MarylandQuitter

On January 11, 1964, Luther L. Terry, M.D., Surgeon General of the U.S. Public Health Service, released the first report of the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health.

On the basis of more than 7,000 articles relating to smoking and disease already available at that time in the biomedical literature, the Advisory Committee concluded that cigarette smoking is—

• A cause of lung cancer and laryngeal cancer in men
• A probable cause of lung cancer in women
• The most important cause of chronic bronchitis

The release of the report was the first in a series of steps, still being taken more than 40 years later, to diminish the impact of tobacco use on the health of the American people.

For several days, the report furnished newspaper headlines across the country and lead stories on television newscasts. Later it was ranked among the top news stories of 1964.

During the more than 40 years that have elapsed since that report, individual citizens, private organizations, public agencies, and elected officials have pursued the Advisory Committee's call for "appropriate remedial action."

Early on, the U.S. Congress adopted the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965 and the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act of 1969. These laws—

• Required a health warning on cigarette packages
• Banned cigarette advertising in the broadcasting media
• Called for an annual report on the health consequences of smoking

In September 1965, the Public Health Service established a small unit called the National Clearinghouse for Smoking and Health.

Through the years, the Clearinghouse and its successor organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Office on Smoking and Health, have been responsible for 29 reports on the health consequences of smoking.

In close cooperation with voluntary health organizations, the Public Health Service has—

• Supported successful state and community programs to reduce tobacco use
• Disseminated research findings related to tobacco use
• Ensured the continued public visibility of anti-smoking messages

Within this evolving social milieu, the population has given up smoking in increasing numbers. Nearly half of all living adults who ever smoked have quit.

The anti-smoking campaign is a major public health success with few parallels in the history of public health. It is being accomplished despite the addictive nature of tobacco and the powerful economic forces promoting its use.

However, more than 45 million American adults still smoke, more than 8 million are living with a serious illness caused by smoking, and about 438,000 Americans die prematurely each year as a result of tobacco use.

Efforts to implement proven interventions must be continued and expanded.

exec-summary.pdf

Preventing Tobacco Use Among Youth and Young Adults

exec-summary1.pdf

Fact Sheet

This is the 31st tobacco-related Surgeon General’s report issued since 1964. It describes the epidemic of tobacco use among youth ages 12 through 17 and young adults ages 18 through 25, including the epidemiology, causes, and health effects of this tobacco use and interventions proven to prevent it. Scientific evidence contained in this report supports the following facts:

We have made progress in reducing tobacco use among youth; however, far too many young people are still using tobacco. Today, more than 600,000 middle school students and 3 million high school students smoke cigarettes. Rates of decline for cigarette smoking have slowed in the last decade and rates of decline for smokeless tobacco use have stalled completely.

• Every day, more than 1,200 people in this country die due to smoking. For each of those deaths, at least two youth or young adults become regular smokers each day. Almost 90% of those replacement smokers smoke their first cigarette by age 18.
• There could be 3 million fewer young smokers today if success in reducing youth tobacco use that was made between 1997 and 2003 had been sustained.
• Rates of smokeless tobacco use are no longer declining, and they appear to be increasing among some groups.
• Cigars, especially cigarette-sized cigars, are popular with youth. One out of five high school males smokes cigars, and cigar use appears to be increasing among other groups.
• Use of multiple tobacco products—including cigarettes, cigars, and smokeless tobacco—is common among young people.
• Prevention efforts must focus on young adults ages 18 through 25, too. Almost no one starts smoking after age 25. Nearly 9 out of 10 smokers started smoking by age 18, and 99% started by age 26. Progression from occasional to daily smoking almost always occurs by age 26.

Tobacco use by youth and young adults causes both immediate and long-term damage. One of the most serious health effects is nicotine addiction, which prolongs tobacco use and can lead to severe health consequences. The younger youth are when they start using tobacco, the more likely they’ll be addicted.

• Early cardiovascular damage is seen in most young smokers; those most sensitive die very young.
• Smoking reduces lung function and retards lung growth. Teens who smoke are not only short of breath today, they may end up as adults with lungs that will never grow to full capacity. Such damage is permanent and increases the risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
• Youth are sensitive to nicotine and can feel dependent earlier than adults. Because of nicotine addiction, about three out of four teen smokers end up smoking into adulthood, even if they intend to quit after a few years.
• Among youth who persist in smoking, a third will die prematurely from smoking.

Youth are vulnerable to social and environmental influences to use tobacco; messages and images that make tobacco use appealing to them are everywhere.

• Young people want to fit in with their peers. Images in tobacco marketing make tobacco use look appealing to this age group.
• Youth and young adults see smoking in their social circles, movies they watch, video games they play, websites they visit, and many communities where they live. Smoking is often portrayed as a social norm, and young people exposed to these images are more likely to smoke.
• Youth identify with peers they see as social leaders and may imitate their behavior; those whose friends or siblings smoke are more likely to smoke.
• Youth who are exposed to images of smoking in movies are more likely to smoke. Those who get the most exposure to onscreen smoking are about twice as likely to begin smoking as those who get the least exposure. Images of smoking in movies have declined over the past decade; however, in 2010 nearly a third of top-grossing movies produced for children—those with ratings of G, PG, or PG-13— contained images of smoking.

Tobacco companies spend more than a million dollars an hour in this country alone to market their products. This report concludes that tobacco product advertising and promotions still entice far too many young people to start using tobacco.

• The tobacco industry has stated that its marketing only promotes brand choices among adult smokers. Regardless of intent, this marketing encourages underage youth to smoke. Nearly 9 out of 10 smokers start smoking by age 18, and more than 80% of underage smokers choose brands from among the top three most heavily advertised.
• The more young people are exposed to cigarette advertising and promotional activities, the more likely they are to smoke.
• The report finds that extensive use of price-reducing promotions has led to higher rates of tobacco use among young people than would have occurred in the absence of these promotions.
• Many tobacco products on the market appeal to youth. Some cigarette-sized cigars contain candy and fruit flavoring, such as strawberry and grape.
• Many of the newest smokeless tobacco products do not require users to spit, and others dissolve like mints; these products include snus—a spitless, dry snuff packaged in a small teabag-like sachet—and dissolvable strips and lozenges. Young people find these products appealing in part because they can be used without detection at school or other places where smoking is banned. However, these products cause and sustain nicotine addiction, and most youth who use them also smoke cigarettes.
• Through the use of advertising and promotional activities, packaging, and product design, the tobacco industry encourages the myth that smoking makes you thin. This message is especially appealing to young girls. It is not true—teen smokers are not thinner than nonsmokers.

Comprehensive, sustained, multi-component programs can cut youth tobacco use in half in 6 years.

• Prevention is critical. Successful multi-component programs prevent young people from starting to use tobacco in the first place and more than pay for themselves in lives and health care dollars saved.
• Strategies that comprise successful comprehensive tobacco control programs include mass media campaigns, higher tobacco prices, smoke-free laws and policies, evidence-based school programs, and sustained community-wide efforts.
• Comprehensive tobacco control programs are most effective when funding for them is sustained at levels recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Posted at 2:49 pm by David Halperin of Public Report

It’s become increasingly clear from law enforcement, congressional, and media investigations that many for-profit colleges are selling a product that can be toxic to students — high-priced, low-quality programs that often leave graduates and dropouts alike without improved career prospects and paralyzed by student loan debt, often $100,000 or more.  So when the for-profit college companies’ trade association, APSCU, meets in Washington next week for its annual lobby day, whom has the group selected to speak to its members on the subject of “Crafting the Positive Impact Proposition of Private Sector Colleges and Universities”?

None other than John Dunham, president of John Dunham & Associates, which, according to the firm’s website, guerrillaeconomics.com, is “an economic research firm uniquely focused on government relations.”  Dunham ”specializes in the economics of how public policy issues affect products and services.”

Where did John Dunham learn these skills? “Prior to starting his own firm, John was the senior U.S. economist with Philip Morris, producing research and information on key issues facing all of the company’s divisions.” Philip Morris, of course, has long been one of the nation’s largest manufacturers of cigarettes. For decades, the company concealed important truths about the toxic effects of cigarette smoking.

