Widdick v. Brown & Williamson
"The Tobacco Conspiracy Trial"
Brown & Williamson Defense Appears to Suffer Setback as Tobacco Chemist Testifies Smoking Causes Lung Cancer
(June 2) Brown & Williamson's defense against the Maddox's family suit appeared to suffer several setbacks as a former Brown & Williamson tobacco chemist testified that smoking causes cancer -- and that Brown & Williamson holds that position.
Lance Reynolds, a British-born and Oxford-educated chemist who worked for Brown & Williamson from 1968 through 1991, was called to the stand by Brown & Williamson to refute allegations that the tobacco company markets a defective product. Reynolds, who is now a consultant for Brown & Williamson, denied any knowledge of an industry-wide conspiracy to conceal the dangers of smoking from the public.
At Brown & Williamson, Reynolds started as a research chemist in product development, where he was initially involved in developing a better filter. This was of particular interest to Brown & Williamson in light of the smoking health scare of the early 1950s and the 1964 Surgeon General's Report. Reynolds described the efforts by Brown & Williamson and the American Tobacco Company to make a safer cigarette over the years. Almost all were marketplace failures, presumably because safety features tended to affect flavor or nicotine delivery.
Carlton, the low tar/nicotine cigarette introduced by American Tobacco Company in 1962 and still on the market today, was the notable exception. Reynolds testified that there are practical limits to what can be done in terms of cigarette design; altering one feature may bring unwanted effects somewhere else. For instance, selectively removing one carcinogen from cigarette smoke, benzopyrene, resulted in the release of higher levels of nitrates, which was thought to cause emphysema.
Reynold may have surprised attorneys for Brown & Williamson when he made a major concession to the plaintiffs' case during direct examination. When asked if smoking causes lung cancer, he said that statistical evidence supports it: that a smoker is 10-20 times more likely to get lung cancer than a non-smoker. However, he quickly added that we do not know the mechanism that causes cancer nor can we predict who gets it..
Wilner had not completed much of his cross-examination of Reynolds when court broke for the day. The most important point on cross was Reynolds's concession that not only did he believe that smoking may cause lung cancer in some people, but that it was also the current position of Brown & Williamson. This contradicts Brown & Williamson's position held during the trial. Wilner also challenged Reynolds about whether the tobacco company cared as much for its non-filtered Lucky Strike customers as for its low tar and nicotine Tareyton smokers. Reynolds said the company's concern was equal. Wilner apparently was asking Reynolds how the company could continue to sell a more lethal product like Lucky Strike when safer cigarettes were available. Reynolds replied that a person is free to buy unfiltered cigarettes is he chooses.
Reynolds's testimony came after Brown & Williamson witness Dr. Joseph Tulchin returned and completed cross-examination by plaintiff attorney Norwood Wilner. Wilner continued to try to poke holes in Tulchin's opinions about the public being aware of smoking's dangers by attacking his research methods. He suggested that the witness ignored large bodies of "public knowledge"-- for example, movies other than the handful he excerpted, articles about smoking that appeared alongside cigarette ads, and school textbooks denying the causal link between smoking and cancer. Tulchin was asked whether documents not available to the public, such as press releases issued by the Tobacco Research Industry Committee through Hill & Knowlton, commonly influence news articles. Tulchin could not say how a newspaper might have used press releases.
At the end of cross, Wilner dramatically brought the case back to Roland Maddox, and to the "public knowledge" to which he may have been exposed. Tulchin was asked to describe a Lucky Strike ad -- the same ad that Margaret Maddox had earlier identified as her husband's sentimental favorite. He said the ad, showing a happy couple relaxing by a fireplace, was "idealized." When Wilner displayed the Maddox family's Christmas photo, where Angela Widdick is seen giving her father a carton of Lucky Strikes, Tulchin said he did not know who the people were, but that it had the same "idealized" quality as the ad he had just seen.
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