BAT Exec Urged Firm to Admit Smoking-Disease Link

An executive of British American Tobacco Co., one of the world’s largest cigarette makers, tried in 1980 to persuade the company to publicly acknowledge the link between smoking and disease, but the idea apparently died because of concerns about the legal fallout from such an admission, according to documents filed in a Minnesota court Monday.

The internal company documents, obtained during pretrial discovery, were filed as part of Minnesota’s lawsuit against the major tobacco companies, which alleges that the cigarette industry conspired to hide the dangers of its products from the public.

The documents provide significant evidence that some cigarette company personnel were privately acknowledging the health hazards of smoking even as industry leaders publicly denied the link between smoking and disease--a position they maintain to this day.

It is unclear who at BAT wrote the May, 16, 1980, memo about health hazards. The author acknowledged that the proposal was a “radical departure” from the company’s normal position. But the author also said the company needed to shift gears because “our integrity is seriously in question over our position on causation,” a position that lacks credibility “in the eyes of the ordinary man in the street.”

Another memo, written May 9, 1980, and titled “A New Company Approach to the Smoking and Health Issue,” states that “smoking is addictive/habituative in addition to being an additional [health] risk and many smokers would like to give up the habit if they could.” Again, it is unclear who at BAT wrote the memo.

The papers go to the heart of allegations in lawsuits filed by Minnesota and 15 other states that the cigarette industry willfully suppressed information about the health hazards of smoking.

The May 16 memo also reflects the concern in some circles that the industry was afraid to make any concession on the issue of a link between smoking and disease because of concerns that it would negatively affect the companies in pending litigation:

“We have three pending legal suits against Brown and Williamson [another BAT Industries subsidiary] in the USA and US lawyers are waiting for an opportunity to demonstrate that the industry accepts causation in order to succeed in their suits. The company’s position on causation is simply not believed by the overwhelming majority of independent observers, scientists and doctors.”

The memo was addressed to three BAT executives, identified only by their initials--including “LCFB,” which matches the initials of L.C.F. Blackman, then the company’s director of research and development. The memo notes that “it could be that a reevaluation has to be made of what we could lose in the short term through court action in the USA, against what we will certainly lose in the long term if we do not defend ourselves credibly on social unacceptability.”

Michael Corrigan, the attorney for BAT’s parent company, BAT Industries, said he could make only a limited comment on behalf of his client:

“As a responsible company in the midst of producing millions of pages of documents pursuant to court order, we believe that matters contained in such documents should be addressed in the appropriate forum--a courtroom. Moreover, it is not feasible to respond to documents cherry-picked and taken out of context by plaintiffs’ attorneys.”

But Minnesota Atty. Gen. Hubert H. Humphrey III said the BAT memo “reveals a historic moment in which some of the highest-ranking tobacco officials in the world considered finally confessing the truth about tobacco and health for the sake of their ‘integrity.’ But the tobacco officials obviously chose instead to perpetuate their deadly cover-up.”

Minnesota attorneys on Monday also filed several other provocative documents, including a February 1982 memo from a ranking Philip Morris scientist that expresses similar concerns to those in the BAT document.

James L. Charles, a senior research and development scientist at the company, wrote to his boss that Philip Morris had to “face the facts” that nicotine is “a potent pharmacological agent” and that nitrosamines, one of the chemical agents in cigarettes, “as a class are potent carcinogens.”

Charles’ memo also warns Thomas S. Osdene, then Philip Morris’ director of research and development, that “we do not know enough about the biological activity of additives which have been in use for a number of years.”

The memo was written on Feb. 23, 1982, one day after U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop issued perhaps the strongest indictment of cigarettes since the landmark 1964 federal report on smoking. Koop increased the list of cancers linked to cigarette use and declared smoking “the most important health issue of our time.”

Charles said in his memo that the latest surgeon general’s report “should make someone sit up and take notice.”

“This company is in trouble. . . . The cigarette industry is in trouble,” Charles wrote to Osdene. “If we are to survive as a viable commercial enterprise we must act now to develop responses to smoking and health allegations from both the private and the government sectors. The anti-smoking forces are out to bury us and the techniques used to attack us do not always involve good science.”

Charles’ memo indicates that he was going to make specific recommendations, but it ends without any.

Minnesota lawyers asked Philip Morris attorneys in August if some of the memo had not been turned over. A company lawyer responded that Minnesota had been provided with all of the document that Philip Morris had.

The Charles’ memo was appended to a brief filed by Minnesota attorneys contending that Philip Morris has destroyed documents. Philip Morris attorney Michael York strongly denied that contention:

“I think it would strike most people as absurd to take a document, retained for over a decade and produced in litigation as evidence of a corporate philosophy of document destruction,” York said. “There is no such corporate philosophy and the plaintiffs know it.”

As to the contents of Charles’ memo, York said: “If this document is evidence of anything, it’s evidence that these [health] issues were being taken seriously by the company as they should have been.