How Long Did Big Tobacco Hide the Effects of Smoking?

Six American guys and a public relations executive walk into a bar. That might sound like the beginning of a bad joke, and in a way it is, except that it was in exceptionally poor taste and the joke was on about a hundred and fifty million smokers who died laughing.

The year was 1953, the location was the New York Plaza Hotel, and the occasion was a crisis meeting in which the presidents of the big six tobacco companies were meeting up with a PR company to discuss something of a prickly problem. Word was finally beginning to trickle out that their product was killing their customers, and this was putting everyone on a bit of a downer.

It was felt that simply denying the truth wasn’t going to work in this case, and so the purveyors of coffin nails had to think a bit smarter than that. Depending on your viewpoint, what they eventually came up with in that hotel could be described as either genius, terrifying, or downright barmy. But it worked.

Fast-forward about forty years, and seven American guys walk into a Congressional hearing. That might sound like the beginning of a bad joke, and in a way it is, but it’s one we’d heard many times before. The year was 1994, the seven guys were the CEOs of the seven major tobacco companies, and the occasion was a Congressional inquiry into whether executives had engineered and manipulated deadly and addictive products.

All seven CEOs insisted that they did not believe tobacco to be harmful. And they were doing so under oath. You might think that making such outrageous claims in 1994 could lead to charges of perjury, but they weren’t technically lying.

Trying to pick apart any strands of truth in an overflowing ashtray of lies and deception can really stain your fingers. The slow-burning dirty tricks of Big Tobacco led to a quite baffling situation in which wide scientific consensus about the health risks of smoking was just completely swept under the carpet for well over a decade, and then questioned for decades more. But just how low did they go? How long did they keep the world choking in a shameless smokescreen?

And did the giant porkies from one of the most profitable consumer-goods industries in history ever really stop?

You Are the Quarry

Oh, to be alive in the 1960s. The world looked very different back then, although admittedly it must have been quite difficult to see anything at all through the endless swirl of cigarette smoke. You could light up pretty much anywhere you liked – in the office, down the pub, on public transport, and probably even down at the petrol station. Not only that, you could proudly wander into your local store and pick out your favourite brand from a display of tempting cigarettes in distinctive classy packaging.

It’s all a far cry from the world of today in which a smoker is rudely pushed out into the lashing rain, and even the act of purchasing one of those packets of shame now hidden away behind metal shutters makes you feel like a little kid asking for a dirty video. Even the distinctive branding has been replaced by uniform plain packaging featuring a photograph of what looks like a car crash victim, accompanied with a text warning along the lines of “SMOKING MAKES YOUR LEGS FALL OFF.”

The original packets looked a lot funkier, and you used to see them all the time on billboards, in print advertisements, and on television commercials. The early seasons of The Flintstones were sponsored by Winston cigarettes and you’d see Fred and Barney lighting up during commercial breaks whilst telling viewers that Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. Much earlier in 1946, the baseball legend Babe Ruth appeared in print advertisements for Raleigh cigarettes, proclaiming that no other leading cigarette brand was safer to smoke. That very same year, Babe Ruth was diagnosed with throat cancer – or more specifically, nasopharynx cancer – from which he would die a couple of years later at the age of 53. That was probably just a coincidence, though.

I mean, doctors and physicians were happy to promote certain brands throughout the early 1960s, and they must have known what they were talking about. According to one advert, “More Doctors smoke ‘Camels’ than any other cigarette” and this was apparently because scientific studies had proven that Camels can aid digestion. Meanwhile, ‘Lucky Strikes’ made the genuine boast that “20,679 Physicians Say That ‘Luckies’ Are Less Irritating to the Throat.” What wasn’t made clear is that all 20,679 of those physicians had been gifted a big carton of ‘Lucky Strikes’ just before being asked to name their preferred brand.

This kind of thing was phased out before the end of the decade, and this brings us to the question of when exactly smoking cigarettes was officially deemed to be a not entirely healthy habit. The usual answer to that one is 1964. To be precise, it was the 11th January 1964 when the U.S Surgeon General, Luther Terry, published a 387-page report entitled Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General. Pulling evidence from over 7,000 scientific articles, Luther Terry concluded that smoking was a cause of lung cancer and a withered fistful of other diseases, whilst also pointing out that dirty smokers were nine or ten times more likely to die from lung cancer than a non-smoker.

The Surgeon General’s report was certainly the big turning point at which people actually began to sit up and take notice. Within the space of a year, cigarette packets in the U.S carried mandatory health warnings which were admittedly a bit tame and indecisive to begin with – “Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Health” – but the messages had grown more forceful by the end of the 1960s. By 1971, cigarette commercials were banned on radio and television.

