What it said
On 4 January 1954 a full-page advertisement ran in 448 newspapers in 258 cities. It was signed by the major cigarette makers, warehouse associations, and growers' groups, and it answered new studies on smoking and lung cancer by declaring the matter undecided. Its numbered points are the core of the campaign:
2. That there is no agreement among the authorities regarding what the cause is.
3. That there is no proof that cigarette smoking is one of the causes.We believe the products we make are not injurious to health.
The ad offered an answer to public worry: a new joint body, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, run by a scientist of unimpeachable integrity and national repute
and advised by scientists disinterested in the cigarette industry.
It also told readers that for 300 years critics had blamed tobacco for practically every disease of the human body
and that one by one these charges have been abandoned for lack of evidence.
The line held for a long time. When Surgeon General C. Everett Koop's report concluded in May 1988 that cigarettes are addicting, the Tobacco Institute said such claims contradict common sense.
On 14 April 1994 the heads of seven tobacco companies testified under oath before Henry Waxman's House health subcommittee, and each said he did not believe nicotine was addictive.
Who made it and why
The campaign began in a hotel room. On 14 December 1953 Paul M. Hahn of the American Tobacco Company brought the heads of the largest cigarette firms to the Plaza Hotel in New York to meet the public-relations firm Hill & Knowlton, as Allan Brandt (2012) describes. The research committee was formed on 28 December and set up in the Empire State Building, one floor below Hill & Knowlton. In 1958 the companies added the Tobacco Institute as their trade and publicity arm. In 1964 the research committee became the Council for Tobacco Research.
The motive was commercial and plain. The companies sold cigarettes, and the studies threatened sales. Before 1954 their ads had leaned on physicians: Camel's 1946 line was More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette
, citing surveys of 113,597 doctors. Gardner and Brandt (2006) report that those surveys were taken at medical conventions where Reynolds handed out free Camels.
The private papers said what the ads would not. Brown & Williamson's general counsel, Addison Yeaman, wrote in a confidential memo on 17 July 1963:
We are, then, in the business of selling nicotine, an addictive drug effective in the relief of stress mechanisms.
A 1969 Brown & Williamson paper, "Smoking and Health Proposal," put the strategy in one sentence: 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.
(Industry Documents Library, Bates 690010951-0959.) On 1 May 1972 Fred Panzer, a Tobacco Institute vice-president, described the approach as creating doubt about the health charge without actually denying it.
What it got right or wrong
Give the 1954 ad its one fair point and then stop. In January 1954 no U.S. government body had issued a formal verdict. That came on 11 January 1964, when Surgeon General Luther Terry's advisory committee, after reviewing more than 7,000 articles, concluded that cigarette smoking is causally related to lung cancer in men.
The archive does not claim the question was formally closed in 1954.
What the companies did with that opening was wrong. They cited only the doubters. They built a research body and gave it a scientific name while its purpose, in Judge Gladys Kessler's words as reported by Tobacco Tactics, was to deny the harms of smoking and reassure the public.
They kept saying the question was open after 1964, after their own counsel had written "addictive drug," and under oath in 1994. Thirty-one years separate Yeaman's memo from the executives' testimony. The two say opposite things about the same substance.
The court record is the verdict. In United States v. Philip Morris USA, a civil RICO case filed in 1999, Judge Kessler issued a 1,683-page opinion on 17 August 2006 holding the companies liable. She wrote that they had marketed and sold their lethal product with zeal, with deception, with a single-minded focus on their financial success.
The D.C. Circuit affirmed on 22 May 2009, and the Supreme Court denied review on 28 June 2010.
Some things went the companies' way, and the record should say so. The Justice Department opened a perjury inquiry into the 1994 testimony and charged no one. In 2005 the D.C. Circuit held that RICO did not allow the government's $280 billion disgorgement claim. In 2015 it held that the district court could not make the corrective statements open by saying the companies had deliberately deceived the American public
, because that went beyond the court's power under RICO to prevent future violations.
Fraud defeats consent
A libertarian does not need a ministry of health to judge this case. A seller who tells buyers a product is safe while his own lawyers call it an addictive drug is not taking part in a debate. He is misleading the people he sells to, and the market cannot work on false information. Fraud defeats the consent that a free exchange depends on.
The remedy mattered as much as the finding. The companies were not silenced by an agency's say-so. They were sued, they had counsel, they were heard over years of litigation, and an appeals court cut back parts of the judgment. The perjury question went to prosecutors, who declined to charge. That is due process doing its slow work. The 1998 Master Settlement Agreement between 46 states and the four largest manufacturers was a negotiated contract. It committed at least $206 billion over 25 years and dissolved the Council for Tobacco Research, the Tobacco Institute, and the Center for Indoor Air Research.
Compelled speech is the open question. Corrective statements began on 26 November 2017 in the Sunday editions of more than 50 newspapers and then ran on major networks for a year, under the companies' own names. A free-speech reader should be uneasy whenever a court writes words for a speaker, and the D.C. Circuit's 2015 trimming shows the courts were uneasy too. Here the order followed a fraud finding at trial, a narrower ground than an agency's say-so.
The government's own messaging gets the same scrutiny. The FDA's 2014 "Real Cost" spot peels a teenager's skin away to make a slow harm look instant. It is a fear appeal paid for by taxpayers. It is openly signed and argues from the medical consensus rather than against it. Signed, accurate, and one-sided is still one-sided. It is a different thing from the Frank Statement, but not an exemption from the test.
Its legacy
Liggett broke ranks in a 20 March 1997 settlement with 22 states and said that smoking causes lung cancer and other diseases and that nicotine is addictive. In October 1999 Philip Morris's website acknowledged an overwhelming medical and scientific consensus
that smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and other serious diseases. Philip Morris later told shareholders that a resolution mischaracterizes the Company's web site as constituting a public admission that cigarettes cause illness
, according to a study in Tobacco Control. Even the concession came hedged.
The method this case made famous is "keep the question open": treat a large and growing body of evidence as a two-sided quarrel, and fund a body with a neutral name to keep the quarrel going. It does not belong to one industry or one party. The habits that expose it do not either. Ask who pays the institute. Compare the press release with the internal memo. Count the evidence, not the voices.
Sources
- "A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers," Tobacco Industry Research Committee, 4 January 1954 (FRAME collection record and transcription; Wikisource text).
- FRAME case study "The tobacco industry's smoking-and-health doubt campaign, 1953 to 1998," for the chronology, the Yeaman, 1969, and Panzer quotations, the 1988 Tobacco Institute reply, the 1994 testimony, and the outcomes in the companies' favor.
- United States v. Philip Morris USA, Inc., 449 F. Supp. 2d 1 (D.D.C. 2006); 566 F.3d 1095 (D.C. Cir. 2009); D.C. Circuit opinion on corrective-statement preambles, May 2015, as cited there.
- Allan M. Brandt, "Inventing Conflicts of Interest," AJPH 102(1), 2012; Gardner and Brandt, "The Doctors' Choice Is America's Choice," AJPH 96(2), 2006, as cited there.
- Tobacco Tactics (University of Bath), entries on the Tobacco Industry Research Committee and the Tobacco Institute; SourceWatch, "Smoking and Health Proposal" (Bates 690010951-0959), as cited there.
- National Library of Medicine, the 1964 Report on Smoking and Health; Public Health Law Center on the Master Settlement Agreement and the 2017 corrective statements; PBS Frontline timelines; Tobacco Control on the 1999 Philip Morris website statement, as cited there.
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration, The Real Cost, "Your Skin" (2014), FRAME collection record.