Dunham worked at Philip Morris from 1995-2000, where, among other things, according to his CV, he “performed financial analysis of corporate legal settlements, including the largest in U.S. history.” It was during this period that public perceptions swung decisively against the image of the tobacco companies, and in 1999 the U.S. Justice Department sued Philip Morris and other big tobacco companies for fraud, charging the industry had engaged in a long conspiracy to mislead the public about the dangers of smoking. There are thousands of documents referencing Dunham in the publicly-available archive of tobacco industry materials. (After Dunham left Philip Morris, the government prevailed in the case, and the tobacco companies were ordered to start telling the truth about their harmful products.)

Now, it’s the for-profit colleges that are on the ropes, with mounting federal and state investigations about alleged deceptions and abuses of students and taxpayers, including, this week’s announcement by Consumer Financial Protection Bureau head Richard Cordray that his agency has sued for-profit giant ITT Educational Services and is carefully probing other companies. APSCU is worried, as it should be. According to a report by Wells Fargo market analyst Trace Urdan, APSCU lobbyists met with some state attorneys general and governors’ staff at this week’s National Governors Association meeting in Washington, and “APSCU requested that prior to taking action, the attorneys general provide some notice to the schools’ stakeholders. APSCU reported that some, though not all of the AGs seemed receptive to this notion.”

The industry also faces the challenge of a revised “gainful employment” rule from the Obama Administration, a measure that would eventually cut off federal aid to programs that consistently leave students with overwhelming debt. The CEOs of many of the biggest for-profit colleges have been meeting at the White House to argue against issuance of the rule. The Wells Fargo report says, not surprisingly, that the “theme” of next week’s APSCU meetings with Members of Congress and their staffs “will be stopping the new Gainful Employment regulation.”

APSCU includes ITT, EDMC, Kaplan, Corinthian, Bridgepoint, DeVry, Globe and other companies now accused of fraud and deception, and it has harbored egregious abusers like FastTrain College and ATI up until they’ve been shut down by authorities for systematic fraud.

APSCU and other for-profit college companies have managed to “persuade” many Republicans, and some Democrats, on the Hill through ongoing campaign contributions. But in their lobby meetings, they at least have to appear to argue in terms of the merits.  In seeking to sell APSCU’s toxic product on Capitol Hill, and persuading Washington that the industry should continue receiving more than $30 billion a year in taxpayer money, it seems that a veteran of crafting policy arguments for the tobacco industry is the man for the job.

It’s one more sign of the deep cynicism of the big for-profit college companies — and the deep trouble the industry is now in.

Instead of trying again to put lipstick on their diseased pig, wise players in the sector should start figuring out how to change their business model and make money by actually helping students to train, at affordable prices, for genuine careers.

By the way, APSCU has prepared these tips for its members coming to take Washington by storm:

Bring plenty of business cards
Wear comfortable shoes
Carry a bottle of water and small snacks with you (banana, granola bar, trail mix)
Tour Washington, D.C.’s many historical sites (schedule permitting)

This article originally appeared on Republic Report

Posted at 4:00 pm by Zaid Jilani of Report Public

Last week, Republic Report noted that six governors from both political parties attended a secretive trade talks conference in Washington, D.C. sponsored by a number of multi-national corporations, including Philip Morris International. These governors apparently were comfortable with allowing themselves to be wined and dined by some of the world’s most powerful corporate entities while pushing for a new NAFTA-style trade agreement for the Pacific region.

While U.S. politicians have grown accustom to this sort of stealth corporate lobbying, it appears that some of our overseas neighbors have not. The Australian embassy actually withdrew the Australian ambassador from the conference after it became apparent that Philip Morris would be sponsoring it.

Meanwhile, in New Zealand, several political parties have called for Mike Moore, the country’s ambassador to the United States, to be fired because he attended an event sponsored by the tobacco industry. Other political parties have called for full disclosure of the details of how Moore ended up at the conference, including a disclosure of whether or not he was authorized by the government. Meanwhile, the Public Health Association there roundly condemned Moore.

Cabinet ministers in New Zealand’s federal government have pushed back against calls to censure or withdraw Moore, but it is interesting that his appearance at the conference has become a scandal at all. The reactions by the body politic in New Zealand and Australia to a conference sponsored by Big Tobacco as compared to the nonexistent response in the United States is instructive in how deeply corporate influence in our politics has become a normal affair.

This article originally appeared on Republic Report

At one point, Taylor pointed out many of Byrd’s various clients, including the tobacco and alcohol industries. Byrd explained that he decided a long time ago that he would work for the “people who pay” and that he wouldn’t be where he is today if he wasn’t able to pass through the Revolving Door as a former lawmaker (he was a Majority Whip):

• TAYLOR: You don’t shy away from controversy. You represented the gaming industry, the tobacco industry, the, some of the alcoholic beverage industry.
• BYRD: If it’s a good idea, motherhood, or Apple Pie, I’m probably opposed!
• TAYLOR: (laughs) There’s social reformers and religious folks who probably think you’re evil for doing that. How do you respond to that?
• BYRD:  When I first decided to do this years ago, one of the things I did is I realized that, you know, you’ve gotta go, if you’re going to do this, you have to go where the people are who are going to pay you. [...] There’s a lot of other ways to say it, but that’s being real upfront about it.
• TAYLOR: How do you stay so active in Democratic politics and still get along, you know, successfully with Republicans in Dover?
• BYRD: You know, I’ve always said  everything I am in this business and all of my success is a result of me getting elected to the legislature as a Democrat in 1974.

This article originally appeared on Republic Report

 

By Adrienne Jane Burke | April 30, 2013, 1:04 PM | Techonomy Exclusive

It might be surprising to hear a tobacco giant described as a tech innovator. But Philip Morris researchers are pioneering new territory with a crowdsourced approach to checking the accuracy of life sciences data.

In partnership with computational biologists at IBM’s Watson Research Center, Philip Morris’s so-called sbv IMPROVER project creates open challenges to encourage scientists to augment traditional peer reviews of research data. On Monday, Philip Morris launched its Species Translation Challenge, which will award three $20,000 prizes to teams whose results best define how well rodent tests can predict human outcomes.

Similar competitions have emerged in the academic world, but sbv IMPROVER (short for “systems biology verification of industrial methodology for process verification in research” in case you were wondering) is the first that taps the crowd to verify industrial research. An initial challenge last year awarded $50,000 to two Wayne State University researchers who proved best at confirming genetic features that could be considered “diagnostic signatures” for particular diseases.

Why is a cigarette manufacturer sponsoring such competitions? “Our number one objective is to do something about our dangerous products,” says Philip Morris scientific communications director, Hugh Browne. (The company is known for its periodic candor about such matters, even as it continues to dominate the industry.) From heart disease to cancer to emphysema, the potential consequences of smoking are well known. But not every smoker suffers all or any of those health effects, suggesting that a combination of environmental and genetic factors lead to disease.

To understand precisely how smoking and chewing tobacco leads to complex interactions in a user’s biological systems, “Philip Morris is increasing its investments into systems biology,” Browne says. The company is looking at networks of genes, proteins, and biochemical reactions to identify the exact biological mechanisms perturbed by smoking.

But such biological data is notoriously complex to analyze. The profession as yet lacks any standard methodology for verifying results, and traditional peer-review methods have “struggled with the volume and complexity of the data,” according to Philip Morris.

IMPROVER breaks research workflows into components and asks the crowd to apply its own computational methods to verify results. IBM computational biologist Gustavo Stolovitsky says the project “provides an excellent platform on which to test and develop some of the most cutting-edge approaches to the analysis of high-throughput biological data.”

The 2012 IMPROVER challenge asked participants to identify signs in a patient’s set of transcribed genetic material that could be relied on to diagnose any of four diseases associated with smoking: psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and lung cancer. Competitors looked at clinical data from patients—some of it licensed from third parties and provided by Philip Morris; some from the public domain.

