Tobacco Documents Online

2072365661 The Philip Morris site does appear to be forthright, however, with regard to addiction. 11 "Cigarette smoking is addictive, as that term is most commonly used today," it says. Remember the tobacco executives swearing under oath, before a congressional committee, that they didn't think it was? It will be fun watching how Philip Morris responds to the document Acosta sent last week. Under court rules, the company must either deny the contentions or admit them. Nearly everything he asks the company to admit came directly from its Web site, or is referenced there. Will Philip Morris deny in court that smoking is addictive? That the Surgeon General's Reports are reliable? That the World Health Information's linked site is authoritative? That smokers are "far more likely" to develop lung cancer? Or do you suppose they'll say that it depends on what the meaning of "is" is? 2

Philip Morris"admissions' a word dance DYCKMAN By MARTIN DYCKMAN Associate Editor © St. Petersburg Times, published October 24, 1999 A brilliant satire in the October Washington Monthly imagines how Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein would have written The Final Days of the Third Reich, relying on anonymous sources who are using them to polish their public images. In Art Levine's parody, Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler, having accepted Adolf Hitler's assurance that he was not anti- Semitic, confront him in his bunker with hard evidence, which he admits. Himmler resigns and resolves to convert to Judaism. When I heard that Philip Morris was finally admitting that its cigarettes sicken and kill people, my first thought was that Levine must have written that too. It couldn't be true. It turns out to be no spoof. But it's not quite what it seems, either. As posted on the Philip Morris Web site, it is a statement, not a confession: "There is an overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and other serious diseases in smokers. Smokers are far more likely to develop serious diseases, like lung cancer, than non-smokers. There is no "safe' cigarette. These are and have been the messages of public health authorities worldwide. Smokers and potential smokers should rely on these messages in making all smoking-related decisions" Howard Acosta read it with keen interest. Acosta is a St. Petersburg lawyer who is suing Philip Morris and two other tobacco companies in Hillsborough Circuit Court on behalf of the family of Suzanne M. Jones, who died at 62 of lung cancer. Acosta promptly called one of the Philip Morris defense attorneys. Acosta would be forwarding a two-page "request for admissions." Could he presume that Philip Morris would admit in court what it appeared to admit on its Web site? "He said, "You'll get two pages of our standard sharply written objections,"' Acosta said. Acosta wasn't terribly surprised. Nothing in the statement quoted above actually admits that smoking causes cancer or any other disease. It admits only what has long since been obvious -- that virtually everyone in medicine and health science thinks so. What the company believes remains a secret that it shares, if it all, only with its lawyers. "They don't say they agree with it," Acosta said. ". .. It's just all too typical for the tobacco industry to dance with words." While the site abounds with links to Surgeon General's Reports and other strongly anti-tobacco sources, Philip Morris posts fine print that effectively disclaims them. "We have not reviewed ail of the information on other sites ...," it says. "Third party sites may contain information with which Philip Morris does or does not agree."