The Cigarette Century Read online

  The debate about smoking and its regulation would turn explicitly to the political arena in the years following the release of the surgeon general’s report. The history of efforts to regulate the cigarette—and their relative ineffectiveness—demonstrated the power of the industry to disrupt public health, just as it had disrupted science. If the tobacco industry did not invent special interest lobbying, they raised it to a new art form in the establishment of the Tobacco Institute in 1958. Each time Congress took up the question of tobacco and public health, proposed regulations were either fully dismantled or had the not-so-ironic impact of actually favoring Big Tobacco. Following the surgeon general’s findings that smoking caused lung cancer, the first required warning labels simply proclaimed: “Caution: Cigarette Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Health.” Attempts to develop public health approaches to reduce the prevalence of smoking were stymied in Congress repeatedly. Although public anxieties about the cigarette rose in the immediate aftermath of the report, by the time the Camel Man abandoned Broadway in 1966, Americans were again smoking in record numbers. Nearly half of all adults were regular smokers in the years before 1970.4

  Not only did the tobacco industry effectively thwart tobacco regulation, they also shaped the public meanings of smoking to their benefit. Even as the health risks of smoking came to be more widely recognized and understood, it was still possible to argue that to smoke or not to smoke was simply an issue of personal agency. According to this logic (strongly endorsed by the industry): once apprised of the risks (with labels on every package beginning in 1966), the “decision” should be left to the individual. Antitobacco efforts faltered for at least two reasons. First, they could not compete effectively with the massive resources of the industry. And second, deep cultural sentiment (encouraged and sustained by the industry) viewed tobacco regulation as offensively paternalistic.5 After all, wasn’t smoking a matter of individual choice? In the great marketplace of ideas and products that constituted American consumerism, individuals could and should make their own decisions about smoking. The companies successfully utilized a deeply traditional American cultural norm that held individuals uniquely responsible for their health. As the knowledge of smoking’s harms came to be widely disseminated, rather than drawing attention to the actions of the industry, many came to agree that individuals should either quit or bear the consequences. To hold the industry responsible for such individual failings seemed to violate core American values of individual agency and responsibility. Powerful American images of independence and autonomy came to be reflected in cigarette promotion and advertising.

  Philip Morris, for example, sought to link the Marlboro Man—an invention of the mid-1950s—with the lone cowboy and the myth of the frontier. Tobacco regulation faltered on the shoals of American individualism, with its consequent hostility to governmental paternalism.

  When public health advocates failed to breech the well-fortified ramparts of Washington politics, they soon looked to open up new fronts in the tobacco wars where grassroots guerillas might have greater success. At some distance from K Street where lobbyists held court at the Tobacco Institute, antitobacco forces deployed new evidence of the harms of passive smoking to considerable success. In this way, they began to reshape the politics of regulation. The growing evidence that smoke harmed nonsmokers, who did not “assume” the risks of smoking, began to erode traditional arguments. If Americans had high tolerance for “assumed” risks, they had low—to no—tolerance for unwanted “exposure.”

  Still, having lost most battles in the halls of Congress, antitobacco leaders also soon opened a new front in the courtroom. The tobacco companies had at first defended against such suits, claiming that there was no compelling scientific evidence of smoking’s harmful impact. And while they never quite abandoned this argument, as time went by they increasingly relied on the assertion that individuals who smoked must take responsibility for their own “decision” to smoke—that smoking was the preeminent “voluntary” health risk. The fundamental question adjudicated in litigation was: who is responsible for the harms of smoking? In a rising tide of litigation, as individuals came forward to sue the industry for the harms they incurred as a result of smoking, the industry would assert the plaintiff ’s individual responsibility. From the 1950s, when the first litigation was brought, until the late 1980s, this argument consistently trumped the claims of smokers. By the early 1990s, the industry had never paid a cent in litigation, a record that they widely publicized as a means of discouraging prospective plaintiffs and their lawyers.

