How, he thought, could you be serious about studying the health aspects of tobacco or fire safety without the proper experts? However, Wigand says that he did not learn of those studies until after he left the company. The firm is reputed to have its own in-house scientists and tobacco researchers. Nine months after Wigand went to work, he attended a meeting of bat scientists in Vancouver, British Columbia. There was a feeling of excitement among the scientists that they could reduce health risks for smokers.
By then Wigand had grown used to the euphemisms of his new industry. At the meeting, Wigand would later testify, roughly 15 pages of minutes were taken by Ray Thornton, a British scientist. A copy was sent to Wigand, who circulated copies to upper management. In a recent deposition Wells testified that Raymond Pritchard, the then C. As a foreign corporation it has never enjoyed quite as much political influence as the American tobacco companies, which donate vast sums of money to organizations as diverse as the African-American political caucuses, the Whitney Museum, and the political-action committees of dozens of candidates, especially Bob Dole.
In the late s the Federal Trade Commission F. They never mixed. You have lots of nice benefits. I was a different animal. He worked on reverse engineering on Marlboros, attempting to discern their unique properties; he studied fire safety and ignition propensity. After Vancouver, Wigand continued to push for more information.
They did the work on nicotine overseas. Wigand began to keep an extensive scientific diary, both in his computer and in a red leather book. I saw two faces, the outside face and the inside face. It bothered me. O James Burke during the recall of shipments of Tylenol after a poisoning scare in At first he believed that Ray Pritchard was a man of honor like Burke. At lunch from time to time, he complained in private to Pritchard about Thomas Sandefur, then the company president.
Wigand had come believe that his safe-cigarette project was being canceled. Sandefur used to beat on me for using big words. I never found anybody as stupid as Sandefur in terms of his ability to read or communicate. There were problems with bacterial fermentation, Wigand told me. They could not get a consistent taste or particle size. They could not understand the tactility of soil bacteria and how it worked on the natural flora. What was the effect of ammonia to flora?
Most moist snuff deteriorates after packaging. If you could find a way to sterilize it, you would slow up bacterial fermentation and have a safer product. No one had done this for four years. You have to look at the age somebody starts smoking. According to The Journal of the American Medical Association, 3 million Americans under the age of 18 consume one billion packs of cigarettes and 26 million containers of snuff ever year. He was disturbed by a report that on the average children begin to smoke by I felt uncomfortable.
I felt dirty. How did they know I was trouble? I was asking some pretty difficult questions: How come there was no research file?
I know a lot. My diary will reflect those meetings. He withdrew into a stolid isolation. Lucretia knew something was wrong, she later told me. There was also a major additional problem at home, a hole in the center of his life. His older daughter with Lucretia had serious medical problems. I finally sought out a respected adult urologist, who made the diagnosis of spina bifida.
This required spinal surgery. Neither Lucretia nor her father would comment on this subject. At work he grew increasingly vocal. For Wigand, the critical moment occurred when he read a report from the National Toxicology Program. The subject was coumarin, an additive that had been shown to have a carcinogenic property which caused tumors in rats and mice. The makeup of coumarin was close to that of a compound found in rat poison, but until no one understood the possible dangers.
The new report described its carcinogenic effect. Wigand told 60 Minutes that when he went to a meeting with Sandefur, Sandefur told him that removing it would impact sales.
Wigand got the impression that Sandefur would do nothing immediately to alter the product, so he sought out his toxicologist, Scott Appleton.
Wigand says he asked him to write a memo backing him up, but Appleton refused, perhaps afraid for his job. Appleton declined to comment.
Driven by anger now, Wigand says, he determined to examine what happens when other additives are burned. He focused on glycerol, an additive used to keep the tobacco in cigarettes moist. He was involved in discussions about the nicotine patch and studied a genetically engineered, high-nicotine Brazilian tobacco called Y Wigand also began attending meetings of a commission on fire safety in cigarettes in Washington. He observed Andrew McGuire, an expert on burn trauma from San Francisco, who had won a MacArthur grant following his campaign for fire-retardant clothing for children.
Spears, the future head of Lorillard. Wigand had several conversations about his experiments with additives with other tobacco men attending the meetings, but he never met McGuire. Wigand had considered him a friend, and had urged him to stop smoking—as Wigand had.
According to a memo Kohnhorst later wrote, the meeting was not friendly. Wigand apparently learned he was on notice, and Kohnhorst is said to have implied that he was difficult to work with and was talking too much. Wigand says that his anger made it impossible for him to censor himself; he had come to believe his worth as a scientist was being violated by his association with the tobacco company.
He also believed that the other scientists in the company would share his values. Wigand was determined to be on the record with his research on additives. He recalled writing a memo for the files on the dangers of coumarin. He felt, he later said, that he was being diligent. On March 24, Wigand was fired and escorted from the building. In the early spring of , Lowell Bergman, an award-winning news producer at 60 Minutes, found a crate of papers on the front steps of his house in Berkeley, California.
The grandson of one of the first female leaders of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, Bergman had a bemused, compassionate nature. He was close to 50 and had come to understand that life was a series of murky compromises. At the University of California at San Diego, he had studied with the political philosopher Herbert Marcuse and lived in a commune.
Bergman often received anonymous letters and sealed court documents in his mailbox; it did not surprise him in the least, he told me, to find the box of papers on his porch.
As always, Bergman was developing several pieces for Mike Wallace, the correspondent he worked with almost exclusively. They were close friends and confidants, but they argued ferociously and intimately, like a father and son. Shortly after the mysterious papers appeared on his steps, Bergman won a Peabody Award for a program on cocaine trafficking in the C. In most cases, the producers had complete freedom to develop stories, and it was they, not the correspondents, who were in hotel rooms in Third World countries at all hours bringing along reluctant sources.