So things were moving pretty quickly in the right direction after the 1964 report. But considering that Europeans had been smoking tobacco for hundreds of years, some might be pondering why we had to wait until 1964 to first hear proof that it might not be very good for us. I mean, long-term smokers must have picked up on a few tiny clues throughout that period. Just little things like a niggling tickly throat, coughing your guts up every morning, and suddenly finding that you can’t even walk up a flight of stairs without stopping for a breather and a cigarette break about halfway up.

A partial answer to this is that we didn’t actually have to wait until 1964 to discover the truth. Since the early 1950s, an emerging scientific consensus was already providing compelling evidence that smoking causes lung cancer. But thanks to some shrewd manoeuvring from the devious tobacco companies, nobody out there was really listening.

Another big factor in the seemingly long-delayed discovery of the health risks was simple enough. Whilst tobacco itself obviously has a long history, not that many people were smoking cigarettes before the 1920s. Mass production of cigarettes had first kicked off at the back end of the 19th century, and the explosive growth of the tobacco industry surged after the First World War, during which millions of soldiers had been given cigarettes in their rations.

So it quickly evolved from a niche product for hipsters to a relatively normal habit that a typical man might enjoy. Only men, mind. At this point, the idea of a woman enjoying a cigarette would have been deeply frowned upon as it wasn’t considered acceptable for girls.

There’s a reason why it was Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble lighting up Winstons in the 1960s whilst Wilma and Betty were washing the dishes.

It was never considered acceptable for children either, which is perhaps a bit weird when you think about it. If nobody was concerned about the health risks, then what would be the harm in young primary school children wandering around the playground with a ciggie on the go? Well, there was probably at least a suspicion even during the very early days that frequently sucking smoke and tar into your lungs could potentially be harmful in the long term, so it was always viewed as a mature vice which should be kept out of the hands of children and women, as only adult men could handle it.

By the 1920s, these mild suspicions were being taken a little more seriously as governments and even the tobacco industry itself began to put some serious research into the health risks. But the problem here is that this kind of research is always gonna take quite a long time. It’s not like people suddenly drop dead after smoking for a week.

In many cases, the harmful side-effects only begin to surface after someone has been smoking for twenty, thirty, or forty years, if at all. Loads of people have that mad grandad who smoked like a fish all his life but lived to be a hundred years old, whilst all his healthier mates had long since collapsed from heart attacks whilst they were out jogging. So it’s understandable that we weren’t likely to see any solid results from all this research for a few decades, in much the same way that we’re not likely to learn about all the deadly dangers of vaping for a long time yet.

One of the biggest clues here though was the sharp rise in lung cancer rates over that period. It seems odd to consider this now but before the First World War, lung cancer was a relatively rare disease, and many doctors would get through their entire career without ever coming across a single case of it. To get a grip on just how much smoking changed all that, we just need to look at the numbers.

In 1920, only 250 people a year in England and Wales died from lung cancer. By 1960, that figure had mushroomed to 10,000 a year. This was pretty much the peak of the smoking epidemic, when over 70% of men in the UK smoked, along with 40% of women who had finally been warmly welcomed into the stained fingers club.

This had followed dubious marketing campaigns aimed at women which claimed that smoking helped keep you slim and less likely to beat your children around the head.

But the thing is, we kind of had this sorted fourteen years before that U.S Surgeon General’s report. The British Medical Journal published the results of a case-study in 1950 in which Dr Richard Doll and Professor Bradford Hill concluded that lung cancer patients were very likely to be heavy smokers, a point which was expanded upon in subsequent studies throughout the early 1950s. Not everyone was in complete agreement of course, as those doctors and physicians were still being bribed to promote certain cigarette brands, and a poll conducted by The American Cancer Society revealed that only a third of American doctors believed that smoking was linked with lung cancer. The very same poll also revealed that nearly half of these doctors were smokers.

But it still seemed that word was finally getting out about the dangers of smoking, and the thing that really put the wind up the tobacco industry was the 1953 publication of a short article in Reader’s Digest with the cheery title Cancer by the Carton. This article urged readers to take heed of the alarming new scientific evidence that smoking was clearly the cause of the recent massive spike in lung cancer cases. And it was this article that prompted a meeting at the New York Plaza Hotel just a couple of months later between six American guys and a public relations executive.