  By the 1980s and 1990s, however, these arguments had begun to wear thin. And a series of forces radically destabilized the industry. American smokers had begun to give up their cigarettes in record numbers as the cigarette underwent a cultural transformation. In an age of considerable skepticism about the ability to change behaviors in the name of health, Americans quit smoking in record numbers. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first surgeon general’s report, the current surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, announced that as a result of reductions in tobacco use and lower rates of initiation among children and teenagers, over 750,000 lives had been saved.6 By the early 1990s, smoking rates—spurred by powerful shifts in the social meaning of cigarette use—would dip in the United States to approximately 25 percent, the lowest rates since the 1920s.

  These changes in smoking prevalence did not go unnoticed within the tobacco industry. At R.J. Reynolds, for example, it became clear that their most popular brands, Winston and Salem, principally appealed to older smokers, those between forty-five and sixty, a market segment in decline from both quitting and deaths. R.J. Reynolds, evaluating these portentous changes, came to the decision to reinvest in the Camel brand, which had fared especially poorly in the years following the disappearance of the Camel Man from Times Square. As one R.J. Reynolds executive explained, young smokers between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four “represent tomorrow’s cigarette business.”7 As part of a new advertising campaign, a Camel billboard returned to Times Square to much fanfare in June 1989, now in the form of a 37.5-foot-high cartoon camel named Joe, rendered in green, blue, and white neon. Joe rivaled the Camel Man in the deployment of high-tech promotion. The new sign would cost R.J. Reynolds more than $1.6 million to design and erect, and nearly $45,000 per month to operate. “The billboard will make an even bigger impact than the original smoking Camel billboard, which was a Times Square landmark for many years,”8 explained one R.J. Reynolds executive. The Joe Camel billboard, R.J. Reynolds proudly explained, required 8.5 miles of wiring and more than a mile and a half of neon.9

  This billboard was only one especially extravagant facet of a much broader campaign using the Joe Camel cartoon figure. Joe promised to meet R.J. Reynolds’s objective of “youthening” the brand. From its inception, the new campaign drew intense fire from the increasingly well-organized antitobacco movement. It was no surprise that the offensive launched by R.J. Reynolds in the Joe Camel campaign immediately provoked defensive maneuvers by tobacco control advocates and public health officials. Both his cartoon image and the tone of the ads easily pointed to kid appeal. The antitobacco campaign, since its inception, had focused on preventing children from taking up smoking. R.J. Reynolds, no doubt, understood that Joe would be the center of a vocal protest. And they devised a clear strategy to respond to critics of the campaign. Cartoons, they suggested, promoted many products from household cleaners (Mr. Clean) to motels (Garfield). Did the Jolly Green Giant convince youngsters to purchase green vegetables? According to industry apologists, no one could claim that these promotions were directed principally at children. For executives with experience in the tobacco wars, responding to critics marked a challenge to be met rather than a moral or ethical dilemma restricting action.10

  Sophisticated critics within the antitobacco movement understood that simply claiming that Joe appealed to kids would be inadequate in any successful attack on the industry. These activists duly recognized the importance
of translating public assumptions about the goals of the Joe Camel campaign into research findings. Just as researchers in the 1940s and 1950s had sought to causally link cigarettes and disease, researchers in the early 1990s sought to causally link advertising with the use of cigarettes among underage children. Soon a series of studies designed to evaluate the appeal and impact of the Camel campaign on young smokers appeared in the influential Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Publication in JAMA promised widespread media attention of several investigations designed to assess the impact of the campaign. In these studies, researchers sought to attack a series of traditional tobacco-advertising defenses. Since the 1950s, tobacco companies had insisted that advertising was designed merely to encourage patrons to maintain (or switch) brands, not to seek new smokers; that tobacco ads did not increase the overall use of tobacco products; and that tobacco promotion did not encourage the initiation of smoking among children and adolescents. One of the studies compared the recognition of Joe Camel among high school students and adults. Not surprisingly, the students were more likely to have seen Joe, associate him with R.J. Reynolds, and have a positive evaluation of his pitch. This same article concluded that Camel’s share of the underage market had gone from 0.5 percent to 32.8 percent since the inception of the campaign. According to this report, the illegal cigarette market accounted for $476 million in the United States each year.11

