Where There’s Smoke, There’s Deceit :...

There is no more pressing question in American public health today than the matter of what to do about cigarettes, the little white sticks of tobacco that claim some 420,000 American lives each year--more than AIDS, automobile accidents, homicides, suicide and alcohol abuse combined.

If there is a single image that has become fixed in the public mind as a symbol of this controversy, it must be the photograph of what tobacco critics call “the Seven Dwarfs”’: seven of the nation’s top tobacco industry executives, standing side by side, right hands raised as they solemnly swore to Congress that they did not believe nicotine to be addictive.

That hearing, conducted in 1994 by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles), marked the culmination of a calculated history of denial. It does not take a tobacco expert to come to this conclusion; anybody who has ever yearned for a smoke and cup of coffee, or wrestled the quitting demon and lost, knows the executives were offering Congress a crock--or at least a semantic, lawyer-proof version of the truth.

Yet there is a complex history leading up to this point. Now come three books that explore this history, providing some much-needed perspective on America’s long-running love-hate relationship with the cigarette.

“Ashes to Ashes,” a hefty 100-year chronicle of the cigarette business written by noted novelist and social historian Richard Kluger, is by far the best of the bunch. The author of “Simple Justice” and “The Paper” has written an exhaustive--and, at nearly 800 pages, exhausting--work, so rich in detail that even the most committed reader will have difficulty absorbing all the little gems he unearthed during 6 1/2 years of reporting and writing.

“Tobacco is a hard plant to love,” the author begins, in a typically elegant passage describing the peculiarities of Nicotiana tabacum--the soft, downy hair covering its leaves and stalk, the way it grows sticky to the touch in hot weather, the mysterious nature of its addictive property, nicotine.

It is an objective, perfectly neutral opening to a book that achieves its authority with a nonjudgmental tone. What follows is an intricately layered, comprehensive narrative in which Kluger lays neither blame nor praise on those who built up the tobacco industry, and those who have attempted, through science and activism, to tear it down.

He tracks not only the scientific case against tobacco, but also the rise of the industry itself, from the Civil War, before mass manufacturing enabled the tobacco companies to sell their product on a grand scale, to the present-day domination of one company, Philip Morris. Neatly intertwined is the fascinating--and utterly deceitful--role that advertising has played in selling this dangerous product to an unsuspecting public.

Kluger recalls the nifty little slogans of the early days of tobacco, when the case against cigarettes relied more on suspicion than science: “It’s toasted!” (Lucky Strike). “That’s why I smoke Camels. And I smoke plenty!” “Give your throat a Kool vacation.”

Then, he debunks these claims: that Lucky Strike’s “special” toasting process removed cigarettes’ harmful irritants (there was nothing special about it; all cigarette tobacco is toasted); that Camels had a calming effect (“hardly a scintilla of evidence,” Kluger reports); that menthol Kools soothed the throat (in fact menthol, sometimes used as a veterinary anesthetic, simply numbed the throat, masking smoking’s harsh effects).

Kluger reveals, as well, the industry’s canniness in dealing with government regulators. When, for instance, the Federal Trade Commission first tries to put warning labels on cigarettes, the industry balks, but only as much as it thinks it must to maintain its image. Underneath, the manufacturers know better. They realize that a warning, if written softly enough--without the words “death” or “cancer”--might do them more good than harm, shielding them from liability suits.

“And so,” Kluger writes, “the sly tobacco lobbyist Earle Clements said to the industry’s lawyers and executives, referring to the health warning label: ‘Let’s write it.’ ”

The author brings his book to life with fascinating characters, large and small. Abe Fortas, the former Supreme Court justice, turns up in his role as tobacco lawyer in the 1960s. Sylvester Weaver, the father of actor Sigourney, turns up as a tobacco junior executive in the 1930s. The reader gets to know, and perhaps even admire, Buck Duke--the hard-driving mogul who built a tobacco monopoly at the turn of the century, only to see it busted up by the Supreme Court as an illegal trust--and Joseph F. Cullman III, the shrewd Philip Morris chief who upon his retirement proclaimed: “I never had a crumb of conscience.”

If there is a failing to “Ashes to Ashes,” it is that too little attention is paid to the developments since the time of the Waxman hearings. Kluger instead delivers a compelling account of the landmark Rose Cipollone case of 1983, the first and only lawsuit brought by a smoker in which a jury ordered the industry to pay damages. (The order, however, was later reversed.)

