Authors: Richard Kluger
“He professed that he planned to contrast Philip Morris with the British cigarette companies,” according to PM’s James Bowling. The American company was to be presented to British viewers as a different kind of tobacco manufacturer, one with a conscience, and in the process the standing of its Marlboro line as the world’s best-selling brand would be reinforced. Philip Morris agreed to cooperate on the proviso that its views would be fairly and accurately presented in the new Taylor documentary, which bore the working title “This Week—Philip Morris.” “We expected a zap in there,” Bowling recalled, “but also that there would be an upside.”
Taylor and his film crew came to the US. in the fall of 1976 and were given access to company officials, footage of its manufacturing procedures, a tour of its research facilities, and abundant data on its enlightened labor policies, including the best wages, fringe benefits, and working conditions in the industry. What Philip Morris’s top people did not know was that Taylor also obtained clips of old Marlboro television commercials from a pliable, low-level company official and that the British film crew took extensive footage of real-life cowboys, or at least Westerners who had worked with cattle professionally part of their lives and who also smoked and were now suffering gravely for it.
When Taylor’s report aired in Britain later that fall, Philip Morris learned that it had been taken for a ride of sorts, as the title of the searing documentary
made plain—
Death in the West: The Marlboro Story
. The format of the program was constant crosscutting among three kinds of footage in a free-flow narrated by Taylor’s crisply dissecting voice. The first two were clips from the Marlboro commercials, showing sturdy wranglers smoking around campfires and chuck wagons or riding hell-for-leather across the range while the rousing anthem from
The Magnificent Seven
surged in the background, followed by pieces of Taylor’s interviews with the six ailing real-life cowboys. One, a branding inspector from Wyoming who had worked with livestock all his life, told Taylor in a raspy voice, “I started smoking as a kid following these broncobusters. I thought that to be a man you had to have a cigarette in your mouth. It took me years to discover all I got out of it was lung cancer. I’m going to die a young man”—and he did, a few months after the filming, at the age of fifty-one. The only five-year survivor among the six smoking Westerners was a rancher from near Cimmaron, New Mexico, who had emphysema and whom Taylor’s crew had filmed with an oxygen cylinder strapped to his saddle while he was rounding up cattle and describing the effect of his disease: “I just have to stop and gasp for breath, and it feels like someone has their fingers down in my chest cutting the air passage off.”
In the third crosscut segment, Taylor gave Philip Morris the chance he had promised by allowing a pair of its top officers to make extended remarks in defense of their company and its product. One of them was the suavely confident James Bowling, with his authoritative newscaster’s voice, who told the off-camera interviewer, “I am not in the business of killing people.” He had read the scientific literature on smoking and would hardly continue the practice himself, or permit his wife and children to engage in it, if he thought cigarettes posed the peril alleged, Bowling said. His industry, he insisted, was the victim of scapegoating: “I think it is really comfortable for a lot of people, when they do not know, to be able to find a target, and cigarettes, because they are pleasurable, have been a very good target … .” Then, with contempt for the collective epidemiological data, Bowling answered Taylor’s question about why most people who get lung cancer are smokers by asking in return, “Why do 98 percent of the smokers never get anything?” This, despite twenty-five years of research demonstrating that about one habitual smoker in ten contracted lung cancer and about one in four died of a disease to which smoking contributed materially. Asked point-blank if cigarettes were harmless, Bowling answered, “I do not know that they are harmful or harmless. What I am saying is I think someone should find out.”
The company’s second spokesman was its chief scientist, Helmut Wakeham, who within Philip Morris’s walls had spoken out with candor that at times bordered on the courageous. But in
Death in the West
he said, “I think there is a great deal of doubt as to whether or not cigarettes are harmful.” He
later remarked, “None of the things which have been found in tobacco smoke are in concentrations which should be considered harmful.” This prompted the following colloquy with Taylor:
Q. But the components themselves can be considered harmful, can they not?
A. Anything can be considered harmful. Apple sauce is harmful if you get too much of it.
Q. I do not think many people are dying from apple sauce.
A. They are not eating much.
Q. People are smoking a lot of cigarettes.
A. Well, let me say it this way. The people who eat apple sauce are dying. The people who eat sugar die. The people who smoke die. Does the fact that the people who smoke cigarettes die demonstrate that smoking is the cause?