The World Won’t Listen

The key players in this emergency meeting were the heads of the six big tobacco companies – American Tobacco, Philip Morris, R. J. Reynolds, Benson & Hedges, Brown & Williamson, and U.S. Tobacco Co – and John W. Hill from the PR agency Hill and Knowlton. The main item on the agenda was how to prevent a potential public panic that would see millions of customers moving away from cigarettes in light of this ever-increasing exposure of the evidence that smoking was likely to kill you.

Some bright spark came up with the idea of developing a “safer” cigarette which didn’t kill customers, but he was laughed out of the room. The reasoning behind this dismissal was that launching a safer cigarette would be conceding the point that the companies had previously been selling dangerous products, and this would only create resentment and a feeling of distrust towards an industry that was slowly killing its customer base.

John W. Hill instead came up with a list of cunning ideas that would later become known as The Tobacco Industry Playbook. And we can see the main playbook strategies at work within a full-page advertisement jointly taken out by the six tobacco companies in over four hundred U.S newspapers in early 1954.

A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers was seen by an estimated 43 million people, and the page of text was pretty serious and sombre in tone without a cartoon character in sight. It took a little while to thrash out the exact wording of this statement, and there was one significant line from an early draft which didn’t quite make the final silk cut: “We will never produce and market a product shown to be the cause of any serious human ailment.”

The published advert kicks off by explaining that recent scientific experiments on mice have given rise to a theory that cigarettes are in some way linked with lung cancer. It’s true that experiments on mice had taken place, but this opening line totally ignored all the research and studies that included human lung cancer patients, and gives the impression that daft men in white coats were just mucking about with mice.

The ad then goes on to say that such serious medical research should never be disregarded or lightly dismissed. It claims that the tobacco industry accepts a basic responsibility for people’s health and that this is paramount to every other consideration in the business. It also promises the industry’s complete co-operation with those who task it is to safeguard public health.

However, the Frank Statement makes it clear that the tobacco companies do not believe their products are injurious to health, whilst pointing out that no research has yet to be considered conclusive, and there is no agreement by authorities as to the causes of lung cancer. But there was no need to worry too much about it, because they were going to find the answers that had thus far eluded scientists. They pledged substantial financial support to the ongoing research in the form of a new ‘Tobacco Industry Research Committee’ which would be headed up by “a scientist of unimpeachable integrity and national repute.” A group of other distinguished men from science, medicine and education would also be invited to serve on the board of directors.

Much of this had been discussed back at the New York Plaza Hotel, and it had been PR expert John W. Hill that had done most of the talking. He reasoned that just angrily denying the claims of scientists wasn’t going to cut the mustard here, as most customers were surely more likely to place their faith in the independent expert professionals rather than the business owners who were protecting their own interests. I’m not so sure this would be such a problem today when the industry could probably rely exclusively on the custom of conspiracy theorists who could be convinced that the scientists and governments were just making up all the health risks as part of a plot to control the population.

But back then, Hill decided that the most effective strategy was to show respect for the scientists and express concern for the health of their customers whilst pointing out that they believed cigarettes to be harmless and that there was more research work to be done before people started jumping to conclusions. It was a strategy best encapsulated a decade later in an internal memo from a subsidiary of British American Tobacco, which explained: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. Doubt is also the limit of our product.”

John W. Hill felt that embracing science and even taking control of the scientific narrative would strengthen the position of the industry. The huge investment of a million dollars into the Tobacco Industry Research Committee was intended to send a strong smoke signal that Big Tobacco cared about this and they were even going to stump up the money to award grants to hundreds more scientists to get it all thrashed out as quickly as possible.

Of course, the committee turned out to be a load of old bollocks. The “scientist of unimpeachable integrity and national repute” who was given the director’s job was a guy called C.C Little, and he was of the unshakeable opinion that there was no connection between smoking and any known disease. Just about every cent of the research went towards looking at other potential causes of cancer, which meant that the so-called Tobacco Industry Research Committee wasn’t really concerning itself with tobacco at all. It was more a case of trying to claim that everything else out there in the modern world could give you cancer, and it was unfair to single out tobacco as the sole cause of the recent huge spike in lung cancer.

This was a point that would continue to be trotted out for decades. In 1976, the director of research and development at Philip Morris told the BBC: “None of the things which have been found in tobacco smoke are at concentrations which can be considered harmful. Anything can be considered harmful. Apple sauce is harmful if you get too much of it.”

Much later in 1989, Ron Berryman, a spokesperson for The Tobacco Institute of Australia, was telling the press: “So are potatoes. Cancer-causing that is. Tobacco is in the same family. You inhale the fumes of potatoes when you’re cooking them.”