More than 50 teams worldwide competed in the challenge that the Wayne State researchers won. Says Ajay Royyuru, director of IBM’s Computational Biology Center in Yorktown Heights, NY: “There was a refreshing variety of competitors.” The most successful applied fundamental understanding of biology “rather than brute force machine learning,” or automated big-data analysis methods. “Some came at it from a mathematical modeling approach, others came from biology, and others combined those,” he continues. (The Wayne State team comprised a bioinformaticist and a perinatal researcher.) Royyuru adds that the challenges can provide young scientists without scientific publications under their belt with a way to get recognition, and computational biology startup companies with a way to showcase what they can do.

A team of IBM computational biology experts scored entries, and a five-man outside panel reviewed the scores. While no single team identified the data perfectly, the leading methods, considered in the aggregate, performed exceptionally well, Royyuru says.

The new challenge launched this Monday seeks to determine if gene expression pathways identified in rodents will predict the same in humans. Scientists typically rely on them to study the impact of products on consumers, even though it remains unclear how well rodent results translate to humans.

Four sub-challenges ask participants to determine 1) if the way signaling pathways in one species react to a given stimulus really predicts similar response in another species, 2) which biological pathway functions and gene expression profiles are most parallel in rodents and humans, 3) how much that depends on the nature of the stimulus or data type collected, and 4) which computational methods are most effective for inferring responses between species.

Competitors will get access to about 5,000 human and rat samples Philip Morris generated for the challenge, and will look at 57 stressors to a single cell line exposed at different time points.

Browne suggests that the IMPROVER approaches for verifying results could be useful as well in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, nutrition, and environmental safety industries. And Royyuru sees the project as a step toward creating “a verification methodology that will become routine industry practice.” Who knows how Philip Morris might utilize the outcomes? For better or worse, they may seek to create safer tobacco products.

(Reuters) - A federal appeals court on Friday upheld a ruling banning tobacco company Philip Morris USA, a unit of Altria Group Inc, from making false or deceptive statements about cigarettes.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld a 2009 injunction banning the company, which sells Marlboro and other cigarettes, from making misleading statements or implying health benefits.

The court had previously upheld injunctions placed under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, but the cigarette company brought a new challenge after Congress passed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act in 2009.

Philip Morris said the newest act, which increased restrictions on the actions of cigarette companies, made the injunctions redundant.

But the company's history of non-compliance led the three-judge panel to agree with a lower court that there is no assumption Philip Morris will comply with the new law.

This is the thirteenth year of litigation between Philip Morris and U.S. government.

The case is United States of America et al. v. Philip Morris USA Inc. Number 11-5146.

Published in CSP Daily News

What does it mean to “carve out” tobacco from a trade agreement?

A “carve out” means an exclusion of tobacco products from the rules and benefits of the trade agreement. In effect, it gives complete protection for governments to regulate tobacco without fear of violating the trade agreement and being sued by the tobacco industry for doing so.

Current trade agreements require drastic change

Tobacco must be listed as an exception under all product references, removing its ability to benefit from free trade benefits between countries. This would not hurt any other products that benefit from the trade agreements because the exclusion would be product-specific.

The Tobacco Industry has sued many countries because of current international trade laws

Trade agreements allow the tobacco industry to drag governments before foreign trade tribunals and demand that anti-tobacco regulations be removed or weakened. Oftentimes, these cases are not about winning but are instead meant to impose the huge costs of litigation on governments, which governments must pay even if successful in their defense.

What is the irreconcilable conflict between the tobacco industry and public health?

Unlike other products that can become harmful when abused or overused, there is no “safe” use or amount of tobacco. The tobacco industry simply seeks to increase consumption of tobacco, while ASH and its public health allies seek a higher level of global health. There is no “happy medium” to be found between the tobacco industry and the public health community.

What is the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, and why does it matter?

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) is a free trade treaty currently being negotiated between the U.S. and eleven countries bordering the Pacific Ocean. It will become the largest regional trading bloc in the world once completed, ideally in 2013.

Negotiations for The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Agreement (TTIP) between the U.S. and the European Union began in July 2013. It will be even bigger than the TPPA. In both negotiations, the U.S. is pushing for the right of corporations, including Big Tobacco, to directly sue governments in foreign trade tribunals. This ability to directly sue a government is a “chill” tactic used by Big Tobacco to discourage governments from implementing tobacco control regulations so as to avoid the cost of defending themselves in court against the tobacco industry, who can afford to drag out the cases for a long time. Learn more about the threat and opportunity of the TPPA>

Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)

In July 2013, negotiation started for a free trade agreement that will be even bigger than TPPA, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the U.S. and the 28 countries of the European Union. Several European countries have made great strides in fighting the tobacco epidemic, and may want to protect their laws from corporate lawsuits. Learn more about TTIP>

How many lives are at risk if tobacco continues to benefit from trade agreements?

The WHO estimates that 1 billion people will die from tobacco this century unless drastic actions are taken. One of those critical actions to take is carving tobacco products out of trade agreements. It is impossible to predict how many lives hang in the balance of the trade debate, but it is certainly millions worldwide.

http://ash.org

Philip Morris International Inc. (PM), the largest publicly traded tobacco company, will spend as much as 500 million euros ($680 million) on a new factory in Italy as part of a drive to make products with lower health risks.

The plant, near Bologna, will start producing tobacco products that are heated with a special device rather than burned at the end of 2015 or early 2016, the New York-based company said in a statement today. The factory will have capacity to produce as many as 30 billion units a year, equivalent to about 6 percent of the European Union’s cigarette sales, the company said.

“This first factory investment is a milestone in our road map toward making these products available to adult smokers,” Chief Executive Officer Andre Calantzopoulos said in the statement.

Nicotine Race

In November, Philip Morris brought the launch date of the tobacco-heating product forward to 2015 from a previous forecast of 2016 or 2017. It will test it in a few cities in the second half of this year.

Unlike e-cigarettes, the company’s new product will contain tobacco to appease smokers’ cravings for the taste of a conventional cigarette.

The device looks like a hollowed-out fountain pen. The custom-built cigarette is inserted and the tobacco is heated to generate a smoking aerosol. The temperature is “significantly below” what’s generated by a traditional cigarette, PMI has said.

PMI has spent more than a decade trying to develop lower-risk products and started eight clinical trials on them last year, the company said.

Philip Morris already has a filter factory and a pilot plant in Bologna. The new facility will employ about 600 people. The company will also enter the e-cigarette market in the second half of this year.

www.bloomberg.com

tobaccoexplained.pdf  Please click on the link to download/view the 78 page document.

FRONTLINE tells the inside story of how two small-town Mississippi lawyers declared war on Big Tobacco and skillfully pursued a daring new litigation strategy that ultimately brought the industry to the negotiating table. For forty years tobacco companies had won every lawsuit brought against them and never paid out a dime. In 1997 that all changed. The industry agreed to a historic deal to pay $368 billion in health-related damages, tear down billboards and retire Joe Camel.

This report recounts how it all started when Mississippi's Attorney General Mike Moore joined forces with his "Ole Miss" classmate attorney Dick Scruggs and sued tobacco companies on behalf of the state's taxpayers to recoup money spent on health care for smokers. Scruggs and Moore criss-crossed the country in a private jet hawking their battle strategy to other state attorneys general and eventually built an army of forty states.

Moore and Scruggs had a number of secret weapons. They took charge of explosive tobacco industry internal documents that no one else would touch. And they protected two of the most important whistleblowers in the history of the tobacco wars: Jeffrey Wigand, the first high-level tobacco executive to turn against the companies; and Merrell Williams, a paralegal who secretly copied thousands of internal documents.

And these Missippippi "boys" held another trump card. They offered a deal to Bennett LeBow, CEO of Liggett & Myers: break ranks with the industry and cooperate with the state attorneys general in return for financial stability. FRONTLINE tells how they also managed to get a back channel to President Clinton and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott through political advisor Dick Morris.

But Scrugg's and Moore's success was not limited to getting the industry to a national settlement. FRONTLINE details for the first time how their efforts triggered a massive criminal investigation of Big Tobacco that threatens to put some in jail for deceiving the American public.