The case of “Melancholy Rose,” as Kluger calls her, gave the public its first glimpse at damaging internal industry documents. “It was like having a great pile of candy to feast on,” Cipollone’s lawyer, Marc Edell, tells the author. Kluger relies heavily on these documents, concluding that they “generated a body of evidence . . . which testified to a American industry’s long unwillingness to deal straightforwardly with the society that licensed it.”

Countless additional records have come to light since the Cipollone case, yet Kluger pays scant attention to them. The two other new books--”Smokescreen,” by Philip J. Hilts, a health policy writer for the New York Times, and “The Cigarette Papers,” by UC San Francisco Professor Stanton F. Glantz and a team of four other researchers--pick up where Kluger’s leaves off.

Hilts’ book begins on a cold morning in December, 1953, when a group of nervous tobacco industry executives gather for a meeting at the elegant Plaza Hotel in New York. Frightened over the reports of an early experiment in which mice developed skin tumors after their backs had been painted with smoke condensate from cigarettes, the tobacco men decide at that pivotal moment to launch a massive public relations campaign that lasts to this day.

“Thus began the conspiracy,” Hilts writes. “. . . The plan was to spend large amounts of money every year indefinitely into the future to prevent, not sworn adversaries, but scientists and public health officers from warning people of a potential hazard in the normal manner. There is no case like it in the annals of business or health.”

It is a rather dramatic opening scene, but unfortunately, the book goes downhill from there. “Smokescreen” relies largely on internal documents from the nation’s third-largest cigarette manufacturer, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., the same records that enabled Hilts to break many of the current wave of tobacco stories. Those who have followed the debate during the last two years will recognize much of the information in “Smokescreen” as having already been published under Hilts’ byline.

The book is more a loose collection of chapters than a narrative, and it reads as though it is not quite yet finished; one wonders if Hilts’ publisher didn’t tell him to hurry things along to keep up with Kluger.

Still, there are several reasons to recommend “Smokescreen.” One is the chapter called “For Starters,” in which Hilts details how the industry has systematically tried to lure young people into smoking--despite its protestations to the contrary. This section includes a damning account of an effort called “Project Sixteen” by Brown & Williamson’s sister company, Imperial Tobacco of Canada, in which children were interviewed on their smoking habits as part of a calculated plan to encourage them to pick up the habit.

Also quite compelling is the author’s account of his meeting in a Mississippi bar with Merrell Williams, the paralegal who pilfered the documents that eventually found their way into Hilts’ hands. In a riveting interview, Williams recounts how he slipped papers into the wide band of the back brace he wore under his shirt, cherry-picking those that seemed particularly damaging to Brown & Williamson.

“I was a thief and knew I was a thief,” Williams tells the author. “. . . This was very dangerous. I was walking around with somebody’s hot documents.”

For those anxious to read these “hot documents” in their original form, “The Cigarette Papers” is an invaluable reference. Glantz is a longtime tobacco foe who, one day in May, 1994, received a mysterious Federal Express box at his UCSF office. The return address was listed simply as “Mr. Butts,” the Doonesbury character who satirizes cigarette industry executives.

Inside the box was a treasure trove--4,000 pages of secret Brown & Williamson documents, presumably those that Williams stole, although no one can say for sure. Glantz, overrun with requests to look at the documents, put them on display in the university library--a move that prompted Brown & Williamson to sue for the return of its “stolen property.” The company lost, and the library has since put the documents on the Internet for all the world to view.

In “The Cigarette Papers,” Glantz and his co-authors--John Slade, Lisa A. Bero, Peter Hanauer and Deborah E. Barnes--analyze these highly technical documents. Here, one can find detailed explanations of the industry’s attempt at creating a “safer cigarette,” and how lawyers managed the companies’ scientific research--all in the language of tobacco insiders.

In a foreword to “The Cigarette Papers,” former Surgeon Gen. C. Everett Koop writes that the book is “a vital weapon in the battle against tobacco,” and that is surely how Glantz et al. intended it. The work is scholarly in tone, and while it might not make for thrilling bedtime reading, it provides an important public service at a time when Americans are trying to decide just how much control government should exercise over the little white sticks.