In short, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee was nothing more than a dodgy PR operation which spent the next forty-five years manufacturing doubt over the consensus of independent scientists who were actually bothering to study the effects of smoking.

But weirdly, it appeared to work, at least for a while. It certainly helped to keep the tobacco industry at an all-time high for another whole decade before the publication of the U.S Surgeon General’s Report. And this now seems quite mad when so many experts had been evidencing the connection with cancer since 1950, yet were being completely ignored. Charles S. Cameron, a former director of the American Cancer Society, hit the coffin nail on the head in 1956 when he told The Atlantic: “If the degree of association which has been established between cancer of the lung and smoking were shown to exist between cancer of the lung, and say, eating spinach, no one would raise a hand against the proscription of spinach from the national diet.”

It’s a fair point. But Big Tobacco had made such a good job of this, that even by the 1980s, so many smokers were still convincing themselves that cigarettes were harmless. And in comparison, Big Spinach would have found it difficult to pull off a similar feat.

Things did get a little trickier with the publication of the U.S Surgeon General’s report in 1964, after which sales slipped into a long-term decline as the industry gradually faced a growing list of restrictions in terms of marketing, packaging requirements, regulation, annoying smoke-free policies, and higher taxation. But before we feel too sorry for them, Big Tobacco was still obviously making an absolute packet for the next sixty years.

Internal documents have revealed that the companies were more than aware of the proven link with lung cancer as early as the 1960s, but these internal documents bore little relation to what they were prepared to say in public. However, the public messaging did become increasingly foggy as the years progressed. By 1971, the chairman of Philip Morris was appearing on television to proclaim that his company did not accept the theory that cigarettes were hazardous. The following year, the same company’s vice president was making a quite startling promise to The Wall Street Journal which was never kept: “If our product is harmful, we’ll stop making it.”

But that PR wizard John W. Hill may have felt annoyed about how some of the later marketing wasn’t exactly following the rules of the Playbook. For example, The American Tobacco Company placed a provocative text advert in The New York Times in 1969 which included the line “We believe the anti-cigarette theory to be a bum rap.” This was essentially a pretty angry rant against all scientific evidence, making it very clear that the company “wasn’t going to knuckle under to critics.” Not quite the subtle pro-science strategy that Hill had in mind.

Then we have the matter of the “safer cigarette.” Whilst the bright spark who suggested it back at The New York Plaza Hotel was told to put a sock in it, so-called “safer cigarettes” did become more commonplace by the 1970s. In fact, it could be argued that they were already knocking around long before that meeting, in the form of filtered cigarettes. Nearly all cigarettes were unfiltered before the 1950s which was when we first got a big taste for little white plugs at the end of our sticks.

The marketing suggested that these new-fangled filters would trap some of the most harmful substances lurking in a cigarette before they reached your lungs. The adverts made such bold proclamations as “Don’t cut down on your smoking! The big Duke filter does it for you!” and “Here’s proof you can see.

Kent gives greater protection than any other cigarette!”

It didn’t help matters that some of the very early Kent Micronite filters actually contained asbestos fibers which made them much more dangerous than unfiltered cigarettes. And one shifty strategy which thankfully never made it to the shops was developed by a chemist working for R.J Reynolds. He came up with a filter that turned from white to brown as you smoked, potentially fooling a customer into believing that the filter was picking up all the nasty stuff when it was actually doing no such thing.

And this is the issue with filtered cigarettes – they barely filter anything at all. If they worked as the adverts claimed, millions of smokers wouldn’t have continued to die from lung cancer since the 1950s.

Not content with just killing off the human race, a further disadvantage to filtered cigarettes is that they’re helping to destroy the planet. They’re usually made from cellulose acetate which takes far longer to biodegrade than the rest of the cigarette, and an estimated 4.5 trillion cigarette butts a year end up as litter. Such a shame that the pocket ashtray didn’t catch on in quite the same way as dog poo bags.

Low Tar or ‘Light’ cigarettes were another blatant fraud that emerged later on in the 1970s, and were largely an attempt to fool the machines. They didn’t actually contain less tar, but to be fair, that was never the claim. The idea was that the filters on low tar cigarettes contained tiny ventilation holes which drew in air when you took a drag, diluting the tar and some of the toxins that would usually be absorbed by the smoker. You could tell that there was some truth to this as there was a noticeably milder and smoother taste with low tar cigarettes.

The marketing again suggested that switching to low tar would be a smart move for your health. A mid-’70s print advertisement for the True brand depicted a female tennis player taking a quick ciggie break at the net, something you don’t tend to see too often at Wimbledon these days. The slogan read: “Considering all I’d heard, I decided to either quit or smoke True. I smoke True.”

