Widdick v. Brown & Williamson
"The Tobacco Conspiracy Trial"
Tobacco Chemist: Brown & Williamson Tried to Make a Safer Cigarette
(June 3) Former Brown & Williamson chemist and current defense witness Lance Reynolds returned to the stand and attempted to rebound from the damaging testimony he gave against his former employers during plaintiff attorney Norwood Wilner's cross-examination the previous day.
The primary areas of Wilner's attack were the alleged industry conspiracy to hide the addictiveness of nicotine and the industry's efforts to make a safer cigarette. Wilner continued to question Brown & Williamson's actions and motivations, a decade and a half before Reynolds even joined the company. Reynolds attempted to answer questions that veered from his areas of expertise. For example, Wilner asked him what motivated the marketing and sales department of Brown & Williamson in the mid-1950's. After Reynolds made it clear he could only speculate on the answers, the defense finally objected to Wilner's questions. Wilner, however, may have succeeded in making the witness look ill-prepared for his testimony.
Wilner then asked Reynolds about Brown & Williamson's efforts to make Lucky Strike, the brand of cigarettes Roland Maddox smoked, safer. Reynolds admitted Lucky Strike cigarettes have remained fundamentally unchanged since the 1950s. However, he emphasize that Brown & Williamson took other steps to produce and market safer cigarettes, including a filtered Lucky Strike. Regarding nicotine addictiveness, Reynolds said he did not accept the Surgeon General's 1988 report and said nicotine addictiveness is still an active area of research. In other words, the effects of nicotine is still under investigation. He repeated his prior testimony Brown & Williamson did not intentionally hide research into nicotine's addictiveness from the Surgeon General.
During redirect examination by Brown & Williamson attorney John Nyhan brought out two basic points from Reynolds: (1) Brown & Williamson spent millions of dollars developing ways to lower tar and nicotine, including the use of filters; (2) that if a smoker chooses to snap off the filter, any safety features are no longer effective. (The defense may present some witnesses who will say that Maddox would snap the filters off his filtered cigarettes.)
The last hour of court today found jurors listening to the written deposition testimony of Harmon McAllister, taken on April 8, 1988. McAllister has been with the tobacco industry's Council for Tobacco Research since 1983. Since 1992, he has been its scientific director and vice president of research. McAllister's testimony discussed the good intentions of the Council in funding research of diseases associated with tobacco. The essence of his testimony was that the Council for Tobacco Research does not try to control the research it funds. He said as a result of funding from the Council, hundreds of articles have been published that have been damaging to the cigarette industry. The articles appeared in the most respected medical journals and are often cited in Surgeon Generals' reports. McAllister defended the Council for Tobacco Research's decision to support basic research into the diseases, rather than studying the epidemiology. The risk factors of smoking, he claimed, are already widely-known.
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