Later, the correspondents stepped in. Only rarely did correspondents know the explicit details of stories other teams were developing. When Bergman received the box of papers, he took a look at the hundreds of pages of material.
He called his friend Andrew McGuire, the only person he knew who had ever studied tobacco and fire. He came close to finding a lucrative job through a headhunter in Chicago. He gave as references Alan Heard and Ray Pritchard. He was surprised not to be hired immediately by another corporation, and soon he began to worry.
According to the suit, his medical benefits would be taken from him, a display of corporate hardball which would subsequently rebound. He reluctantly signed an onerous, lifelong confidentiality agreement so stringent that he could be in violation if he discussed anything about the corporation.
Wigand felt trapped, and he did not know what to do. In repose, Lucretia is elegant and steely. She looked at her divorce lawyer, Steven Kriegshaber, who shook his head as if to warn her not to speak. Alcohol and rage are at the center of what happened on a bad night in the Wigand marriage in October The tension in the family had become overwhelming while Wigand was negotiating the punitive confidentiality agreement. Since Rachel had been diagnosed with spina bifida, the marriage had suffered enormous strain.
Wigand himself had at one time been a drinker, but he had stopped when he felt out of control. After he was fired, he told me, it was not surprising that he began to drink again.
She raged that he had not told even her of his growing unhappiness in the company. She was frightened that he would lose any claim to their medical package. Wigand recalled her mood as sometimes dismissive and unsympathetic. There are contradictory versions of the evening. He took my keys away and was grabbing me. He ripped the cord out of the wall. He smashed my nose with the palm of his hand. The kids were screaming, I was screaming. I ran down the hall and picked up another phone and dialed Jeff left the house before the police arrived.
Soon after, according to a lawyer close to the case, Wigand became concerned enough about his drinking that he checked into a clinic for four days of evaluation—which would later, in a page dossier of allegations about his character, be reported as two weeks of hospitalization for treatment of anger. Through an intermediary in the government, Wigand reached out tentatively to Andrew McGuire, whom he had observed in Washington. McGuire was intrigued. A tobacco-industry witness could be invaluable to him, since he was then pressing Congress to regulate fire safety.
Call him. Nevertheless, he passed his name along to Lowell Bergman. For weeks Bergman tried to get Wigand on the telephone. He wanted a scientist, not an anti-tobacco advocate. In February , he decided to go to Louisville.
At 11 a. It was the beginning of an extraordinary relationship. For Bergman, Wigand would become a source who needed unusual protection and hand-holding—a fact which would ultimately jeopardize his position at CBS. Can you analyze these documents for me? Wigand agreed to examine the Philip Morris papers for Bergman. They had a fire-safe-product study on the shelf in and , and they knew it!
Wigand flew to New York for a day to attend a screening of a version of the projected program at CBS. Get it? In April , Henry Waxman, the California congressman, was holding public hearings on tobacco in Washington. Wigand watched the live coverage on C-SPAN of the testimony of top executives of the seven largest tobacco companies.
Wigand was furious. They lied with a straight face. Sandefur was arrogant! And that really irked me. He could not criticize Sandefur publicly or his child might lose her medical insurance. After Wigand started working as a confidential expert for CBS, his name began to circulate in anti-tobacco circles. He was soon called by the Food and Drug Administration. Would he consider advising F. His identity would be protected. For Wigand, the invitation to Washington was a major step toward regaining his self-respect.
By the time F. Wigand was invaluable; he even helped the F. In this case, perhaps with an assist from Wigand, the F. That month, Wigand said, he received a threatening phone call. Wigand called Bergman in a panic. He was bound up because of his contracts and yet he was filled with moral outrage. Soon Wigand told Bergman another death threat had come. Wigand was becoming distracted, unable to concentrate.
He had started to drink again. One day when he had his two young daughters in the car, he stopped to buy a bottle of liquor. I had one of those big jackets with the big pockets.
Instead of getting a basket, I grabbed it and put it in my pocket. And then somebody came running after me. Was it hidden? Was it exposed? My children, Rachel and Nikki, were in the car. Was it intentional? It was two days after the death threat. Give me a break. The whole thing was dismissed without adjudication.
You can be arrested and charged with a lot of things in your life. Did you know that even Thomas Sandefur was once arrested and pleaded guilty on a D.
Wigand did not tell Bergman about the episode, but Bergman sensed that something was very wrong. He was at the beginning of a long dance to create a sense of trust in his source, who he felt had an incredible story to tell. Privately, he complained that the lawyer did not ask the right questions. By this time Wigand had become a shadow expert on the tobacco industry. That was my job, to get people to talk! Meanwhile, Bergman had been feeling the heat from New York.
If Jeff went on-camera, Lucretia asked, what would they do if they got sued? Bergman next sent his associate producer to Louisville to do a preliminary interview with Wigand.
I need my wife there. It was not obvious to Bergman that Wigand had not told Lucretia that he intended to be interviewed. All summer long Wigand debated about his public role, and Lucretia grew increasingly panicky. He was even asked to testify for ABC if the case should ever go to court. Bergman read his name on a wire-service story. Jeffrey Wigand, who exposed corporate deceit and wrongdoing in spite of threats to his career and the personal lives of those around him.
I found him to be extremely intelligent, driven and very courageous. Jeff was the first real insider at the corporate officer level to tell the truth about the industry. We will be forever grateful for Jeff's great personal sacrifice in our effort to save lives.
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