Soon after
Death in the West
aired, Philip Morris moved against Thames Television, the production company, for an injunction to prevent further showings and any sale of the program, claiming that it had been fraudulently seduced into cooperating and its commercials had been deceitfully obtained and used in a manner constituting copyright infringement. Taylor argued that he had honored the spirit of his agreement with the company by allowing its representatives to have an ample on-air say and that the Marlboro commercials were freely given to him for use in the film.
While the British courts were mulling the matter, a smuggled copy of
Death in the West
reached the American Cancer Society, whose Irving Rimer considered it “the most effective attack ever done on the cigarette industry.” The tape, its copyright somewhat clouded, found its way to the producers of “60 Minutes,” who had a good deal of interest in airing it—until a judge on the High Court of Justice, Queen’s Bench Division, ruled in June 1977 in favor of Philip Morris. The jurist, who noted that he was himself a smoker, commented that the program “gave me all the indications of intending as its purpose the complete discrediting of the defendants,” starting with “the conscious concealment of the title.” The judge said that while he did not doubt the value and importance of Taylor’s message, he asked, “Can a civilized legal system survive side by side with the proposition that the end can always justify the means?”
In an out-of-court settlement, Philip Morris supposedly got all the prints of the program save one for the Thames Television archives and had quashed its further distribution; terms of the agreement were to be kept secret in order not to further prejudice the injured party’s position. “60 Minutes” could not legally buy the rights to
Death in the West
, and so the best piece of antismoking advocacy ever fashioned was, for the time being, effectively silenced by the aggrieved party.
VII
THE
tobacco industry had its apparent invulnerability to effective political regulation tested seriously for the first time in the late 1970s. The instigator, though, was not the public-health community, which perceived smoking as pathological behavior that had to be treated like a disease, but the emerging environmental protection movement, which saw tobacco smoke as the most visible, odoriferous, and pervasive indoor equivalent of outdoor air pollution. Whether indoors or out, other people’s smoke was becoming a potent political and social issue as well as a health concern, because it was patently an imposition by self-indulgent smokers on the ability of nonsmokers to enjoy clean air, even as the well-behaved citizenry had the right not to have its eyes offended, say, by the indecent exposure of passersby or its eardrums rattled by loudspeakers in their neighborhoods.
Although the scientific evidence was thin regarding the gravity of the health peril from environmental tobacco smoke (ETS), common sense suggested that it was a genuine pollutant. Cigarette smoke was known by then to contain some forty carcinogenic materials in at least trace quantities, and smokers, who typically inhaled for about twenty-four seconds in consuming a cigarette, extracted only one-third of its total smoke effluent—the portion known as mainstream smoke (M/S). The remaining two-thirds, known as side-stream smoke (S/S), which drifted off into the surrounding air, was for a time more potent than M/S, which had had a portion of its toxic contents removed by the filter before it reached the smoker’s lungs. Nitrosamines, for example, were 80 to 90 percent trapped by cellulose acetate filters but were measured in concentrations up to fifty times higher in side-stream smoke, which never passed through a filter.
Gauging the toxicity of ETS, which combined S/S and exhaled M/S, to determine its order of magnitude as a pollutant was no easy matter. The lingering duration of the smoke in any given chamber varied with its size, temperature, ventilation, number of smoking occupants, and other factors all affecting the rate of dilution. Still, the acute effects of ETS were manifest to those who suffered tearing eyes, sore throats, stuffy or runny noses, headaches, nausea, and other symptoms. Asthmatics beset by ETS risked respiratory distress in reaction, while heart patients with angina were at risk from the oxygen deprivation due to smoky air.
Thus, ETS was a ripe target for environmentally concerned nonsmokers, as the Roper pollsters had advised the tobacco industry, and nowhere did the issue arouse more distress than in California, the nation’s prime social laboratory, an unruly arena for political experimentation that lured ideologues from
both the radical and reactionary fringes. In such an environment, one-issue action groups flourished and often attained disproportionate power. So it was with the local antitobacco organizations in California, widely known by the acronym GASP (for Group Against Smoking Pollution).