Partly because of this criminal investigation, strong forces in the public health community opposed settlement talks. FRONTLINE interviews Minnesota State Attorney General Hubert Humphrey III and former FDA Chairman David Kessler who balk at any "deal with the devil."

As of May 1998, the Senate is poised to pass broad anti-smoking legislation which would cost the industry over $500 billion. The tobacco firms have denounced this new deal claiming it will bankrupt them. But Congress -- once a servant of the industry in large part because of tobacco's massive political clout and contributions -- has now turned against it.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/settlement/

In 1998, the Attorney General's Office reached a settlement with the major tobacco manufacturers that imposes major restrictions on the industry's advertising and marketing machine, curtails its ability to fight anti-tobacco legislation in our political arena, and provides states quick mechanisms to enforce the agreement.

In addition, it provides states approximately $206 billion through the year 2025 - including $4.5 billion for Washington State - to help rectify the harm caused by tobacco. The tobacco settlement is the largest financial recovery in legal history.

The Master Settlement Agreement

The 1998 Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) between tobacco companies and 46 U.S. states was the largest civil litigation settlement in U.S.history. Its central purpose was to reduce smoking, and particularly youth smoking in the U.S.

In the Agreement:

• Each of the 46 states gave up their legal claims that the tobacco companies had been violating state antitrust and consumer protection laws.
• The tobacco companies agreed to pay the states billions of dollars in yearly installments to compensate them for taxpayer money that was spent on patients and family members with tobacco-related diseases.

It Settled Lawsuits:

• The MSA resolved litigation brought by over 46 states in the mid-1990s against majorU.S.cigarette manufacturers: Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson, and Lorillard, plus the industry's trade associations and PR firms.
• It settled the state lawsuits that were trying to recover billions of dollars in costs associated with treating smoking-related illnesses.
• The Attorneys General of the 46 states signed the MSA with the four largestU.S.tobacco companies in 1998.

It Created New Restrictions:

• New limits were created for the advertising, marketing and promotion of cigarettes.
• It prohibited tobacco advertising that targets people younger than 18.
• Cartoons in cigarette advertising were eliminated.
• Outdoor, billboard and public transit advertising of cigarettes were eliminated.
• Cigarette brand names could no longer be used on merchandise.
• Many tobacco company internal documents were made available to the public.

It funded anti-tobacco education:

• The MSA called for the creation of a nonprofit organization, the Legacy Foundation, funded by the settling states. This foundation was charged with educating the nation about the social costs, addictive nature and negative health effects associated with tobacco consumptio
• In 2001, the Legacy Foundation launched “truth” campaign. The American Journal of Public Health publishes peer-reviewed research that finds that the Truth campaign, funded by the MSA, is linked conclusively to 22 percent of the overall decline in youth smoking rates in 2000–2002—translating to 300,000 fewer smokers in 2002.

Since the MSA was signed in November 1998, about 40 other tobacco companies have signed onto the MSA and are also bound by its terms.

Under the agreement, state attorneys general are responsible for enforcing the restrictions on cigarette marketing and advertising.

http://www.atg.wa.gov/MSA.aspx

Steve Parrish is Senior Vice President, Corporate Affairs, of Philip Morris and representative for the tobacco industry in settlement negotiations. He is in favor of the national settlement and has argued that the tobacco industry will reform under the proposed regulatory framework contained in the deal. He was "at the table" during the settlement talks and was considered a rational and fair negotiator by the participants we interviewed. Previously, Parrish was General Counsel for Philip Morris and worked with Philip Morris International in Switzerland. Prior to joining Philip Morris, Parrish was a partner at the law firm of Shook, Hardy and Bacon in Kansas City, MS. He was the main tobacco industry attorney in the famous Cipollone case.

Q. Mr. Parrish, why did the industry try to settle litigation with the Attorney's General?

Parrish: Well, we had been thinking for some period of time about trying to come up with a way to resolve a number of the very contentious issues that were facing the industry. The Attorney's General lawsuits, the class actions, there was a lot of legislative and regulatory issues that were out there, and we were really trying to come to grips with was there a way that we could try to resolve as many of these issues as possible, and the Attorney's Generals cases were a part of that....because we just felt that we could continue the litigation, whether it was the class action cases, the Attorney General cases, and if we won the cases we would still be in litigation and we would still be fighting and we were really....analyzed the situation. We didn't want to keep fighting. We wanted to sit down with others, people that we had disagreed with quite strongly on a lot of issues and see if we could find some common ground and try to resolve some of the issues.

Q. To those of us on the outside it seemed like a great sea change. You're a veteran of that litigation; you come from Shook, Hardy and Bacon before you were at Phillip Morris.

Parrish: That's right, I was a trial lawyer before I came with Phillip-Morris.

Q. Representing the tobacco industry.

Parrish: I represented Phillip-Morris in a case in New Jersey back in 1988, that's right.

Q. So that tobacco industry was known, if you will, for never giving up, for spending any amount of money to defend itself. What caused the sea change? Was there an event, or do you remember a conversation?

Parrish: Well, I think it was really a lot of different things that came together at one point in time, which sort of led us to this almost historic opportunity we have. We had the individual cases, which we had always very successfully defended, we'd had a large measure of success defending the class actions lawsuits, we felt like we had a good chance to win the AG cases. We thought ultimately we would probably prevail in our FDA lawsuit. But it just seemed to us that even if we won, every one of those lawsuits, how would the situation be better? And we just felt like we owed it to our shareholders, to our employees and our business partners, retailers, wholesalers, and our consumers to see if there was a way to end the acrimony and try to find some common ground with the Attorneys General, people in the public health community, regulators and legislators.

Q. You don't remember...there wasn't a meeting or someone came in with a memo or a proposal or a draft and said, "Hey, we've got to change the way we're doing business."

Parrish: No, not at all. Actually, at Phillip Morris, for example, we had been talking about this issue for some time, and as it turned out the other companies had been doing the same thing. And I think in late 1996 there was a discussion among some of the CEOs about trying to sit down and see if we could fashion a way to work out some differences with some of those who had been our opponents in the past, find some common ground, and see if we could resolve some of the issues.

Q. Was there a fear that you might lose a lawsuit?

Parrish: Well, anytime you're involved in litigation you're always worried about whether you'll win or lose the case. But again, it was really more than just the being concerned about winning or losing an individual case, or a series of cases, because while the litigation was a very serious thing to us, there was more involved. It was very obvious to us that there was more involved. It was very obvious to us that people around the United States were very concerned about the issue of youth smoking. We talked to people, we did polling, and it was very obvious that people were concerned about that. We were concerned about it, so we thought "is there a way that we could address the 'youth smoking' issue?" The Attorneys General and others in their lawsuits had claimed that the youth smoking issue was central to their claims against the industry, and we thought that might provide an opportunity to address the youth smoking issue, as well some of the litigation issues.

Q. Well, Mike Moore and Dick Scruggs and others who participated in the negotiations say to us they asked you or...Mike Moore said they asked you or Phil Carlton....that they be serious when they come to the negotiating table. And they all say that they were stunned, initially, when the industry said, "we'll give up our first amendment rights" or advertising rights. Somebody must have had a discussion about giving up that, after all the litigation and all the money, and all the argument against doing that.

Parrish: Well, we certainly had talked about that before we sat down to begin the negotiations. And I think there were really two key events early on in the negotiations. One was when Jeff Bible, the Chairman of Phillip Morris, and Steve Goldstone, the Chairman of RJR and Nabisco, sat down with the Attorneys General, the class action lawyers and some people from the public health community, and indicated very firmly their good faith and the fact that they were willing to make fundamental changes in the way we do business, going forward. I think that was very sincerely communicated to those on the other side of the table and I think they were impressed by that. And then, very quickly, we moved to the issue of our advertising and marketing practices, and I think when we, early on, indicated a willingness to forgo things like the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel in our advertising to give up billboards all across the country, that they realized that we were there in good faith and we were serious and we really wanted to try to work something out.

Q. Before I go back into the history here, I'm confused: are the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel still out there, or are you guys taking them out of the market place?

