Cornered by Peter Pringle

Author:Peter Pringle
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466881587
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

9

THE SCIENCE TEACHER

This guy is Jekyll and Hyde; he’ll do whatever he needs to do for whoever is paying him.

—Gordon Smith, a lawyer for Brown & Williamson

MERRELL WILLIAMS CHANGED the balance of power in the tobacco wars. For a lowly paralegal, he had managed to select such explicit and damning confidential documents of such high quality that the antitobacco forces now possessed a potent arsenal of evidence. For all his cleverness, though, Williams was still only a clerk. He had no firsthand knowledge of how decisions were made in the company; no evidence that the proposals in the documents were actually carried out. He had not met anyone who made big decisions, only supervisors at the document center in Louisville. Brown & Williamson would make much of this distinction, claiming in many cases that the documents Williams had stolen were only the random thoughts of individual scientists or lawyers, not company policy. What the antitobacco forces needed desperately was a high-level executive who had knowledge of policy making, someone who could substantiate conversations at board level about nicotine addiction and cancer of the lung or heart disease. At trial, Williams would be useless as a witness. He was just a document thief, a $9-an-hour clerk who turned against the company. The lawyers needed a tobacco executive.

As it turned out, such a person had been found at the end of 1993 but his identity was being kept secret. His FDA code name was “Research.” His real name was Jeffrey Wigand, a smart but somewhat erratic biochemist who once dreamed of being a doctor but had never made it to medical school. Instead, he worked as a scientific research manager in companies that produced health-care products. In 1989, he had just lost a job in New Jersey as a result of a company reorganization and had answered an ad in The New York Times for a company research director. A headhunting firm from Louisville, Kentucky, contacted him. They told him that Brown & Williamson was looking for someone to lead the company’s research department.

Wigand had never thought of being employed by Big Tobacco, but he was interested in public health and knowing the problems of smoking and cancer, he thought he might be able to make a difference. In interviews he was told he would be working on the development of a “safe cigarette,” one with much reduced harmful substances and tobacco additives. Wigand was intrigued. He embarked on a tortuous journey that would earn him lots of money for doing rather little and, in the end, give him a pile of trouble.

After four and a half years, Wigand was fired. But within months he was working as a consultant on the tobacco industry for the CBS program 60 Minutes, and as a witness in the Justice Department’s investigation into fire-safe cigarettes, and then as a consultant to the FDA on its inquiry. He would become the highest-ranking defector in the history of the tobacco industry. He would be hounded by hostile company lawyers and private investigators.

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