Lawyer: Pressure Snuffed ‘Safer’ Cigarette

Struggling cigarette maker Liggett was pressured by rivals during the late 1970s into scuttling an experimental cigarette that it had viewed as a potential breakthrough against lung cancer, according to testimony by a former Liggett attorney that was unsealed this week.

Lawrence G. Meyer, a top outside lawyer for Liggett, said the firm dropped the project, known internally as XA, for fear of being excluded from the industry’s joint defense of smoking and health suits. Meyer said he was repeatedly told by Liggett general counsel Joseph Greer that the firm’s stronger rivals “could have nothing to do with a company that weakened . . . the industry’s [legal] position” by implying existing brands were unsafe.

Meyer, the first industry lawyer to cooperate with plaintiffs in an anti-tobacco case, has emerged as a potentially important witness against Big Tobacco. His deposition was taken two weeks ago in Seattle, where opening statements are scheduled next week in the state of Washington’s anti-tobacco case. Among other things, the state has accused cigarette makers of colluding to squelch introduction of safer smokes.

Meyer’s testimony, made possible by the landmark legal settlement that Liggett reached last year with the states, focused on the abandonment of the “safer” smoke Liggett had planned to market under the brand name Epic. He said Greer came under steady pressure to kill the project from colleagues on the Committee of Counsel, made up of top industry lawyers who regularly discussed legal and regulatory strategy.

Lawyers for Brown & Williamson and Philip Morris, firms that Meyer claimed had threatened Liggett, disputed his account and contended that the XA was shelved because it was not a safer cigarette.

Meyer, 57, advised Liggett on regulatory issues from 1974-86, most of that time as a partner in the law firm of Patton, Boggs & Blow. Under questioning by lawyers for the state and tobacco companies, Meyer said his knowledge of XA’s demise came from memos and conversations with Greer, a professional colleague and close friend.

Greer, a heavy smoker who died of lung cancer in 1985, never wavered from the view that the risks of smoking were unproven--even taking “some pleasure” in the belief that he had contracted a type of cancer not usually linked to smoking, Meyer said.

Meyer said that Ernest Pepples, former general counsel for Brown & Williamson, had repeatedly told Greer “that this was the dumbest project that he had ever seen and that it was going to ruin the industry and . . . certainly ruin Liggett.” And Pepples, said Meyer, “said the same thing to me.”

Meyer said this was taken as a threat, but under cross-examination said Pepples had not spoken in an “unfriendly” tone. And Jim Milliman, a B&W; lawyer, said Wednesday that Pepples and B&W; “emphatically [deny] that there was any threat to retaliate against Liggett.”