Another short-lived low tar brand in the 1970s went by the particularly dodgy name of Fact, and internal memos have revealed why exactly they went for this name. An early marketing proposal was to use the slogan: “Critics of smoking claim that cigarettes are dangerous. We don’t agree. That’s not a claim. That’s a Fact.” Ooh, clever. Whilst they chickened out on that one, they did still go with: “You don’t have to give up taste to get low tar. That’s not a claim. That’s a Fact.”

But all this is a bit bewildering and contradictory, because on the one hand all these new low tar brands were clearly marketed as a safer option and even a sensible alternative to quitting, whilst on the other hand you’ve got the tobacco companies still claiming that there’s nothing remotely dangerous about normal cigarettes. You would have thought that even some of the smokers who were still convinced that the anti-cigarette theory was a bum rap, might have noticed that this didn’t entirely make sense.

Not that it mattered much anyway, as Big Tobacco was already aware that low tar cigarettes only increased the dangers of smoking. The real inspiration for those ventilation holes was largely a reaction to a new U.S law in 1967 which required new or modified cigarette brands to be tested by the Federal Trade Commission. This involved passing the cigarettes through a special smoking machine that measured the amount of tar inhaled from consistent and moderate electronic puffs.

Big problem here, though: The machines couldn’t mimic the natural instincts of a typical smoker taking a drag on a low tar cigarette. It’s true that the ventilated holes did lead to a milder smoke and a negligible reduction in the yield of tar. But it’s also true that this meant smokers tended to suck much harder to satisfy their craving, and this in turn meant that they were inhaling much more smoke.

This led to a fresh spike in the rates of a specific type of lung cancer called adenocarcinoma which hits the outer lungs where all the toxins from the deeper inhalations were getting dumped. As the smoking machines never felt the inclination to suck harder, the brands were allowed to get away with making misleading claims about lower tar content for far too long. And the tragedy here is that so many smokers of low tar cigarettes – and subsequent cancer victims – were utterly convinced that they really were making a healthier choice, when if anything low tar cigarettes were even more dangerous than the regular brands.

Of course, another major niggle with cigarettes is that they’re a bit more-ish. Or to put it another way, the nicotine inside the tobacco is hideously addictive, so even if you were growing worried about all these emerging health risks, it was going to be a herculean challenge to knock this dirty habit on the head.

The surprising thing here is just how long it took for nicotine to get officially recognised as an addictive drug. It wasn’t until 1988 that the U.S Surgeon General, Charles Everett Koop, identified nicotine as an addictive drug, similar to heroin, cocaine, and Vegemite. And it wasn’t until 1994 that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration finally concluded that tobacco companies were essentially selling an addictive drug.

It’s weird because I’m pretty sure everyone already had a pretty clear idea that smoking was addictive long before then, and it had been established for decades that trying to quit was far from easy. It certainly hadn’t escaped the attention of the industry. As early as 1963, an internal memo composed by an executive of Brown and Williamson conceded: “Nicotine is addictive. We are, then, in the business of selling nicotine, an addictive drug.”

The point was reiterated by a research official at Philip Morris in 1972 when he wrote: “The cigarette should be conceived not as a product but as a package. The product is nicotine. Think of the cigarette pack as a storage container for a day’s supply of nicotine.”

They naturally sang a very different tune in public, and were still denying that nicotine was addictive as late as the 1990s, comparing the urge to have another cigarette to quite fancying another packet of Gummy Bears. By the time we get to 2011, the CEO of Philip Morris was finally admitting that tobacco is addictive but was also insisting that “It is not that hard to quit.”

Something else that Big Tobacco denied for decades was the manipulation of nicotine, such as adding ammonia compounds which boost the delivery of nicotine into your lungs and brain, creating a more intense buzz. Internal documents reveal that they had absolutely been doing this since at least the 1960s, but they would continue to manipulate the truth in public for decades.

And the lies just kept on coming. It had been suspected since the 1950s that smoking during pregnancy could be harmful to the baby, and this was confirmed in the 1964 U.S Surgeon General’s Report. The risks to the baby include low birth weight, birth defects, premature birth and even a higher risk of stillbirth. Big Tobacco was having none of that, although the president of Philip Morris admitted in a 1971 television interview that some babies might not quite reach full height.

As he put it: “It’s true that babies born from women who smoke are smaller, but they are just as healthy as the babies born to women who do not smoke. Some women would prefer to have smaller babies.”

