Nicotine addiction - 25 April 1997

Twenty-five years ago, goodness, 26, 27, I was making a television series about the history of America, and I spent many tedious hours in film libraries looking for something that no movie fan would have the least interest in once he/she had seen it – newsreels.

Picture theatre newsreels, the only visual stuff we ever saw, before television, about the news. It was pretty routine and unexciting, big fires, earthquakes and such, were, of course as they still are, red meat for the cameras. And shots of war showed infantry moving across the horizon, and an explosion or two.

Before the invention of the telephoto lens, the cameraman had practically to stay safe, way back with the generals. In any political crisis, we saw our leaders: mostly stepping briskly in and out of cars while a voiceover told us about a threatening diplomatic crisis.

For light relief, we saw prime ministers greeting presidents or bosomy ladies banging champagne bottles against liners sliding out to sea as thousands cheered. Why were they so dull?

Every company seemed to have the same shots which, once television documentaries arrived, we tended to see over and over again. This, I found out, was because the choice of shot was left to the cameramen who'd been sent out on the job and, not being Hitchcock or Fellini, they didn't watch out for character or odd happenings. It was always statesmen jumping out of cars, crowds waving handkerchiefs at coronations, Paris surrendering to the Nazis. The same weeping middle-aged man. And the funeral of Franklin Roosevelt, the same black woman waving at the cortege.

Looking back now, it's just about impossible to realise how extremely narrow was our field of vision about the politics and the character of life outside our neighbourhood, in our town.

The only people who look back on that time with a sigh and a tear or two are ageing politicians who, before television, or rather before television could tape everything it showed, politicians were free to be boastful or careless with their talk in public. And since American reporters – surprisingly – didn't write shorthand, there was no provable record for them to have to deny.

Oh, but when television tape came in. Nobody foresaw the trouble it would beget for politicians and all public men and women. By this time, our time, the libraries of television stations carry millions of feet of what you might call compromising material. For a glaring example, go back no farther than six years ago, when a black judge was picked by President Bush to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court.

The Senate always has to approve these appointments and the Judiciary Committee holds public hearings. They're usually short, polite and complimentary. However, a young black woman, a law professor who'd once worked for the black judge, charged him with having made frequent obscene remarks and jokes to her.

The thing blew up into a national scandal. The chairman of that Senate committee who had daily television exposure across the whole nation decided to run for president. He decided not to run when some mischievous television news editor remembered the tape of a speech the senator had made in New England. Somewhere, it struck a familiar chord. The editor had a notion. He rifled through some other tape they'd stored, from England, of a favourite speech of the Labour leader, Neil Kinnock. The senator's speech recited Kinnock's speech, with similar passion, word for word. How could this be? Osmosis? No! Plain thievery! The senator, like hundreds, thousands of his kind, has lived to curse the day when television tape was born.

We might recall in passing that, forgetting television for the moment, President Nixon might have lived and died in honourable retirement if he'd remembered soon enough to switch off the recording machine in his office in the White House.

Well, today, there live and breathe, not very comfortably, six or seven tycoons who must shudder at the prospect of seeing themselves whenever the evening news comes on. For the past week or two, I've seen them, I swear, 20 times – always as a visual overture or fade-in to the story of the beleaguered tobacco companies.

Their ordeal during the past year or two has been so relentless, so unrelieved, I almost said the "poor" tobacco companies. Now these men are shown at hearings before a congressional committee three years ago. It was seeking the truth about the health hazards of cigarettes and these men constituted a line-up. If they hadn't been sitting down, they really would have looked like an expensive line-up of suspects in night court.

No sooner had they composed themselves than the committee chairman told them to stand and raise their right hand, and then, in turn, "Are you prepared to swear that nicotine is not addictive?" In turn, they recited, "I believe that nicotine is not addictive". Fade out. Or rather fade in, to the latest stage in this week's tobacco battle. That fleeting shot makes all the difference between the tobacco tycoons assertion of sincerity and innocence and their new admission that, indeed, they lied.

Recently, one company collapsed into a confession and produced documents showing that they'd known all along that nicotine was addictive, is indeed the main element that gets people hooked. That small company threw in the sponge before a raft of suits, which always charged that the plaintiff's cancer, emphysema or whatever was due to cigarettes.

For most, of at least 30 years, the industry has always been able to say in its defence that even if cigarettes were proved to be harmful, anyone buying a cigarette could plainly see on every pack since 1968 a warning dictated by Congress. First it was "The Surgeon General has determined that cigarettes may be hazardous to your health". But for most of those years, the line has been, "Surgeon General's warning. Cigarettes cause lung cancer, emphysema, heart disease".

It was this reminder that made the tobacco companies win all the cases that came before them. And until this year, their chief officers and their scientists have put up an ingenuous front to maintain the pretence that the addictiveness of nicotine is a matter of opinion, in spite of a towering mountain of scientific evidence from half a dozen countries during the past 30-odd years.

Americans like to quote the Surgeon General's famous report of 1974 as the first declaration of danger. It announced a positive link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. But 10 years before that, I attended a press conference in New York held by the American Cancer Society. It had three years previously started a five-year study to explore a possible link, but at the end of three years, and after following the cases of thousands of volunteers, the results were so dramatic they thought they'd better publicise them as soon as possible.

Now these past few weeks, the two biggest tobacco companies in the world, after the government of China, have admitted the truth of leaked and produced documents which reveal their belief in nicotine addiction, their one-time campaign to boost the nicotine's effectiveness and a longstanding proposal for sharpening their special appeal to children.

In a word, after 40 years, they've raised the white flag. There are thousands of suits pending against them from the relatives of dead or dying smokers. And after their new confession, these new suits might have a good chance of winning and milking the industry for endless millions.

So they decided to cut a deal with the devil they can see, rather than risk losing everything to a plague of devils they can't see. They're offering to set aside during the next 25 years a whacking indemnity fund of about $300billion to settle in advance suits to be brought against them, on a promise to be monitored by the Food and Drug administration, greatly to restrict public advertising, and to cease and desist from their advertising pitch at children.

Anyone inclined to shed a tear for the plight of an industry that in this country alone employs over a million workers should remember that the industry's main revenue comes from the Far East, and the Middle East, and is rising sensationally.

Also, I think we should mention that much of this anti-smoking campaign has a missionary hysteria to it. There are many such campaigners whose aim is to have the government eventually make all cigarette smoking illegal and usher in a new golden age of prohibition.

They should remember, or get somebody to tell them, about the first one. The prohibition of the manufacture, licensing or sale of alcoholic liquors, 1920 to 1933. Hailed at its birth as the start of "the noble experiment", it did not make Americans noticeably more noble than they already were. It encouraged millions, including inquisitive teenagers, to carry hip flasks who'd never drunk before. It created a huge underground criminal empire that corrupted the police and many judges. Frightened city dwellers, floated much inflation and degraded social life.

By the way, a day or two after that long-gone press conference thrown by the American Cancer Society, a doctor friend of mine told me he thought that only one company, two at most, made the cigarette paper and that the paper contained an arsenical compound which made it slow burning. Maybe trouble lay there?

I went back to the doctor who ran the original conference, a doctor, Cuyler Hammond, I just remember, and asked him about this. He said nobody had mentioned it to him. He thought it might be worth taking up. So far as I know, nobody has ever taken it up.

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