terry had to scramble to cover this omission when questioned about it not long afterward. Yet the

1+ wakeham/2 industry, to my knowledge, never made the point, presumably for the same reason alluded to in my preceding question -- i.e., to suggest that filtration may reduce any health risk is (a) an~un- provable claim and (b) a concession that unfiltered cigarettes were thus more hazardous, opening the door to litigation. As a consequence, it seems to me the whole cigarette industry has had to fight with one hand tied behind its back, as it were -- or thinks it does, and has been reduced to asserting repeatedly, "The case has not been proven," a losing argument in the court of public opinion. Many other products have been modified on the strength of preponderant scientific data, e.g., the availability today of so-called "thin" milk because of the suspicion that lowered chol- esterol reduces health risk (just as lowered tar & nicotine yields are widely thought to do the same). In short, I'm asking if your work, so far as public credibility goes, wasn't enormously frus- trating to you as a scientist? 8. What are you proudest of in connection with your career at Philip Morris? 9. I understand that PM feels the British documentary "Death in the West" by Peter Taylor, taken as a whole, was harmful to its image and plainly contrary to the company's understanding of what Mr. Taylor intended. But my reading of the transcript of your remarks in that film is that you were able to state your views and they were rendered in a fashion that did not distort the points you were making. Do you feel your remarks were unfairly used or twis te d? 10. Did you ever undergo a crisis of conscience because of your long affiliation with an organization charged with selling a pro- duct gravely harmful to the public?