Another conclusion that came quite late in the day related to the dangers of passive smoking. Regular exposure to second-hand smoke can increase the risks of lung cancer and heart disease by between 20% to 30%, which must be particularly annoying if you’re a militant anti-smoker. The legendary British entertainer Roy Castle is a contender for the most famous person to have died from passive smoking. Despite never having been a smoker, he died from lung cancer in 1994.

After he was first diagnosed, he pinned the blame on all the years he spent playing the trumpet in smoky jazz clubs. I suppose he could have just been a crafty secret smoker and didn’t want to let on to his wife.

The dangers of passive smoking weren’t made official until yet another U.S Surgeon General’s Report, this time in 1986. But in another diversion from the Tobacco Industry Playbook, Philip Morris released a series of print advertisements just one year later which arrogantly suggested that the Surgeon General was talking out of his arse. The ads loftily declared: “Please don’t tell me my cigarette smoke is harmful to you. There’s just no convincing proof that it is.”

It seems that Philip Morris reverted to the rules of the Playbook the following year when they hooked up with other tobacco companies to launch The Center for Indoor Air Research. Along the same lines as The Tobacco Industry Research Committee, this was sold as an investigation into indoor air pollution and the potential dangers of passive smoking, but was actually just an excuse to try and find any other reason why some non-smokers might develop lung cancer.

But perhaps one of the most disgraceful strategies ever deployed by Big Tobacco was the marketing of a dangerous and addictive drug to children. I say it was disgraceful, but I guess you can see where they were coming from on this one. Selling a lethal product that is constantly killing off your customers means that you have to start thinking quite early on about the next generation of suckers.

One of the most blatant examples of this was the introduction of “Joe Camel” in the late 1980s – a funky humanoid camel cartoon character who smoked Camels whilst racing cars, shooting pool, pulling the ladies, and generally appearing to be the cool dude that every young kid aspired to be when they grew out of short trousers. Joe Camel obviously struck a chord with the kids – at one point, it was revealed that nearly 33% of cigarettes illegally sold to children were of the Camel variety.

It’s no surprise that Camel denied that they were ever marketing to children, as did every other tobacco company. But yet more internal documents reveal a different story. A 1974 presentation from R.J Reynolds focused on why they should be targeting 14-year-old children, whilst a 1981 memo from Philip Morris puts it very bluntly: “We do realise that today’s teenager is tomorrow’s potential regular customer.”

One company in particular did pay a particularly hefty price for targeting kids in a much more direct manner, though. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, some tobacco companies were actually handing out free samples of cigarettes to schoolchildren in a bid to get them hooked. The focus was usually on young black children who would be offered free cigarettes near schools, playgrounds, youth centres, or wherever they could be found.

One such victim was Marie Evans from Boston who claimed that she was given free cigarettes from the age of nine onwards by the Lorillard Tobacco Company, who were quite staggeringly allowed to set up their stall in the school playground. After Marie died from lung cancer in 2002, her son Willie took Lorillard to court, and the jury found the company guilty of targeting children with cigarettes, originally awarding damages of around $150 million. After years of legal wrangling, the case was ultimately settled out of court for a reported $70 million, but the jury’s original verdict still stuck, which is why I’ve not had to crowbar the word “allegedly” into every other sentence here.

So at least Willie got a big payout, but did Big Tobacco ever accept any wider responsibility from decades of wilfully misleading millions of customers to their gravestones, and did they ever manage to stop telling lies? Well…it’s complicated.

That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore

They were definitely still telling fibs in 1994 when seven American guys walked into a Congressional hearing. Under oath, all seven CEOs of the major tobacco companies claimed that they did not believe cigarettes to be either harmful or addictive. We brought up the question of perjury near the top of the video, but the key word there was “believe.”

All seven CEOS were clearly trained beforehand to phrase their answers very carefully. By saying that they only “believed” things that were demonstrably false, their answers were legally viewed as misguided personal beliefs rather than lies told under oath. Having said that, it’s more of a mystery why nobody pursued perjury charges for some of their other statements, including the bits where they vehemently denied manipulating the levels of nicotine – a point which was proven to be untrue by the later release of internal company documents.

We’ve talked a lot about these internal documents, and the only reason that we’ve been able to learn so much from them is because the release of internal company documentation was one of the stipulations of the later 1998 Master Settlement Agreement. As over 40 states had now commenced litigation against the major tobacco companies for creating a health crisis, Big Tobacco responded by seeking a national legislative settlement. The result was the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement in which Big Tobacco agreed to pay out a whopping total of $206 billion to 46 states across the next 25 years, most of which was meant to go towards medical costs and tobacco prevention, education, and cessation programs. The other four states had already reached private settlements by this point.