  Even more damning, however, was another study reported in this same JAMA issue that found that among children between the ages of three and six, Joe’s recognition rate approached that of Mickey Mouse. Dr. Paul Fischer, a pediatrician at the Medical College of Georgia, devised a study in which children were asked to pair cards representing popular advertising logos and figures with their products. This study galvanized the media and generated new outrage among the public. It rates as one of the most influential studies in the history of the modern tobacco wars.12 R.J. Reynolds’s marketing entered a new phase of intensive scrutiny and calls for regulation. Even if R.J. Reynolds continued to declare that it had no interest in underage smokers, this research into the recognition and appeal of Joe Camel worked to subvert such claims. Further, the study revealed a critical aspect of tobacco advertising: it was not specifically directed at teens about to try cigarettes for the first time; its appeals went much younger. One could easily conclude from such a study that R.J. Reynolds was eager to create appeals for tobacco that would hold a sympathetic audience from very young ages. Although the authors of these articles had strong advocacy positions in the tobacco wars, their publication in peer-reviewed JAMA had the desired effect of turning their critiques of the Joe Camel campaign into medico-scientific data. R.J. Reynolds’s denials and defenses inevitably appeared self-interested in this context. And it became much more difficult for the company to claim that smokers were responsible for “choosing” to smoke.

  The very prominence of Joe Camel and the aggressiveness of his campaign in the face of such vocal criticism led to the demise of the latest R.J. Reynolds’s Times Square spectacular. In August 1994, after sustaining much calumny, Joe finally relinquished his spot high above the Marriot Marquis. R.J. Reynolds spokesperson Peggy Carter insisted that the decision to dismantle the billboard was unrelated to antismoking advocates’ pointed criticism (echoing R.J. Reynolds’s denials when the Camel Man came down in 1966). Describing the decision to erect the billboard in the late 1980s as part of R.J. Reynolds’s “marketing strategies developed . . . to reposition the brand’s image among adult smokers,” she insisted “the board did the job we wanted it to do, and now it’s time to move on.”13 In large measure, R.J. Reynolds could put Joe out to pasture, having accomplished the critical goal of rehabilitating the brand and, more importantly, regaining market share among new initiates to the cigarette. In 1986, Camel had less than 3 percent of the underage market; by 1993, it had at least 13 percent.14 Although R.J. Reynolds had succeeded in increasing its market share, the blows to the already tarnished image of the tobacco industry were significant. The Times Square Joe Camel billboard was not only a blight on R.J. Reynolds’s reputation, it also appears to have made cigarette billboards vulnerable to regulation more generally. Ultimately, the industry would, under pressure from activists and litigation, pull all outdoor advertising in 1999. And so ended—once and for all—the cigarette billboard.15

  Joe had, in part, exposed the complex risk-reward structure of the tobacco industry late in the twentieth century. The camel had succeeded in building market share in a critical segment, but he exposed the previously invulnerable tobacco industry to new legal attack.16 In late 1991, after the publication and publicity associated with the JAMA articles, Janet Mangini, a family law attorney in San Francisco, decided to sue R.J. Reynolds for targeting minors. “When I read press reports about the JAMA articles, I was stunned,” explained Mangini. “I mean, Mickey Mouse is a pretty important character and to think that six-year-olds find Joe Camel just as popular, well, I was outraged.”17 Soon assisted by additional counsel, Mangini’s suit focused on the targeting of minors and the general duty not to engage in advertising against public policy. Mangini asked for the court to issue an injunction to bar the campaign in California; a corrective ad campaign to be paid for by R.J. Reynolds and supervised by the court; and the refund of all monies earned from the Camel campaign to be used for court-supervised charitable and research activities.18 As the case neared trial in the fall of 1997, R.J. Reynolds agreed to settle the suit by pulling the Camel campaign in California, releasing a spate of previously confidential industry documents detailing the plans for the campaign, and paying $10 million for antismoking activities in California.19

