Activist’s Battles Highlight Cigarette Firms’ Firepower

The mysterious Federal Express package that catapulted Stanton Glantz from professor of medicine to defender of free speech arrived, unsolicited, on May 12, 1994. Whoever sent it had a sense of humor: The return address was listed as “Mr. Butts,” the pro-smoking Doonesbury cartoon character.

To the UC San Francisco scientist, the contents were priceless--4,000 pages of confidential documents from the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., the nation’s third-largest tobacco company.

Here were the smoking guns that the anti-tobacco activist had longed for: the scribblings of lawyers who had rewritten scientific documents; memos from a campaign to co-opt journalists into writing positive stories about smoking; even a letter from Sylvester Stallone agreeing to use Brown & Williamson cigarettes in at least five movies in exchange for $500,000.

“It was,” Glantz recalls, “like being an archeologist and stumbling onto some untouched tomb filled with Egyptian treasures.”

Glantz’s first instinct was to make the papers public. What has happened since then illustrates how the tobacco industry has used the legal system--often just the threat of court action--to control the flow of damaging information that is emerging amid increased government and media scrutiny.

In a 1988 memo, a young tobacco lawyer named J. Michael Jordan, who represented R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Corp., outlined the legal strategy that has worked so well.

“To paraphrase Gen. Patton,” Jordan wrote about several lawsuits the company had won, “the way we won these cases was not by spending all of Reynolds’ money, but by making that other son of a bitch spend all his.”

In one highly publicized incident, a $10-billion defamation lawsuit brought by Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds forced ABC to apologize publicly for using the words “artificially spike” to describe the process of manipulating nicotine levels in cigarettes.

In another, the threat of a lawsuit delayed the airing of a CBS feature on whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand--who is himself being sued by Brown & Williamson for violating an agreement not to talk about his work.

Lesser known is the saga of Stan Glantz: How Brown & Williamson sued UCSF to keep a lid on the secret papers he received; how pro-smoking forces urged Congress to cut off Glantz’s federal research money, and how the mere possibility of a lawsuit nearly thwarted publication of a book Glantz is writing about the papers.

“Stan’s story is emblematic,” says lawyer Cliff Douglas, an expert in tobacco control who advised ABC on the nicotine manipulation segment and later found himself the target of subpoenas issued by Philip Morris. “It’s a clear example of the way in which the tobacco companies seek to muzzle their opponents. . . . They clearly have frightened many people.”

Douglas, a tenacious tobacco foe, admits he is “more cautious in the way I do things” in the wake of the ABC affair.

The cigarette manufacturers say they are not trying to intimidate anybody; they are merely using available tools to protect their interests. In the Glantz matter, a Brown & Williamson spokesman said the company sued because the documents sent by “Mr. Butts” were stolen property and did not belong in the public domain.

“You have to ask yourself, is there a double standard because this involves the tobacco industry?” said spokesman Tom Fitzgerald. “Would this have been allowed if a Silicon Valley software company had its research stolen? Would a California state university publish that?”

As for Glantz, Fitzgerald terms him “a member of a group of avowed anti-tobacco extremists who want nothing short of a prohibition of cigarettes. His book will be nothing more than a rehash.”

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If Hollywood were casting the role of the activist professor, Stanton Glantz--he of the roly-poly figure, the mop of salt-and-pepper curls and the eccentric tastes--would surely get the part. He drives a 1969 Dodge Dart convertible, sewed his own yellow rain slicker and still wears the pumpkin-colored vest his mother knitted for him when he was 16.

At 49, he has been taking jabs at the tobacco industry for nearly two decades. He combines the mind of a scientist (his PhD is in cardiovascular physiology, but he has also written a textbook on statistics) with a quirky sense of humor (his favorite office wall hanging juxtaposes quotes from Machiavelli and Kermit the Frog).

He’s got an ego the size of California (“I’m involved in just about everything going on in the damn world in tobacco,” he says) and the tenacity of a pit bull. Even his friends say he is best taken in small doses.

“He’s somebody I completely respect,” says Dr. Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Assn., “and he’s annoying because he won’t give up. He makes you feel guilty if you don’t buy everything he says all the time and do exactly what he wants all the time. I want to box his ears and hug him at the same time.”

Most scientists stick to numbers. Glantz blends science with public policy; his foes derisively call him a “political scientist.” He is a prolific contributor to the nation’s most prestigious medical journals, and his academic writings range from a landmark paper on the links between secondhand smoke and heart disease to a study showing that smoking bans in restaurants do not affect business.

Recently, he has been analyzing the political clout of the tobacco lobby--an effort that earned him the dubious distinction last year of being the only researcher whose grant some members of Congress sought to revoke.

“He’s not a scientist,” says Stephen Handman, president of the American Smokers’ Alliance, which led the effort to strip Glantz of his funding. “He’s a con man.”

Con man or scientist, to tobacco manufacturers Glantz is Public Enemy No. 1. He earned his stripes 15 years ago when, in a curious harbinger of things to come, a plain brown envelope arrived at the office of Californians for Nonsmokers’ Rights, a Berkeley activist group that Glantz helped found.

The envelope contained a bootleg videotape of “Death in the West,” a 1976 film that contrasted advertising images of Marlboro cowboys with those of real cowboys dying of cancer. The film, produced in Britain, had aired only once before Philip Morris, Marlboro’s manufacturer, sued the producers. They agreed never to show it again and to give all copies but one to the company.

When Glantz got the pirated copy, he shopped it around to TV stations across the country, finally persuading a San Francisco NBC affiliate to air it. An instant hit, it has since been shown worldwide.

“I unsuppressed it!” Glantz says gleefully. He adds, with characteristic immodesty: “I have a reputation for having guts.”