As well as the handing over of 14 million internal documents, other provisions of the agreement included new bans on sport sponsorship, outdoor advertisements, product placement in TV and movies, branded merchandise, and blatant marketing to youths – including a ban on cartoon characters such as poor old Camel Joe. A missed opportunity there was to force Camel into making one last advertisement in which Joe dies horribly of lung cancer. The Tobacco Industry Research Committee and the Center for Indoor Air Research were also closed down as part of the agreement.

Whilst all this may have been hailed as a victory in many quarters, and Big Tobacco certainly had to dig deep into its coffers, there was one major disappointment. A mandate was never put in place for the states to specifically spend the money on medical costs and tobacco education, and so the majority of the money ended up getting diverted elsewhere. In a way, the states treated the annual payouts as a bit of a windfall which could be spent wherever they liked.

That wasn’t quite the end of the story, though. The U.S Department of Justice launched its own legal action against Big Tobacco in 1999, seeking a penalty of $280 billion for violating provisions of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. If successful, all this money would almost certainly have ended up going to appropriate places instead of being used to renovate the governor’s swimming pool.

The companies certainly got a proper ticking off from federal judge Gladys Kessler by the time the case concluded in 2006. Over the course of a ruling that spanned 1,683 pages, Judge Kessler found that the tobacco industry had, amongst many other things, covered up the health risks of smoking, engaged in fraud and lying to the public, targeted children as replacement smokers, manipulated levels of nicotine to increase and perpetuate addiction, distorted the truth about low tar cigarettes, and abused the legal system to make pots of money with little or no regard for illness and human suffering. However, the judge’s hands were tied when it came to imposing any kind of financial penalty, as apparently the specific charges of federal racketeering dictate that remedies must look to the future rather than imposing fines for past behaviour.

Whilst no money was shelled out – aside from the payment of the government’s legal costs – the case did lead to a ban on the marketing of low tar or light cigarettes, and a forced series of “apologies” or “corrective statements” which were to appear as full-page print advertisements and TV spots. But even the latter point turned out to be pretty farcical. The tobacco companies spent no less than eleven years arguing the toss about the exact wording used in these corrective statements.

The original plan had been to get them to issue such bold statements as: “We falsely marketed low tar and light cigarettes as less harmful than regular cigarettes to keep people smoking and sustain our profits.” But by the time the public apologies finally rolled out in 2017, the wording had been somewhat diluted, placing much of the emphasis on the fact that the tobacco companies were being forced to do this by the federal court. It didn’t help matters that the narration on the TV spots came in the form of a soulless computer-generated female voice which was notably lacking in any sincerity.

The apologies would have sounded more convincing if the narration had been provided by a schoolkid who kept sniggering every other sentence.

The original question that we were meant to be answering in this video was “How Long Did Big Tobacco Hide the Effects of Smoking?” We could arguably trace the roots of the deceit back to that 1953 meeting at the New York Plaza Hotel, and we could say that they finally began to take some real responsibility and move away from the dirty habit of lying at some point after the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, or perhaps after the 2006 federal case. So the answer to the question would seem to be somewhere between about 45 and 53 years.

There’s no doubt that Big Tobacco paints itself as a reformed industry these days. They reckon that they’ve put their dubious past behind them and now want to be part of the solution to the problem that they caused. They claim to be working hard towards a healthier ‘Smoke-Free Future’ in which nasty cigarettes are gradually phased out in favour of e-cigarettes and vaping products.

But they still make the vast majority of their profits from tobacco. And even if they were trying hard to promote alternatives to smoking, we have to remember that they’re still in the business of selling an addictive drug. They admitted themselves in the 1960s and ’70s that their product was nicotine and the cigarette was merely the package for nicotine delivery. Their business model hasn’t really altered that much; they’ve just changed the packaging.

And speaking of packaging, they weren’t afraid to kick up a proper stink over the measures to introduce plain packaging for cigarettes in the 2010s. Philip Morris even tried to sue Uruguay over the matter, although all their claims were dismissed. Australia was the first country to adopt plain packaging with graphic warnings in 2012, prompting the industry to respond with a long list of their own warnings as to why this was a terrible idea.

They claimed their research had shown that plain packaging would drive down prices making cigarettes more affordable, it would make smokers more likely to purchase their cigarettes from supermarkets and put smaller shops out of business, and it would flood Australia with illegal tobacco as customers hunted down packets that didn’t come with the graphic illustrations. They also reckoned that those unpleasant pictures would be a waste of time anyway as most smokers would just use special covers to hide them.

