Conclusions

Conclusions

¶822. Defendants have been aware since the late 1950s of substantial evidence demonstrating that smoking causes significant adverse health effects, in particular, lung cancer. The evidence was presented by practicing physicians, such as Michael DeBakey, Alton Oschner, and Richard Overholt, by academic scientists, such as Evarts Graham and Ernst Wynder, and by government officials such as Surgeon General Leroy Burney in his 1959 JAMA article.

¶823. By 1964, when the Surgeon General of the United States, Luther Terry, issued his ground-breaking Report considering some 7,000 scientific articles on the relationship between smoking and health, there could no longer be any question that there was a consensus in the American scientific community "that cigarette smoking contributes substantially to mortality from certain specific diseases and to the overall death rate," that "[c]igarette] smoking is associated with a 70 percent increase in the age-specific death rates of males," that "[c]igarette smoking is causally related to lung cancer in men," and that the "data for women, though less extensive, point in the same direction." In 1968, the Surgeon General concluded that "cigarette smoking can contribute to the development of cardiovascular disease and particularly to death from coronary heart disease."

¶824. From at least 1953 until at least 2000, each and every one of these Defendants repeatedly, consistently, vigorously -- and falsely -- denied the existence of any adverse health effects from smoking. Moreover, they mounted a coordinated, well-financed, sophisticated public relations campaign to attack and distort the scientific evidence demonstrating the relationship between smoking and disease, claiming that the link between the two was still an "open question." Finally, in doing so, they ignored the massive documentation in their internal corporate files from their own scientists, executives, and public relations people that, as Philip Morris's Vice President of Research and Development, Helmut Wakeham, admitted, there was "little basis for disputing the findings [of the 1964 Surgeon General's Report] at this time."

¶825. Indeed, as far back as 1968, William Kloepfer, Vice President of Public Relations for the Tobacco Institute recognized that "[o]ur basic position in the cigarette controversy is subject to the charge, and may be subject to a finding, that we are making false or misleading statements to promote the sale of cigarettes." Mr. Kloepfer was both correct and prescient.

¶826. For more than forty years after issuance of the Frank Statement in 1954, and for more than thirty years after issuance of the Surgeon General's first Report on smoking and health, Defendants maintained their position denying the causal relationship between smoking and disease. Finally, in 1999, Philip Morris launched a corporate website acknowledging the "overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and other serious disease in smokers." Despite this acknowledgment of the "overwhelming medical and scientific consensus," Philip Morris could not bring itself to clearly state its agreement with that consensus until October 2000. Philip Morris still does not include the information on its cigarette packaging that it agrees that smoking causes cancer and other diseases in smokers.

¶827. Neither RJR, Lorillard, nor B&W, have openly admitted that smoking causes cancer. Indeed, in 2000, two years after the effective date of the Master Settlement Agreement, B&W was putting the following message on its website: "We know of no way to verify that smoking is a cause of any particular person's adverse health or why smoking may have adverse health effects on some people and not others."

The Addictive Properties of Nicotine