Why would the revelation that the tobacco industry manipulates and sells an addictive product be that earth shattering? The incidents portrayed in this film occurred decades after the Surgeon General's condemnation and revelation of the harmful effects of nicotine so I'm not really sure why this was such a huge deal. Perhaps the head of B&W was fearful of being charged with perjury?
shareYeah I don't know either. It all sounds very farfetched to me. I know that Big Tobacco, just like Big Oil is a multi-billion dollar industry and they are protected, pretty much feel invincible and have a large number of politicians in their pocket all over the world and I'm not defending them but I don't see how threatened they were with one guy's "big reveal" that was... what everyone knew for a very long time.
Anyone who's ever known a smoker who had been trying for years to quit and only kept smoking more can tell you that cigarettes are addictive. And everyone knew that the guys perjured themselves. They even joke about it because it's ridiculous.
So... why would they have been that threatened? He made the interview and... it's still a billionaire industry preying on people's health. Nothing's changed.
For every lie I unlearn I learn something new - Ani Difranco
The stakes are made clear when Bergman talks to Wigand in the car and then after with the news team meeting afterwards. The seven dwarfs testified in front of Congress about their plausible deniability of the addictiveness of their product. There was enough murkiness to keep Big Tobacco from being liable for the health and death of those that used their product. Wigand had insider information that his tobacco company deliberately chemically engineered their product to make nicotine more addictive and that it was common language within their industry.
State governments had deep enough pockets to file and pursue lawsuits to hold Big Tobacco liable but did not have a killer witness because of the confidentially agreements that employees and former employees are held to.
Enter Lowell Bergman with to have the interview with Wigand, have it in the public record and use the states subpoena power to allow Wigand to get around the confidentiality agreement. If states were to be able to use that interview as evidence, Big Tobacco would be greatly threatened in being held financially liable for the medical costs from the effects of their products.
I believe years later, and with the dents that whole Wigand situation created, Big Tobacco was found to be conspiratorial in deception in order to maintain their negligent business model. In addition, their collusion also showed how to illegally kept international competitors from making inroads in the domestic market.
Big Tobacco's status quo was severely threatened and I believe the industry settled with numerous states that filed a medicaid suit for hundreds of billions of dollars.
In the end, the settlement ended up just being a "tax" that tobacco companies pass on to their customers. Because the demand for Big Tobacco's product is inelastic with regards to price, it has made only a small dent to their profits. These cases though are allowing the federal government to build their arguments for a much larger lawsuit for the reimbursement of medicare costs and also racketeering charges for the companies. Of course, this is still decades in the making because of the deep pockets to create the legal barriers the film mentions. I guess the story is to be continued...
You are incorrect. The Surgeon General report did not name nicotine as a carcinogen. They only suggested that there is a causal relationship between smoking tobacco and higher mortality and health issues.
The report also isolated nicotine as not 'addictive' but 'characterized as an habituation' since they could find scientist who would deny addiction exists with smoking or chewing tobacco.
Any time a scientist brought up nicotine and addiction, the public relations firms would stroll out a few scientist to deny it. This went on for decades.
Once the whistleblower gave up the goods, the PR firms left Big Tobacco and went to work for the Big Oil obfuscating global climate change.
It wasn't just the fact that nicotine is addictive, but also that additional chemicals were being added to boost the addictive properties of nicotine.
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