Parrish: If the comprehensive resolution that we negotiated last June is enacted into law, then they will be gone.

Q. Because it's not a good idea?

Parrish: I'm sorry, I don't understand.

Q. Well, you're willing to take them out of your advertising campaign because it's been alleged that it attracts kids and young people...it's not a good idea to have that out there attracting young people.

Parrish: Well, if I understand your question correctly that is one of the differences of opinion, if you will, that we have had with others, to whether the Marlboro Man, for example, is what causes kids to smoke. We don't think it is, but we were willing to give up the Marlboro Man as part of a comprehensive resolution of all these issues that were facing us. So, certainly, if this comprehensive resolution is enacted into law you'll never see the Marlboro Man again in this country.

Q. But if it isn't?

Parrish: Well, if it isn't, then I think that all of the companies in the industry have indicated that they...while we will do everything we can to address the issue of youth smoking, that we are not going to give up our First Amendment rights to communicate with our adult consumers. And the Marlboro Man, for example, is one way to do that. We're perfectly willing to try to work to eliminate youth smoking and do everything we can...we can't do it all by ourselves, and that's why this comprehensive approach, which involves money for education campaigns for kids as well as restrictions on advertising practices of the industry, is a much better way to go in our view.

Q. Okay, let me go back to a little history. When the Medicaid suit was first filed in Mississippi, and I assume you monitor litigation (related to Phillip Morris and the industry), what was your reaction?

Parrish: Well, it was a new theory. It was something that we really hadn't seen in the courtroom before; there had been discussions about theories like that in the past, and any time you have a lawsuit filed against you you take it very seriously. This one in particular we took seriously for a couple of reasons: it was a new theory, and just because of the potential amount of damages that was being alleged in the case.

Q. So you weren't like many of the other people we've interviewed who said when they first heard about it they thought "ah, it's a new theory and it's never going to go anywhere."

Parrish: Well, we took it seriously. We did our legal research and thought that we would win the case, that the law, if you will, was on our side. But, again, anytime you have a major lawsuit filed against you, you have to take it seriously--you owe that to your shareholders.

Q. At one point the governor of Mississippi went into the Supreme Court of Mississippi to try to get the whole suit and his Attorney General out of court, and you and your colleagues joined him in that suit. Once you lost that suit, did you really take it seriously then?

Parrish: Well, that was certainly a set-back, but we were taking it seriously before then. We were preparing for trial and we were preparing for trial right up until the moment we settled the case. So we were disappointed with the court's ruling, but we were prepared for it, and we were prepared to go forward if that's what we needed to do.

Q. So they were going forward in Pascagoula, these country lawyers in the shopping center in Pascagoula, but you took them seriously. They weren't just a bunch of hillbillies out there.

Parrish: The lawyers in the state of Mississippi in that case are excellent trial lawyers. They have done very well for clients all over this country, and as I've come to know them through the negotiation process I have a tremendous amount of respect for their ability; they're excellent lawyers.

Q. Were you guys home cooked in Mississippi?

Parrish: Well, I don't know what you mean by "home cooked." The state of Mississippi has a court system which functions very well. I'm not sure I would say that we were "home cooked."

Q. You're in Chancery Court, no jury, in Pascagoula and I think that the beauty of this comprehensive resolution was that despite our differences of opinion, the AGs, the private class action lawyers and the representatives from the public health community all had certain things that we could find common ground on. I think the Attorneys General, for example, realized that bankruptcy of the tobacco industry is not going to solve the youth smoking issue. It's not going to solve the public health issues that are trying to be addressed in this comprehhe law. I don't think that we thought we were going to be treated unfairly by the judge or anybody. Any place you try a case there's going to be a local lawyer.

Q. Well, but in Mississippi there was another case where the plaintiff complained that your people came in and hired all the prominent citizens as jury consultants, put them in the audience, and he wound up losing the case. He felt he got reverse cooked, if you will. I was just wondering whether if because the Mississippi case, in a sense, you may have felt outmaneuvered.

Parrish: No, I don't think we felt outmaneuvered. I think we thought at the end of the day if we had chosen to litigate that case all the way through the appellate process we ultimately would have prevailed, but at the end of the day we would have decided that it was in the best interest of our company and our shareholders and the industry to try to resolve that case as part of a comprehensive resolution of all the issues. And our firm belief was that to litigate these cases, one at a time, year after year after year, was not really going to be a satisfactory outcome for anybody; not for us, not for the citizens of Mississippi or the other states, and that there had to be a better way than 50 AG cases around the country.

Q. Well, isn't there the threat that you may lose one, two, three of these multi-billion dollar judgments and have to go into bankruptcy?

Parrish: Sure, that would be a terrible thing, and it would be not only terrible from the industry standpoint and all the hundreds of thousands of people around the country who depend on the industry for their livelihood, but I would submit it would be a bad thing for the public, because if you have a jackpot justice system where one, two, or three states get all the money, then what happens to the rest of the states? They get nothing, and that's why the comprehensive resolution that we negotiated with the Attorneys General, the class action lawyers and others, is a much better approach because it insures that the claims of all individuals and states will be satisfying.

Q. Fear of bankruptcy would have been a logical motive, though, for you to settle.

Parrish: Well, certainly, if this industry were to be bankrupt that would be, as I said, would be a terrible thing.

Q. When your share...the stock you own in the company would be worthless.

Parrish: It would not be worth much. And I think we owed it to our shareholders to try to resolve not only the AG cases, but all these other issues as well, and I think that the beauty of this comprehensive resolution was that despite our differences of opinion, the AGs, the private class action lawyers and the representatives from the public health community all had certain things that we could find common ground on. I think the Attorneys General, for example, realized that bankruptcy of the tobacco industry is not going to solve the youth smoking issue. It's not going to solve the public health issues that are trying to be addressed in this comprehensive resolution, because there will just be new manufacturers, whether they're foreign-based manufacturers or new manufacturing entities here in this country. There could very well be a black market. And I don't think anybody wants that. So we all said we all have the same concern here, so how can we fashion a resolution that addresses the very legitimate interests of everybody around the table.

Q.You know, in interview after interview that we do, people continue to refer back to the Spring of 1994 when the CEOs all were sworn in and then said they didn't believe that nicotine was addictive. From hindsight now, how do you look at that hearing and the strategy of that hearing?

Parrish: I think, in hindsight, that hearing in April of 1994 in front of Congressman Waxman's Subcommittee, was one of the seminal events over the last number of years as it relates to tobacco, and it was a very important hearing.

Q. Was it a disaster for the industry?

Parrish: I don't know if I would say it was a disaster, but it certainly focused a lot of attention on the smoking issue in this country.

Q. Would you have done it differently today?

Parrish: I don't know with 20-20 hindsight whether I would have or not. Not that I was the one who was making those decisions but I just don't know.

Q. Maybe, could you clarify what the industry position is now between the 1994 testimony about nicotine addiction and risk factors related to health and recent testimony that there's some acknowledgment that you may have contributed to 100,000 deaths a year, and similar statements or confusing statements from my point of view.

Parrish: I don't think you can say there's an "industry" position on those issues. I think what you have is different companies have different positions. The CEOs of the different companies have different views, as a personal matter. And I think you've seen that reflected in the recent congressional testimony, so I don't think you can say there is a industry position on those issues.

Q. Do you believe that nicotine is addictive?

Parrish: Do I personally? Under the definition that people apply today, I certainly do believe it is addictive.

Q. You do...

Parrish: I do!

Q. Okay, so that's no longer a controversy?

Parrish: Well, not as far as I'm concerned. And what we have said is, we've agreed as part of this comprehensive resolution to put bold new warnings on all packages of cigarettes, including the addiction warning. That's, again, one of the things that we agreed to do as part of this comprehensive resolution, to try to end the acrimony and focus on solutions to the issue, rather than this ceaseless, endless litigation and argument.

Q. So, if I understand correctly, the industry is no longer, and you are no longer, taking positions that have been reflected to some extent in all these documents, that we cannot admit something, like that there is addiction connected to nicotine?

