Jury Views CEO’s ‘Gummy Bear’ Deposition

The chief executive of Philip Morris USA testified that cigarettes are no more addictive than coffee or gummy bears--statements made in a videotaped deposition played Thursday for jurors in a landmark secondhand smoke trial.

James J. Morgan, president and chief executive of the leading U.S. cigarette maker, said that cigarettes are not “pharmacologically addictive,” but could be considered a “behaviorally addictive . . . part of your lifestyle” like caffeine, “or, in my case, gummy bears.”

“I like gummy bears, and I eat gummy bears. And I don’t like it when I don’t eat my gummy bears,” Morgan said. “But I’m certainly not addicted to them.”

Portions of Morgan’s deposition were played Thursday afternoon in Dade County Circuit Court, where flight attendants are seeking damages for lung cancer and other illnesses allegedly caused by secondhand smoke before the airline smoking ban.

The case is the first class action ever tried against the cigarette makers, as well as the first case to test their liability for illnesses supposedly suffered by bystanders from other people’s cigarettes.

Morgan’s deposition was taken April 17, and his gummy bear remarks were widely lampooned when aired two weeks later on CBS’ “60 Minutes.” But there was no obvious reaction Thursday from the jury of four men and two women, who viewed the deposition near the end of a long day of testimony.

Plaintiffs’ lawyer Stanley Rosenblatt has sought to discredit industry statements on secondhand smoke by repeatedly invoking the industry’s long-standing denials that smoking has been proven to be dangerous and addictive.

Under questioning by Rosenblatt, Morgan testified that smoking “may possibly” cause cancer, but said the case could not be considered proven “until you know the mechanism and process” by which cancer develops.

“If, theoretically . . . you became satisfied that yes, cigarette smoking does cause lung cancer, would you get out of the tobacco business?” Rosenblatt asked.

“No, I wouldn’t,” Morgan said.

Morgan further denied that the industry acted for business reasons when it filed a suit seeking to void the Environmental Protection Agency’s 1993 declaration that secondhand smoke is a “Class A carcinogen” responsible for 3,000 lung cancer deaths per year.

“The truth has been twisted,” Morgan said. “Science has been manipulated. I don’t think this is about business at all. I think this is about honesty.”

Earlier Thursday, the industry unsuccessfully sought a mistrial on grounds that Judge Robert P. Kaye had prejudiced the case by criticizing one of its lawyers in front of the jury. The judge denied the motion for a mistrial.

Kaye had rebuked R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. lawyer Jeffrey Furr for “throwing figures around” during his lengthy cross-examination of Dr. Ronald M. Davis, who headed the federal Office on Smoking and Health from 1987 to 1991 and is editor of Tobacco Control, an international journal.

Much of the evidence indicting secondhand smoke is derived from health studies of women whose husbands smoked. The industry maintains, however, that these studies are flawed. Even if taken at face value, the industry says, the studies do not prove harm to flight attendants because exposure in homes would be considerably higher than in airline cabins.

But Davis testified that “exposures on airplanes would be much more intensive . . . and much more dangerous” than in homes, because “40, 50, 60 people” would be smoking at once and “you couldn’t open your windows. You can’t open the door of the airplane.”

“My opinion is that it is definitely a cause of lung cancer in flight attendants who are exposed over a period of time,” Davis said.

Furr questioned Davis at length about purported flaws in specific studies and what Furr described as the EPA’s biased use of data. He also asked Davis to acknowledge that risks to flight attendants would be impossible to gauge without measuring their actual exposures to secondhand smoke.

“I don’t think you have to do a million-dollar study to figure out that the people are being harmed,” Davis said. “They [flight attendants] spent enough time on airplanes that there would be a health problem from that.”

In this first phase of the trial, plaintiffs are seeking to prove the generic case that secondhand smoke is harmful and that the industry has lied about its dangers. If they clear that hurdle, they will face the more difficult task of proving it caused specific ailments.