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If “Mr. Butts” intended to create trouble for the tobacco industry, he picked the right guy for the job.

And what a job it was. The documents arrived a mess. “It was just a bunch of papers thrown into a box,” Glantz says. First he made copies and stashed the originals in a place “for safekeeping”--he won’t say where. Then he coded them in a sort of a Glantz version of the Dewey Decimal System.

It was like piecing together a massive jigsaw puzzle, a task made all the more difficult when word of the cache leaked out. Soon journalists, academics and lawyers suing the tobacco industry began turning up at Glantz’s doorstep. Annoyed by the interruptions, he put the documents in the UCSF library, which, at Glantz’s urging, had just established a tobacco archive to chronicle the nonsmoking movement.

That is where his troubles began.

On Feb. 3, 1995, a two-page typed letter was hand-delivered to Karen Butter, the UCSF librarian. The author was Barbara A. Caulfield, an attorney with the San Francisco firm of Latham & Watkins, which represented Brown & Williamson.

It had come to the company’s attention, the letter said, “that the archive library possesses confidential and privileged documents which belong to Brown & Williamson.” The company wanted the papers back.

Butter says of Caulfield’s request: “I wasn’t very happy about it.” She grew even unhappier as mysterious men bearing cellular phones camped out in the sunny reading area just outside the tobacco archive, keeping watch on who walked in and out. Butter assumed the men to be private detectives and she had the university lawyers ask Latham & Watkins about them.

Caulfield, who no longer represents Brown & Williamson, did not return repeated phone calls seeking comment.

However, the company’s vice president for public affairs, Joe Helowicz, said the observers were not detectives but people assigned “to keep watch on our papers because our view was the documents were stolen and we didn’t want them disappearing from the library the same way they disappeared from our building.”

Brown & Williamson ultimately sued the university, seeking not only the return of the papers but also library records of the names of anyone who had viewed them. Butter was incensed. Glantz bordered on panicky as he met with university officials to find out if they would back him.

“I thought they were going to say, ‘It’s really nice, Stan, that you have this little crusade, but we hope you have a good lawyer.’ ”

Instead, the university took on the case--and won, even as Brown & Williamson appealed all the way to the California Supreme Court. Today, the secret papers are posted on the Internet, and the library is selling “the Brown & Williamson Collection” on CD-ROM.

“Whenever people talk about how invincible the cigarette companies are,” Glantz says, “I say, ‘Hell, no, the university beat ‘em.’ ”

*

Glantz’s real battle, however, was yet to come.

While he was gathering dirt on the tobacco industry, pro-smoking forces were gathering dirt on him. They learned that the National Cancer Institute--the arm of the National Institutes of Health that funds cancer research--had given Glantz $600,000 to conduct research on tobacco control, including an analysis of how tobacco campaign contributions influenced the votes of state legislators on smoking and health.

Handman, the American Smokers’ Alliance president, bought a full-page ad in the Washington Times to complain that the research was political, not medical. The paper wrote a story and then an editorial on the issue. Soon, an unprecedented effort was underway in Congress to put Glantz’s research on ice.

Meanwhile, last July, Glantz headed a team of researchers who authored nearly an entire edition of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Assn.--five articles analyzing the Brown & Williamson papers, work that was also funded by the Cancer Institute. Such prominent play was clearly the pinnacle of Glantz’s academic career.

He got his comeuppance the next month. The House Appropriations Committee, at the behest of Rep. John Porter (R-Ill.), instructed the institute to withdraw its funding of his campaign contribution research. Officials at NIH, where grant applications undergo a rigorous review by a panel of independent scientists, could not recall another instance of congressional interference with a study.

“This was legitimate science,” says Donald Shopland, who coordinates the Cancer Institute’s tobacco and smoking control program. “He has demonstrated quite clearly that when the health forces don’t become involved in these issues and you allow the tobacco industry to come in with their money and their lobbyists, you lose.”

Glantz appears to have survived the incursion. After he received $75,000 from the American Cancer Society, the Cancer Institute opened negotiations with Congress to lower the price tag on his grant but to let the work continue.

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As that battle raged, Glantz immersed himself in a book about the Brown & Williamson documents that would pick up where the JAMA articles left off. When his proposal landed on the desk of hotshot New York literary agent Jane Dystel, she thought she had a blockbuster on her hands.

“I can usually sell a book that is difficult to sell in six weeks,” Dystel said. She figured she could sell this one, tentatively titled “The Cigarette Papers”--a not-so-oblique reference to the Pentagon Papers--in two.

She was wrong.

Publisher after publisher--about two dozen in all--turned her down, Dystel said. Some thought the book was too technical to be marketable. But, Dystel said, many of them feared a tobacco industry lawsuit.

At the New Press, a not-for-profit company specializing in public interest books, Associate Editor Diane Wachtell was surprised to hear from such a high-powered agent. It meant the book had undoubtedly been turned down by more prominent houses.

“I thought the material was completely fascinating, very damning and something that ought to be available to the public,” Wachtell says. But the publisher’s lawyer told her in no uncertain terms not to publish.

“He said there was no question in his mind that Brown & Williamson would come up with grounds to sue us, whether they were good grounds or not, that they . . . could come up with a lawsuit that was big enough and bad enough and costly enough that our very existence would be jeopardized,” she says.

Dystel finally found a publisher--the University of California press, run by Glantz’s employer.

“The Cigarette Papers” is due out next month. But the central mystery of the Brown & Williamson documents--the identity of “Mr. Butts”--remains unsolved.

Glantz, for one, prefers it that way. Says the scientist who specializes in troublemaking: “For me to know who sent me that stuff is nothing but trouble.”