Parrish: Well, I'm not sure what documents in particular you're referring to, but in a way it doesn't really matter. I think what the CEOs have said, their statements speak for themselves, and I think individual CEOs have different views from one another. There's not an "industry" position on addiction, for example.

Q. Do you agree that you sell a "nicotine-delivery device?"

Parrish: I'm not so sure I would characterize it as a "nicotine-delivery device," I'm not sure I know exactly what that means. I know that others have said that. I think the important question is: what is the public health policy going to be in this country going forward, and what role is the industry going to play in that policy. And as a part of the resolution that we've agreed to we're going to put a warning on the packs that says that cigarette smoking is addictive, that nicotine is addictive, and we as a company have agreed that we are not going to debate this issue endlessly, that we'll work with the public health community, not only on the nicotine addiction issue but the other public health issues, to try to forge common ground that will advance the public health goals or the public health community.

Q. When Benett Lebow decided that he was going to break ranks, do you remember that, when you found about that?

Parrish: I certainly do.

Q. What was your reaction?

Parrish: I went to the train station to get on the train to go to work, I picked up the Wall Street Journal, and read the article. And my first reaction was that I was surprised, and as I read the article I was even more surprised that it had been kept secret and broke in the Wall Street Journal that day. Those were my two immediate reactions. I was surprised that there had been a settlement with Mr. Lebow, and I was almost even more surprised that it hadn't leaked out.

Q. "Surprised" sounds a little understated. You're a veteran of Shook, Hardy and Bacon, you guys used to brief executives on what their stance should be, legally and otherwise related to these issues. This was like the fall of the Berlin Wall in terms of the success of your organization.

Parrish: It was a major event. I would say it was a major event...in the process that led us to June 20, 1997 that I think, as I said earlier, there were a number of things that came together. And certainly the Liggett settlement was a part of that.

Q. Well, you've got a turncoat. You've got somebody breaking ranks!

Parrish: Well, I'm not sure....

Q. I know you teach Sunday school, but you don't curse?

Parrish: Well, I didn't curse that day...I quietly read my paper. I don't know to this day everything that motivated Mr. Lebow to enter into that settlement. But the fact of the matter is--it happened! I'm not sure I would characterize him as a "turncoat" or that he broke ranks. The fact of the matter is, it happened. And that was one of the things that led us to the June 20, 1997 agreement.

Q. By the way, why did Phillip Morris pay his legal fees? Why did Phillip Morris pay the legal fees for Liggett?

Parrish: As I understand it, Mr. Lebow was...Liggett was in some financial difficulty and was having trouble paying its legal fees and defending the smoking and health litigation, and they asked us if we would assist them in that and we did.

Q. In order to keep a united front.

Parrish: We thought it was important that defendants coordinate and cooperate in the defense of the cases, and to that end we did agree to help Mr. Lebow with his legal expenses.

Q. Mr. Lebow told us that his attorney then met with your attorneys and other attorneys and one of them turned to him and said, "You just destroyed the most beautiful legal defense ever...the most successful legal defense in history."

Parrish: I wasn't there. I don't know if that comment was made or not.

Q. What was your reaction when you heard that President Clinton was going to give the FDA permission to promulgate their regulations?

Parrish: I wasn't surprised about that because we had heard that that was something that was under consideration. I was disappointed. One of our main concerns with FDA regulation in the past has been that FDA would have the authority to ban the sale of tobacco to adults in this country. We obviously would be concerned about that. We are concerned about that. The FDA's council, in an argument in the 4th Circuit, recently said that under the laws that exist today, if the FDA regulates tobacco products as drugs or devices, it could ban the sale of tobacco to adults. So we were concerned about that.

My company, Phillip Morris, had proposed a comprehensive federal legislative scheme to deal with the regulation of tobacco, to address the issue of youth smoking, and we were hopeful that that legislation could have passed as opposed to giving FDA jurisdiction under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. That didn't work out, so we had to think about another way to do it.

Q. Well, you were pretty tough in those days about Commissioner Kessler and the "Trojan Horse for Prohibition", "a bureaucrat out of control", "an authoritarian," do you still feel the same way?

Parrish: I think that today I would say that one of the lessons that I've learned (and I think one of the lessons that others on the other side have learned) is the best way to have a dialogue is in person, face-to-face, and not through the newspapers. And with 20-20 hindsight I would have loved to had more substantive discussions in those days with people in Congress, with people at the FDA, with people in the public health community; I think that's one of the things we've learned over the last year. It's that before you can really make progress you've got to sit down and have substantive talks one-on-one and not through the newspapers.

Q. Again, a clarification, the original settlement on June 20th accepted limited FDA jurisdiction with a lot of controls over that. Am I correct to understand that the industry now accepts the idea of unfettered FDA jurisdiction?

Parrish: No, we're still very much concerned about and opposed to giving FDA the authority to ban the sale of tobacco products to adults in this country. That is something that we are unalterably opposed to.

Q. Isn't that a contradiction? I mean, the FDA and many of the documents that have come out say that nicotine is an addictive drug...the FDA will have total authority. As it has over every other addictive drug.

Parrish: Well, again, I would say that if that means that FDA had the unbridled authority, the discretion to ban the sale of tobacco products to adults in this country, we are opposed to it. And I think that the overwhelming majority of Americans would be opposed to that, despite what they may think about smoking.

Q. What about regulating how much nicotine and what additives go into the nicotine in tobacco?

Parrish: Well, the agreement that we reached with the Attorneys General and others provides that the FDA would have authority over nicotine in the product. It does provide some measure of protection to the industry and to adults who want to continue to use the product.

Q. I guess the critics would say that the federal courts already acknowledged the North Carolina FDA jurisdiction, why give that up? Why water down what they can do and can't do?

Parrish: Well, I guess I would say to them and I have said this to them in those one-on-one discussions that we've had that if no one wants prohibition (and that's what they all say; everyone says "we don't want prohibition, it won't work"), and if that's the case then let's sit down and work out a reasonable regulatory regime for this product that doesn't run the risk of imposing prohibition on this country. It was a miserable failure with alcohol, and I think everybody agrees it would be a failure for tobacco products. So let's sit down and see if we can work that out.

Q. You know, some people that participated in negotiations told us that your side came in wanting...saying we want it to be like the beer industry. Is the goal of this to change the image of the tobacco industry from being, if you will, worse than a cocaine cartel, to quote Mike Moore?

Parrish: Well, I think that one of the things we'd like to see going forward is a recognition by all, including us, that tobacco products, cigarettes are a controversial product. I think that's always going to be the case; there are health risks associated with using the product. I think everybody knows that, everybody agrees with that. But if everybody agrees that tobacco use is going continue, at least for adults, let's figure out how we're going to regulate it, allow us to market it in responsible ways to adults under a regulatory regime that the American public is comfortable with. That, I think, is one of the goals that we have as a result of this negotiation process.

Q. If the bankruptcy really didn't worry you, and it was just this onslaught of general litigation, was it the image that people involved in the industry had to live with that forced you to settle?

Parrish: Sure, that was one of the concerns. As I say, it was a number of things. It was the financial threat from the litigation, it was the image that the companies had, it was the legislative and regulatory threats that we were facing, as well as the private and Attorney General litigation. So it was really all those things and I think it was a real sense on behalf of the industry because you have to realize that within the last few years there's really new leadership in the industry in this country, and as Jeff Bible from Phillip Morris said, when he became CEO he felt like he had a choice to make: am I going to rely....am I going to continue to fight about the past and defend the litigation, fight regulation and legislative initiatives, or am I going to look to the future and see if there's a way that I can fashion a compromise that will allow us to remain in business selling a legal product to adults while addressing some of the very legitimate concerns that some of our adversaries have.

Q.You say that you don't believe that nicotine is an addictive drug. Does Philip Morris now say that?

Parrish: Our company was asked by the Senate Judiciary Committee, I believe it was, last fall to state its position on that question, and we provided a rather lengthy response, but I think it's fair to summarize it as saying that we agree that under--at least certain definitions--nicotine is ad...or cigarette smoking is addictive. And we also said that we think it is more productive, rather than arguing about which is the appropriate definition and whether smoking falls under this definition or that definition, that we sit down and work toward a policy for regulating this product that's consistent with the goals of the public health community. And that's really Philip Morris's position.