What actually happened is that prices continued to rise, smokers didn’t just start flocking to the supermarkets for no discernible reason, and there was no sudden spike in the sales of illegal tobacco. Although around 3.5% of smokers used special covers to hide the graphic warnings shortly after the launch of plain packaging, this had dropped to less than 2% by the following year. Weirdly, the kind of smoker who bothered to do this was also proven to be the kind of smoker more likely to quit in the near future.

And whilst Big Tobacco now makes out that it’s supposedly working towards a smoke-free future, they’re still going heavy on tobacco promotion in developing countries where regulations are a bit more lax or at least very lazily enforced. The sale of single sticks is meant to be illegal around the world as it provides an affordable gateway for children and people who don’t have a pot to piss in, yet you can still buy single sticks in between 80% to 90% of stores in some African countries. Whilst much of the blame here is pinned on the actual vendors rather than the industry, a 2021 report from The African Tobacco Control Alliance found that British American Tobacco had been actively encouraging this with the distribution of promotional items and equipment aimed squarely at the sale of single sticks.

Big Tobacco will argue until its red in the face that it no longer targets children as the next generation of customers, yet very recent marketing campaigns in some countries are blatantly youth-oriented, including the promotion of funky flavoured cigarettes to young people at music festivals in the likes of Argentina and Costa Rica.

I’m not convinced that they ever stopped lying or ever will, simply because it’s tricky to tell the whole truth and stay profitable when you’re trying to flog addictive cancer sticks. So, to revise our earlier answer, by my reckoning, Big Tobacco has now been hiding the effects of smoking for 73 years. And counting. That’s got to be more than the life expectancy of a heavy smoker. It’s almost enough to make me think about quitting. Almost…

Frequently Asked Questions

When did Big Tobacco first acknowledge the health risks of smoking?

Big Tobacco first acknowledged the health risks of smoking in 1964 when the U.S. Surgeon General, Luther Terry, published a report concluding that smoking was a cause of lung cancer and other diseases.

What was the ‘Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers’?

The ‘Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers’ was a full-page advertisement jointly taken out by the six major tobacco companies in over 400 U.S. newspapers in early 1954. It acknowledged scientific experiments linking cigarettes to lung cancer but claimed that no research was conclusive and that the industry would support further research.

What was the Tobacco Industry Research Committee?

The Tobacco Industry Research Committee was established by Big Tobacco in 1954 to fund research and create doubt about the link between smoking and health risks. It was headed by a scientist who believed there was no connection between smoking and disease.

When did the U.S. Surgeon General identify nicotine as an addictive drug?

The U.S. Surgeon General identified nicotine as an addictive drug in 1988.

What was the Master Settlement Agreement of 1998?

The Master Settlement Agreement of 1998 was a settlement between Big Tobacco and 46 states, where the tobacco companies agreed to pay $206 billion over 25 years for medical costs and tobacco prevention programs. They also agreed to release internal documents and ban certain marketing practices.

What was the ‘Joe Camel’ campaign?

The ‘Joe Camel’ campaign was a marketing strategy by Camel cigarettes in the late 1980s that featured a cartoon camel character to appeal to young people. It was criticized for targeting children and was eventually banned as part of the Master Settlement Agreement.

What were ‘low tar’ or ‘light’ cigarettes?

Low tar or light cigarettes were marketed as a healthier alternative to regular cigarettes, but they contained ventilation holes that diluted the tar and toxins, leading smokers to inhale more deeply and actually increasing the risk of certain types of lung cancer.

What was the Center for Indoor Air Research?

The Center for Indoor Air Research was established by Big Tobacco to investigate indoor air pollution and the potential dangers of passive smoking, but it was actually an attempt to find other reasons for lung cancer in non-smokers.

What was the outcome of the U.S. Department of Justice’s legal action against Big Tobacco in 1999?

The U.S. Department of Justice’s legal action against Big Tobacco in 1999 resulted in a ruling by Judge Gladys Kessler in 2006 that found the industry had engaged in fraud and lying to the public. It led to a ban on the marketing of low tar cigarettes and forced corrective statements, but no financial penalty was imposed.

How did Big Tobacco respond to plain packaging regulations?

Big Tobacco opposed plain packaging regulations, claiming they would drive down prices, make smokers more likely to buy from supermarkets, and increase illegal tobacco sales. However, these claims were not supported by evidence after the regulations were implemented.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: How Long Did Big Tobacco Hide the Effects of Smoking?
• Hero image source by Satvrnine / openverse, by-sa.