  The Mangini case demonstrated an important and increasingly significant vulnerability for the tobacco industry: the newly effective and creative use of litigation by antitobacco advocates. Such legal maneuvering took place in a radically altered social and cultural context in which the activities of the industry had now come under intensive public scrutiny. The Mangini settlement also resulted in the exposure of the planning and execution of the Joe Camel campaign to unprecedented public review by the court-mandated release of previously confidential documents. These records revealed the central goals and approach of R.J. Reynolds to youth smoking. Revelation of secret documents through litigation became a key strategy among tobacco control activists eager to encourage public outrage toward a hypocritical industry. Litigation forced the industry to reveal its most intimate corporate strategies in the tobacco wars.

  This book is based significantly on the wide range of documentation that emerged in the context of such litigation. When I first began investigating the history of cigarette smoking, I quickly realized there would be a remarkable range of documentary evidence to sustain this work. The medical literature on tobacco alone had come to fill shelves in medical libraries; a vast popular literature in magazines and newspapers would assist in tracing changing social norms and values regarding smoking; and the large number of advertisements offered additional primary material for evaluation and analysis. Even before the governmental evaluations of smoking and health in the 1950s and 1960s, public health officials had explored the relationship of tobacco and disease, archiving large caches of additional documents for future researchers. As I made my initial research forays, I quickly came to understand that the wide diversity of historical materials would make this project both exciting and daunting. But there was one important exception: I knew I would be unlikely to gain access to materials revealing the internal dynamics of the tobacco industry. The tobacco companies were already facing challenges in the courts, and in the court of public opinion, regarding the rectitude of their business practices and their ongoing denials of the harms of smoking. As a result, I assumed my investigation would center on public meanings, behaviors, and debates about smoking rather than on industry strategy and activity. Nonetheless, in 1986 I paid a visit to the Tobacco Institute, having read about their extensive library and historical collections. Quick
ly and without fanfare, I was politely shown the door. I do remember, however, being impressed by the prominence of ashtrays throughout their offices. Thus, I began my work with the expectation that the inner sanctums of the tobacco industry would not be part of my investigation. I was both disappointed and a bit relieved. There was plenty to do without industry materials. The availability of materials limits every historical inquiry, and this study would be no exception.

  At the time of my brief field trip to the Tobacco Institute, I could never have anticipated that in the next decade I would have access to millions of pages of internal and confidential industry correspondence, reports, and memoranda. Now, rather than staring up at the Camel Man, I can examine his personal papers—the very contracts, plans, and letters that made him a reality. The “discovery” process in the tobacco litigation, coupled with the revolution of the Internet, makes this access possible. I can now sit in my office, downloading thousands of pages of documents evaluating the industry’s approach to the science and politics of marketing cigarettes. The industry strategy of avoiding liability by vetting internal materials and policies with legal counsel to claim attorney-client privilege ultimately backfired in the 1990s in the course of litigation. It is one of the great ironies of modern corporate history that we have come to know more about the internal operations of the tobacco industry than perhaps any other American big business in the last century. The tobacco industry fought diligently in many instances to keep these confidential documents from public scrutiny. Today, there are over 40 million pages of tobacco documents, searchable and downloadable, online. The story of how these materials became available through whistle-blowers and the legal process of discovery constitutes yet another central aspect of the history of tobacco. Following the revelations of these documents, the social standing of the industry—once an icon of American entrepreneurialism—sunk to new depths.