99 



.•ss tobacco did not cause cancer, (The surgeon general in 1986 

 said II raised ihc risk of oral cancer.) 



Allhough Dr. Smith all but repudiated his own conclusions 

 on CBS's "60 Minutes" in 1985 — urging the public to avoid 

 smokeless tobacco — a short time later he acknowledged he 

 accepted an offer of several thousand dollars from Jacob 

 Medinger lawyers to review scientific literature in preparation 

 for a tobacco liability suit. The plaintiff was the mother of an 

 Oklahoma youth who had died of oral cancer after using 

 smokeless tobacco for seven years. 



The Jacob Medinger firm and other defense lawyers won 

 the suit, invoking Dr. Smith's studies as independent research. 

 But there are indications he had longstanding ties to the Coun- 

 cil; one court document shows his first study was earmarked 

 a "priority" for funding by Council lawyers 20 years earlier. 

 Dr. Smith says the Council paid for equipment at hjs depart- 

 ment's lab at the University of Tennessee when he was doing 

 his smokeless tobacco studies, though it didn't finance the 

 studies. 



REWARDING RESEARCH 



Two other favorite scientists of the Council were Carl Selt- 

 zer and Theodore Sterling. Dr. Seltzer, a biological anthropol- 

 ogist, belie%es smoking has no role in heart disease and has 

 alleged in print that data in the huge 45-year, 10,000-person 

 Framingham Heart Study — which found otherwise — have 

 been distorted by aniitobacco researchers. Framingham Direc- 

 tor William Casielli scoffs at Dr. Seltzer's critique but says it 

 "has had some impact in keeping the debate alive." 



Dr. Sterling, a statistician, disputes the validity of popula- 

 tion studies linking smoking to illness, arguing that their nar- 

 row focus on smoking obscures the more likely disease cause 

 — occupational exposure to toxic fumes. 



For both men, defung conventional wisdom has been re- 

 warding. Dr. Seltzer says he has received "well over $1 mil- 

 lion" from the Council for research. Dr. Sterling got $1.1 

 million for his Special Projects work in 1977-82, court records 

 show. 



In relying on such research, the tobacco industry is "e.\- 

 ploiting the margins of science," contends Anthony Colucci, 

 a former top researcher and later director of scientific litiga- 

 tion support at R.J. Reynolds. He offers an analogy: "There's 

 a forest full of data that says tobacco kills people, and sitting 

 on one tree is a lizard with a different biochemical and physio- 

 logical makeup. The industry focuses on that lizard — that tiny 

 bit of marginal evidence." 



R.J. Reynolds is suing Dr. Colucci, an outspoken critic, to 

 keep him from testifying in a trial or talking to the media about 

 tobacco liability, and accuses him of demanding a big consult- 

 ing contract to keep quiet. Dr. Colucci says Reynolds "manipu- 

 lated the negotiations" so it can now portray them as an 

 extortion attempt He adds: "This is a clear demonstration of 

 the extent to which a tobacco company will go to silence some- 

 one who is telling the truth." 



The Special Projects unit worked in a vanety of ways to 

 protect tobacco companies. Lobbying in Congress against ad- 

 vertising curbs, the industry in 1982 submitted to Congress a 

 researcher's statement that peer pressure, not advertising, in- 

 duced young people to smoke. Congress wasn't told that the 

 research had been funded by Council attorneys. This was no 

 accident. At a meeting of tobacco-company lawyers the year 

 before, Mr Jacob explained that the reason for funding that 

 particular research as a Special Project was to conceal the 

 researcher's ties to the industry "We did not want it out in 

 the open," Mr. Jacob said, according to the meeting transcript 

 as cited in a Newark, N.J., federal judge's opinion. 



The Council's lawyers weren't content for long to confine 



their activities to the Special Projects division. By the late 1960s, 

 they had begun to encroach on the smoking research emanat- 

 ing from the putatively independent Council itself. Ofien, the 

 Council and its lawyers shared or swapped projects and 

 scientists. 



By 1968, the Council had begun putting researchers under 

 contract for many studies. This gave it the right to control both 

 a study's design and publication of the results. However, as 

 a contractor, the Council could be held responsible for with- 

 holding negative findings. So its operatives would do their ut- 

 most to ensure that ugly surprises didn't arise. 



This contributed to a parting of the ways with Hill & 

 Knowlion. "The lawyers had this thing under control," recalls 

 Loet Velmans, a former chief executive of the PR firm. It quit 

 the account in the late 1960s, he says, out of frustration that 

 the industry "for legal reasons felt it couldn't admit lo any- 

 thing (on tobacco and health) because then it would be sued 

 out of existence." 



Says Robert Kersey, a former head of tobacco research at 

 Liggett: "Almost everything that transpired had to be done un- 

 der the advice of counsel so that nothing . . . would incur a 

 potential liability." 



SMOKING RODENTS 



In 1968, the Council contracted with Mason Research In- 

 stitute in Worcester, Mass., to evaluate "smoking machines" 

 for animal inhalation studies and do toxicity tests on rodents. 

 .As the study drew to a close in 1972, Mason researcher .Mias- 

 nig Hagopian was astonished when scientists from the Council 

 and from R.J. Reynolds began turning up weekly at his lab, 

 where he says they sat for hours taking notes. They made sure 

 that only the most genetically vigorous (that is, cancer-resistant) 

 rodents were going to be used, he says, and dictated which 

 cigarettes and how many puffs were administered to them. 



"It got to the point where they were directing the course 

 of the studv," says Dr. Hagopian. "It was nowhere near as 

 objective as if it had been funded by" the government. 



.Although he did complain to Mason's president. Dr. 

 Hagopian concedes he and other researchers mainly "looked 

 the other way." They wanted to make sure the contract was 

 renewed so they could do the critical experiments on whether 

 smoke affects rodents' lung tissues. However, the Council can- 

 celed funding before Mason began the animal study. 



The Council pulled out the big guns after another study, 

 at Bio-Research Institute in Cambridge, Mass. UTien Syrian 

 hamsters were exposed to smoke twice a day for 59 to 80 weeks, 

 •Wo of those of a cancer-susceptible strain and 4<''oof a resis- 

 tant strain developed malignant tumors. Before publishing the 

 study in 1974, the institute's founder, Freddy Homberger, sent 

 a manuscript to Robert Hockett, then scientific director of the 

 Council. Dr. Homberger says he had to do so because halfway 

 through his study, the Council had changed it from a grant to 

 a contract "so they could control publication — they were quite 

 open about that." 



Soon thereafter, Dr. Hockett and Mr. Jacob, the lawyer, 

 hastened to Dr. Homberger's summer home in Maine. Their 

 mission? "They didn't want us to call anylhing cancer." Dr. 

 Homberger testified years later at the Rose Cipollone tobacco 

 liability trial in federal court in Newark, N.J. "They wanted 

 it to be pseudo-epitheliomatous hyperplasia, and that is a eu- 

 phemism for lesions preceding cancer. And we said no, this isn't 

 right. It is a cancer." Today. Dr. Homberger adds that Mr. 

 Jacob told him he would "never get a penny more" if the paper 

 was published without making the changes. 



He compromised At the last minute, he changed the final 

 proofs to read "micro-invasive" cancer, meaning a microscopic 