Q. Understood, but the reason why I'm asking these questions is that we're trying to figure out what the position is now because in the past, for instance, Philip Morris and the industry has maintained that you don't manipulate nicotine in order to get people to smoke. Is that position changed?

Parrish: One of the problems (and this goes back to the definition issue), one of the problems we've always had is the term "manipulate" and exactly what that means; it's sort of a pejorative term. And what we think...

Q. Engineered. Change. Move around. Use whatever words you want to use, but do you change the impact of nicotine or its quantity in your products in order to make sure that people want to smoke or continue to smoke?

Parrish: We have a range of products on the market that go from 0.1 milligrams of nicotine, as measured by the government testing method, all the way up to in the...above 2.0 milligrams of nicotine. So clearly there is a wide range of products out there with a wide range of nicotine deliveries. So, again, I don't really see the purpose of continuing the debate over what does the word "manipulate" mean. Let's set about trying to fashion a comprehensive approach to the regulation of the product so that not only the FDA and the federal government, but the public health community and the public at large know what needs to be known about the product, and that's really what people have asked us for, and that's what we've tried in good faith to do.

Q. I understand now that the public position, now, is that you don't dispute the issue of nicotine addiction, basically, that's what you're saying: you don't dispute that there's health damage created by your product.

Parrish: Right.

Q. Okay, how do we deal with the past in order to trust you in the present?

Parrish: The agreement that we reached with the Attorneys General and the members of the public health community and the private class action lawyers provides for all industry information on the health risks of the product to be made available to the public at large: to the media, to plaintiff's lawyers, to members of the public. You put them in a document depository here in the Washington area and anybody who wants to look at it can go in and see it. In addition, the agreement provides for, on a continuing basis, additional documentation and information to be disposed to the Food and Drug Administration.

Q. Let me give you an example of what I mean by "history," and you should know this because you were a member of....what was the "Committee of Council?"

Parrish: The Committee of Council is made up of the general councils of the domestic tobacco companies in the United States who are members of the Tobacco Institute.

Q. You've attended those meetings?

Parrish: Sure, I used to be General Council of Philip Morris USA and I would attend those meetings.

Q. You've chaired some of the meetings.

Parrish: Sure.

Q. We interviewed G. Robert Blakey, a law professor in Notre Dame who worked in the Florida and Texas cases on the RICO aspects of those cases. He describes the Committee of Council to us as almost a conspiracy of Consigliari from a Mafia family, getting together to make policy, policy designed to deceive the American people.

Parrish: Could not disagree with that more. Don't know what else to say.

Q. Did you in these meetings attempt to steer research in certain directions that would help the industry and obfuscate the scientific debate?

Parrish: In the limited time that I attended those meetings, we got together to discuss common legal issues to the industry. We had updates on the litigation, we talked about bills that were being introduced in Congress and at the state level on things like excise taxes, and a variety of issues that the industry faced that were legal issues.

Q. We talked with Gary Huber, you know Gary Huber.

Parrish: I've met him, yes.

Q. He's gone to your Sunday school class, apparently. He remembers going to Kansas, he told us, going to your class. Do you remember that?

Parrish: I think he did go one time. That's right.

Q: Gary Huber says that the Committee of Council was described to him by your mentor Mr. Hardy as an "organization set up basically to obfuscate the scientific debate."

Parrish: Well, as far as I know, Dr. Huber has never been at any of the Committee of Council meetings. He certainly was never at any of the meetings that I attended. And I don't know what anybody has told Dr. Huber about the Committee of Council so I just, really, I don't know.

Q. He says he had discussions back in the 70s with Mr. Hardy who came to Harvard to look at his research and Mr. Hardy told him that they also arrange it so that one member of the industry is never there so they can get out of an anti-trust argument that they're conspiring together.

Parrish: Never heard that before so I don't....as I said, I wasn't part of those discussions and I've never heard that before.

Q.In reading about your Shook, Hardy experience and your background, it sounds to me...is there another law firm in the country that has pharmacologists, toxicologists, psychiatrists, doctors full-time on staff like that?

Parrish: Oh, I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised. Shook, Hardy for example, in addition to representing tobacco companies, has a number of pharmaceutical clients. It's a big law firm, it may be the biggest in the state of Missouri's; I think they may have over 300 lawyers. They are involved in a lot of complex litigation. In my experience it wouldn't be unusual to either have on staff or have as consultants pharmacologists or people with expertise on issues like that.

Q.We've been told stories about the "24th Floor," that there was a secret floor that had limited access, at Shook, Hardy, is that true?

Parrish It wasn't when I was there. Whether it is since I left, I don't know.

Q. By the way, Chairman Bible I believe testified the other day that he didn't know anything about the Committee of Counsel, hadn't heard of it before. Is that believable?

Parrish: Well, you have to realized that Jeff Bible became chairman of Philip Morris, I believe, in 1995 and was never the head of Philip Morris USA. He's not a lawyer...that doesn't sound unusual to me.

Q. That he wouldn't know his general counsels are meeting semi-regularly with everyone else in the industry?

Parrish: Well, it wouldn't be his general counsel. Mr. Bible is chairman of the holding company. He has a general counsel who is general counsel of the holding company, so it wouldn't be Mr. Bible's general counsel who would be attending those meetings.

Q. If you had to do it again, would you have issued the Frank Statement, you know, in the 1950s, the statement where the industry promises to do any research and reveal all of its results?

Parrish: I was probably about three years old when the Frank Statement came out.

Q. But you've got to live with the consequences.

Parrish: And I've got to tell you that even by reading books and newspaper articles and talking to people who were involved, there is no way that I can construct in my mind what the situation was like at the time, what was going on in the minds of the people who were involved in making that decision. There's just no way I could make a judgment on that, even with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight.

Q. Yeah, but you wind up at the Committee of Council, which is related to this CTR--the Council of Tobacco Research, right?

Parrish: No.

Q. The Committee Counsel has no relationship to the Council on Tobacco Research?

Parrish: In my....the times that I attended meetings with the Committee of Counsel, no.

Q. Did it have anything to do with scientific research projects?

Parrish: I'm sure there were discussions of scientific research.

Q. Special projects.

Parrish: One of the key things that is a part of the smoking and health litigation is the science that people use to claim that cigarette smoking makes people sick. So I'm sure there was discussion about that.

Q. Didn't the Committee of Counsel consider what were called "special projects," special scientific research projects that they wanted controlled by the attorney-client privilege?

Parrish: I don't remember discussions like that at those meetings that I attended.

Q. There are documents and letters, some written by Bill Shin, who is an associate of yours at Shook, Hardy.

Parrish: He was one of my partners, that's right.

Q. Which talk about that--special projects involving Gary Huber, for instance.

Parrish: And I'm just not familiar with those documents. I'm sorry.

Q. What was Dr. Huber's role, do you know?

Parrish: As I understand it, he was a consultant to either the industry or to Shook, Hardy, I'm not sure which, or maybe both. I'm just not sure.

Q. So if he says that he was an independent researcher who happened to get funds through various universities, some funds came from the tobacco, you would dispute that.

Parrish: No, I think Dr. Huber obviously was an independent researcher, and maybe I'm wrong, but it was my impression that at least some points he had consulted with the industry, but maybe I'm wrong about that. I just don't know. I didn't really, as I said...I think I met Dr. Huber but didn't really work with him, so I wasn't, I'm not still familiar with his relationship.

Q. You know, he says to us that he has discovered now, now that he has access to documents about himself that...he says that now that he has access to documents from inside the industry, that he was actually being funded in cases to find out things that the industry already knew were true. That he was duped. That this was all a sham.

Parrish: I don't know how to respond to that. I haven't spoken to Dr. Huber about that. I don't know what documents he's referring to, I haven't seen those so I just don't know how to respond. I'm sorry.

Q. Yeah, well, we may show you a document but...have you seen any documents that describe the Council on Tobacco Research as a front?

