At White House, Red Carpet for Tobacco Whistle-Blowers

In another sign that President Clinton will push for a toughened tobacco settlement, administration officials on Friday met with four tobacco industry whistle-blowers, introduced them to the media as “American heroes” and said they had listened carefully to their warnings that cigarette makers have not disclosed everything they know about smoking’s health hazards.

“I think the major message of today . . . was that we need a lot of document disclosure” by the tobacco industry and that provisions of the pending settlement on this subject must be reviewed “very carefully,” Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala said.

Bruce Reed, the president’s domestic policy advisor, stressed that the session taught Clinton officials “a great deal about nicotine and what the industry may or may not know about developing reduced-risk cigarettes.”

A Senate aide said he thought Friday’s event with the whistle-blowers “means that the administration is starting to develop a message that in certain key respects, the settlement is inadequate.”

For their part, all four of the whistle-blowers--three of whom formerly worked for Philip Morris Cos. and one who worked for Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp.--said they view as especially troublesome the settlement provisions that restrict the ability of the Food and Drug Administration to reduce the nicotine content of cigarettes.

The three former Philip Morris scientists--Victor DeNoble, Paul C. Mele and Ian Uydess--all asserted that the industry still held massive amounts of undisclosed scientific data about the hazards of smoking and the impact of nicotine.

“If this industry is going to reinvent itself in a more acceptable fashion,” the cigarette companies have to disclose all that information, said Mele, who now is chief officer of research and technology applications at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

“There are so many years of research hidden by the industry,” said DeNoble, who added that research into a safer cigarette that he and Mele were working on had been cut short by Philip Morris in the early 1980s.

Uydess, who was an associate senior scientist when he left Philip Morris in 1989 after 11 years at the company, said he had urged administration officials--including Vice President Al Gore, who attended Friday’s meeting--to form a partnership with former industry employees to learn what they need to know to assess the settlement.

“Otherwise, they’ll be at the mercy of the industry,” Uydess said.

In March 1996, Uydess submitted a sworn affidavit to the FDA that took issue with the 1994 congressional testimony of William Campbell, Philip Morris’ then-president, that the company “does not manipulate nor independently control the level of nicotine in our cigarettes.”

In his affidavit, Uydess said Philip Morris “routinely targeted and adjusted” the levels of nicotine, the chemical component of cigarettes that leads to addiction, according to scientific studies.

Uydess said he considered the intent of the settlement good. But he cautioned, “we need to be careful not to let the industry control the details.”

Jeffrey Wigand, the former research director of Brown & Williamson, is the highest-ranking former cigarette-company employee to turn against the industry. He was fired by the company in 1993 under disputed circumstances.

In a pretrial deposition in 1995, he testified in a lawsuit Mississippi filed against the tobacco companies that Brown & Williamson’s chief executive had opposed work on safer cigarettes to avoid the possibility of legal liability on conventional smokes--a charge the company denied.

He was sued by the company, accused of violating confidentiality agreements by talking to the CBS TV news program “60 Minutes,” leaking documents to other news organizations and offering himself as an expert witness to anti-tobacco lawyers.

But at the insistence of state attorneys general during the final hours of talks that led to the recent settlement, the company agreed to drop the suit.

The accord--reached with 39 state attorneys general and private lawyers--calls on the industry to pay $368.5 billion over 25 years to settle lawsuits by the states and 17 private class-action suits. The industry also agreed to accept severe restrictions on advertising and marketing, place stark new warning labels on packages and incur up to $2 billion a year in penalties if smoking by minors does not drop dramatically within five years. In return, class-action suits against the industry would be barred, as would punitive damages for prior misconduct.

Before introducing the whistle-blowers at a news conference outside the White House, Reed said that administration officials not only learned a lot of technical information at the 90-minute meeting but also “heard moving stories about how difficult it had been for these four brave men.”

Uydess, who broke with his closest friend over turning on Philip Morris, said he was pleased at how seriously the administration officials, particularly Gore, approached the issues they raised.

“It just has to help to have the vice president understand how a cigarette is designed,” said another participant in the meeting, speaking on condition of anonymity.

In a related development, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said he would recuse himself from any consideration of or vote on the tobacco settlement in Congress because his brother-in-law, Richard Scruggs, a Pascagoula, Miss., attorney who is serving as special counsel to 20 states suing the industry, has played such a key role in the deal.

Times staff writer Janet Hook contributed to this report.