Among the two dozen or so people who showed up one evening in the mid-’Seventies when the Berkeley GASP assembled was Paul Loveday, a young graduate of the University of California Law School, then practicing in San Francisco. Loveday was a Mormon by upbringing and had a physical sensitivity—as well as his sect’s theological opposition—to tobacco smoke; he also had a yearning for social activism. In short order, he was chosen president of the Berkeley unit and found himself allied with two ardent co-workers, Peter Hanauer, a quiet, meticulous, rather philosophical law-book editor, and Tim Moder, a chemist disenthralled with his profession who turned his Berkeley home into the makeshift headquarters of what soon became a loose confederation of GASPs and other antismoking action groups throughout the state. These ranged from big units in places like San Diego and Santa Monica to small ones that Loveday and his colleagues helped colonize while Moder turned but a newsletter and other mailings. Their chief challenge as they traveled the state was to persuade audiences that, unlike some other single-issue causists, they were not fanatics—in this case, tobacco prohibitionists. As far as GASP was concerned, it was fine for the Marlboro cowboy to light up, Loveday would tell groups he addressed, “so long as he does it on his own range.”
Young, energetic, full of themselves and their mission, the Berkeley anti-smoking activists soon moved beyond the educative function and set out on a course of social action. They besieged the Berkeley city council with letters, petitions, and in-person appeals for restrictions on smoking in all public indoor places and separate sections for nonsmokers in restaurants and workplaces. Tobacco industry representatives tried to tar GASP and its allies as zealots, but the company men were plainly interlopers and were badly outnumbered in a community with a rarefied social consciousness; and when the city’s—and one of the nation’s—best restaurants, Chez Panisse, signed on to the reform effort, the outcome was no longer in doubt. The restrictive measure, passed unanimously by the Berkeley council, was the toughest of its kind in the state and a model for other GASPs to pursue in California and elsewhere.
Buoyed by their own and similar local success stories, Loveday and his band of amateur activists tried to storm the legislature in Sacramento in quest of antismoking regulations like Berkeley’s to apply to all of California, even calling for inclusion of the right of citizens’ arrests of violators. But the cigarette industry, sensing a rising peril, focused its lobbyists’ well-paid labors on the state’s legislators and swatted down the GASPers’ cheeky effort. Their crushing loss only inspired renewed enthusiasm, this time in a form that circumvented the industry’s lock on the state lawmakers—a referendum under
California’s public-initiative procedures, an exercise in direct democracy available when representative government was found unresponsive to perceived social needs.
To get on the 1978 ballot, they would need to gather 300,000 signatures by petition and mount an organizational effort far beyond anything GASP had attempted before. They got 600,000 names. Even so, the proposed Clean Indoor Air Act, as their Proposition No. 5 was termed, was not going to come easily in a state where Ronald Reagan, with his antiregulatory credo, had lately completed two terms as governor and a steamrolling antitax movement left voters in a sour mood toward activist programs like the antismoking initiative. But Prop Five, as the GASP-sponsored referendum was called for short, was no esoteric daydream of rabid environmentalists; instead, it struck a responsive chord with voters who could distinguish between risks they as individuals could take voluntarily, like skiing down a treacherous slope or driving without a seat belt, and risks that were imposed on their health and safety, like pesticides applied to their vegetables before harvesting or other people’s smoke in their faces.
Loveday’s clean-air coalition was bolstered by two important recruits among the leadership. The noisier of them was a technological virtuoso, Stanton A. Glantz, trained as an aeronautical engineer with a Stanford doctorate in applied mechanics and economics, who was on the University of California’s medical faculty in San Francisco. He had been a political and environmental activist at Stanford and thus a natural enlistee in the emerging nonsmokers’ rights movement, to which he brought political savvy, technical expertise, a pointed rhetorical style, and a feisty, somewhat obsessive disposition. But before Loveday and Hanauer unleashed him as their scientific guru, to explain the medical case for Prop Five in speaking engagements around the state, Glantz was asked to put aside his blue jeans and only suit—an orange one, his favorite color, that he was married in—for more respectable threads. Glantz, sometimes volcanic, complied and thus began a uniquely effective and long-running career as an antismoking activist.