Getting Out The "Facts"

The documents include what appears to be a fragment from a 1967 employee handbook on how to answer questions about the company's products. A section titled "Smoking and Health" consists of a brief introduction by B&W's president, Ed P. Finch {1801.02}. Finch tells his readers:

Keeping accurately informed on the smoking and health controversy is an increasing problem. Many assertions are being made which tend to condemn smoking and the tobacco industry. Headlines carry these assertions as "news." Unfortunately, the other side is sometimes overlooked.

And there is another side to the controversy! The following section states and gives factual replies to 10 of the most common assertions. From these, I hope you will gain a better insight into our position as a part of a viable and responsible industry. I also hope you will add your voice in support of the soundness of our cause. {1801.02}

Six of the ten assertions are available in the documents {1801.03}. In each case the assertion has been chosen and crafted to permit a plausible-sounding rejoinder. By dealing only with peripheral issues, the response to the assertion avoids confronting the real scientific information known at the time about the relationship between cigarettes and disease. For example,

ASSERTION: "People who smoke are select prospects for cancer and other diseases."

FACT: People who do not smoke suffer from all the diseases that have been selectively linked with smoking. Ten to 20 per cent of lung cancer, for instance, occurs in non-smokers. {1801.03, p. 1}

This "fact," although true, sidesteps the uncomfortable truth that people who smoke are more than ten to twenty times more likely to get lung cancer than people who do not smoke. It is grossly misleading in its selection of information.

Another example deals with the attributable risk of death from cigarettes.

ASSERTION: "300,000 adult smokers die prematurely each year because of cigarette smoking."

FACT: No one can accurately make that statement, because there is no valid supporting evidence. The Assistant Surgeon General, when the 1964 Surgeon General's Report was issued, said the Report "Might be as misleading as it was informative" to try to calculate "the total number of excess deaths causally related to cigarette smoking in the U.S. population." In other words, the Advisory Committee acknowledged that any such excess deaths could not be "accurately estimated." {1801.03, p. 2}

Again, the "fact" sidesteps the real issue. The Advisory Committee concluded that a substantial number of smokers were dying prematurely each year. Instead of responding to that fact, the response quibbles about

whether a precise body count can be calculated. The tobacco industry still relies on this technique. James Johnston, CEO of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, in his testimony to Congress in April 1994, claimed that there is no list of dead people that adds up to the number of people who allegedly died because of cigarettes (1).

Some of the "assertions" were simply set up to invite an important-sounding rejoinder.

ASSERTION: "All doctors are convinced that smoking is dangerous."

FACT: Doctors are by no means unanimous in condemning smoking. There are many who have expressed publicly their unwillingness to accept statistical evidence as scientific proof of a causal relationship between cigarette smoking and human disease. For example, some of the country's most eminent men of medicine and science—from such renowned institutions as Bellevue Hospital, Columbia University Medical School, Yale University Medical School, and New York Medical College—have testified before the U.S. Congress that the charges against tobacco remain unproved. {1801.03, p. 2}

As described in chapter 8, many of the "eminent scientists" so often quoted by the tobacco industry were on the industry payroll, often without public disclosures of this fact. The scientists not only received support for research but also were paid to provide testimony favorable to the industry, to perpetuate controversy about the health effects of smoking and, more recently, passive smoking.