Number of words: 772

Edell’s case, filed in 1983, was ingeniously crafted. Previous cases against tobacco companies had followed a rather stereotypical pattern: plaintiffs had argued that they had personally been unaware of the risks of smoking. Cigarette makers had countered that the victims would have had to be “deaf, dumb and blind” not to have known about them, and juries had universally sided with cigarette makers, acknowledging that the packaging labels provided adequate warnings for consumers. For the plaintiffs, the record was truly dismal. In the three decades between 1954 and 1984, more than three hundred product-liability cases had been launched against tobacco companies. Sixteen of these cases had gone to trial. Not a single case had resulted in a judgment against a tobacco company, and not one had been settled out of court. The tobacco industry had all but declared absolute victory: “Plaintiff attorneys can read the writing on the wall,” one report crowed, “they have no case.”

Edell, however, refused to read any writing on any walls. He acknowledged openly that Rose Cipollone was aware of the risks of smoking. Yes, she had read the warning labels on cigarettes and the numerous magazine articles cut out so painstakingly by Tony Cipollone. Yet, unable to harness her habit, she had remained addicted. Cipollone was far from innocent, Edell conceded. But what mattered was not how much Rose Cipollone knew about tobacco risks; what mattered was what cigarette makers knew, and how much of the cancer risk they had revealed to consumers such as Rose.

The argument took the tobacco companies by surprise. Edell’s insistence that he needed to know what cigarette makers knew about smoking risks allowed him to ask the courts for unprecedented access to the internal files of Philip Morris, Liggett, and Lorillard. Armed with powerful legal injunctions to investigate these private files, Edell unearthed a saga of epic perversity. Many of the cigarette makers had not only known about the cancer risks of tobacco and the potent addictive properties of nicotine, but had also actively tried to quash internal research that proved it. Document after document revealed frantic struggles within the industry to conceal risks, often leaving even its own employees feeling morally queasy.

In one letter, Fred Panzer, a public relations manager at the Tobacco Research Institute, wrote to Horace Kornegay, its president, to explain the industry’s three-pronged marketing strategy—“creating doubt about the health charge without actually denying it, advocating the public’s right to smoke without actually urging them to take up the practice [and] encouraging objective scientific research as the only way to resolve the question of health hazard.” In another internal memorandum (marked “confidential”), the assertions were nearly laughably perverse: “In a sense, the tobacco industry may be thought of as a specialized, highly ritualized and stylized segment of the pharmaceutical industry. Tobacco products, uniquely, contain and deliver nicotine, a potent drug with a variety of physiological effects.”

Pharmacological research on nicotine left no doubt about why women such as Rose Cipollone found it so difficult to quit tobacco—not because they were weak-willed, but because nicotine subverted will itself. “Think of the cigarette pack as a storage container for a day’s supply of nicotine,” a researcher at Philip Morris wrote. “Think of the cigarette as a dispenser for a dose unit of nicotine. . . . Think of a puff of smoke as the vehicle of nicotine.”

In a particularly memorable exchange, Edell quizzed Liggett’s president about why the company had spent nearly $5 million to show that tobacco could cause tumors to sprout on the backs of mice, and then systematically chose to ignore any implications for carcinogenesis in humans:

Edell: What was the purpose of this [experiment]?

Dey: To try to reduce tumors on the backs of mice.

Edell: It had nothing to do with the health and welfare of human beings? Is that correct?

Dey: That’s correct. . . .

Edell: And this was to save rats, right? Or mice? You spent all this money to save mice the problem of developing tumors?

Exchanges such as this epitomized the troubles of the tobacco industry. As the cigarette industry mavens muddled their way through Edell’s cross-examination, the depth of deception made even the industry’s own attorneys cringe in horror. Cover-ups were covered up with nonsensical statistics; lies concealed within other lies. Edell’s permission to exhume the internal files of tobacco makers created a historic legal precedent, allowing others to potentially raid that same cabinet of horrors to pull out their own sooty exhibits for future tort cases.

Excerpted from pages 269-271 of ‘The Emperor of All Maladies: A biography of Cancer’ by Siddharth Mukherjee