Parrish: I may have. I know that claim has been made in the litigation.

Q. No, I mean an industry document that describes the Council on Tobacco Research as a front, as a public relations front. It was set up by Hill and Knowlton.

Parrish: Well, I know that that claim has been made in the litigation and I believe that the plaintiffs lawyers and others have tried to use industry documents in support of that claim and in that issue the Council for Tobacco Research was one that we talked about for a long time in our negotiations. And as part of the June 20th agreement, we've agreed to disband the Council for Tobacco Research.

Q. I guess my question is, in order for us accept that the industry has changed and wants to change, will there be an admission that much of this...will there be an admission at the Council on Tobacco Research and other entities that were set up by the industry, were set up, basically, to obfuscate and hide documents and not have admit nicotine addiction or the health damage caused by the industry?

Parrish: What there will be is a process by which those documents will be made available, not just to lawyers but to the public. Anybody who wants to look at those documents and draw whatever conclusion they want.

Q. But a judge in Minnesota has already said that. He's going to release almost...apparently he's releasing 39,000, he may be on his way to releasing everything.

Parrish: Fine, then those documents will be public and people, if that's the ruling of the courts, then people will be able to look at them. But the agreement that we've negotiated goes even further than that--there will be a public depository for millions of pages of documents for people to look at if they want to. And my point is that, let's make that stuff available. Let's comply with the terms of the agreement, make that stuff available, but let's not let that slow us down as we try to come up with a nation-wide policy on tobacco in this country--how the product is going to be manufactured, how it's going to be regulated, let's do something about the issue of youth smoking, and let's make these documents available as the June 20th agreement requires.

Q. The industry opposes youth smoking.

Parrish: That's right.

Q. The industry did, on occasion, target youth, to sell tobacco products to youth, no?

Parrish: Well, I have seen documents over the last few weeks and months, and without knowing the author of those documents or in the context under which those documents that are very troubling in that regard.

Q. I think this is one of them...

Parrish: What you have is, I believe, is sincere commitment in the industry not to target to kids. And it's not just a commitment. The agreement that we reached with the Attorneys General and the private lawyers provides for strict penalties on industry, on any company that targets kids or violates that agreement.

Q. In reaction to these....allegations about youth smoking, in the past you have said "we don't care about youth smoking, we'll give up youth smoking, it's a very small part of our market anyway."

Parrish: I believe that to be the case.

Q. But isn't that where you lay the seeds for future smokers?

Parrish: Well, I've heard people say that and I guess...

Q. Well, every study that exists...

Parrish: There are certainly a lot of studies that suggest that, and I guess all I can really say to you is that we are willing to abide by the rules of the June 20th agreement, we are willing to do everything we can as a company and as an industry to address the issue of youth smoking. We firmly believe that we cannot do it all ourselves, there's a role here for the government, there's a role for parents, educators, friends...we've all got to work together, and if that means youth smoking is eliminated that will be fine with us. If that means our business suffers over the long-term then we're prepared to accept that.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/settlement/

McCain [R-AZ] has proposed legislation that would require tobacco companies to pay $516 billion dollars over 25 years, increase the price of cigarettes by $1.10 per pack by 2003 and give the Federal Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate nicotine as a drug. The legislation has been repeatedly endorsed by President Clinton.

Senator McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936. He was elected to the United States Senate in 1986 and re-elected in 1992. He was the National Security Advisor to the Dole/Kemp presidential campaign and placed Senator Bob Dole's name in nomination for president at the 1996 Republican National Convention.

McCain told FRONTLINE that the tobacco companies have not told the complete truth to the American people. He also believes they were trying to maximize their profits and there have been occasions when they targeted people that they shouldn't have. Nevertheless he believes that making a deal with the companies instead of bankrupting them is the best way to move forward.

Q. What's your sense of this industry?

McCain: My sense of the industry is that they're a group of business people who have been trying to maximize their profits. And there have been at least a number of occasions where they have targeted people that, ah, they shouldn't have. And that they have employed advertising tactics that have enticed young people into smoking. They denied that. I think that evidence has been revealed recently through documents that, ah, they have not told at least the complete truth to the American people. But could I add, I'm interested in the settlement now as opposed to punishing the, the people. The person who is in charge of the negotiations for the attorney's generals before our committee last week said, said, look, there are a lot of people that are still mad at them and want to get even. What we want is to get even by getting a settlement and preventing kids from smoking. And I think there was a lot to what he had to say.

Q. We're collecting opinions of this industry. They've been called a rogue industry, the masters of deception. What are we dealing with here?

McCain: I think we're dealing with an industry that, ah, tried to maximize it's profits. I think that they have deceived the American people in that they said they were not trying to target young people. And recent documents, ah, the revelations from recent documents have indicated that that's not the case. But I want to hasten to add that I, I sort of agree with Mike Moore, the attorney general from Mississippi, who said there's no point in staying mad at them. But the best way to get even is to prevent them from ever enticing young people to smoke again. And I think he's got a legitimate point.

Q. You say that, but the people out there listening probably know that it's been a long time since the congress ever did anything related to this industry. An industry which is credited with killing over four hundred thousand people a year.

McCain: I don't think there's any doubt that the influence of the tobacco industry here in congress was a compelling argument for campaign finance reform. And they did have significant influence. I would also argue that if it had not been for the agreement negotiated with the attorney's generals, then we probably would not be where we are in attempting, anyway, to reach some kind of over all settlement.

Q. In other words if the attorneys general hadn't been able to, in a sense, bring them to their knees, congress wouldn't be able to deal with them?

McCain: I would like to say otherwise. That congress would have dealt with this issue. But everything that I know from my sixteen years here indicates that if the attorneys generals had not forced this agreement, then we would not be at this stage as we are in congress. And that is seriously addressing the issue. Now, whether congress actually reaches a legislative result is, still remains to be seen. But I intend to work as hard as I can to achieve that result.

Q. Could you give me an example of how powerful they were before June twentieth?

McCain: Well, yeah, you know, I can't. Because, because I wasn't involved in their issues. And I, you know, I don't know better. But the fact that, I think the very fact that it took a action such as the AG's did and made, which was unprecedented...in order to motivate the congress, indicates that, ah, there was substantial influence on the part of the tobacco industry here in congress.

Q. People that we've been talking to who criticize the June twentieth deal, say why can't congress simply enact these reforms in the industry? Why give them anything since they're guilty of deception? Guilty of making, helping our children smoke?

McCain: Let me describe the conundrum here. We are not willing to make tobacco an illegal substance. If we were willing to do that as a nation, and all these people who criticize the agreement don't want to make it an illegal substance...if we were able to make it illegal, we wouldn't have a problem. We could restrict everything that they do. But since we're not willing to take the step, as a nation, to make it illegal then we have a problem with their first amendment rights. Which are to advertise their product. So, what we have to do, or try to do, is achieve some agreement with them that they would voluntarily restrict their advertising and engage in campaigns to stop children from smoking. In exchange for some benefit that they might receive. Now, I'm not sure exactly what that benefit should be. We're in the process of negotiating that, negotiating that out. But I can tell you this. We have had a testimony from constitutional lawyer after constitutional lawyer that says, hey, you can only go so far in restricting these people's rights to advertising their products. Because they're not manufacturing an illegal substance. So that, really, is the problem we're facing. And to say, give them no benefits, give them no protection, give them nothing...then risks going to court, them winning, and continuing to advertise their product which then entices children to smoke. So what we're trying to do is weave our way through this very difficult maze so we can achieve our goal. That is to stop kids from smoking. And do what it takes to get there. And if we don't keep our eye on that goal then we can easily be side tracked by a whole bunch of emotional aspects of this issue.

Q. And the idea of not having children smoke is, in a sense, to cut off their supply of future customers?

McCain: Or, to raise the price to the point where it's a disincentive to engage in programs, ah, ah, that, ah, would educate children not to smoke. Which would then provide penalties for people who sell cigarettes to minors. There's a whole laundry list of ways you can attack this issue. And we worked, let me point out...I've been working very closely with Dr. Koop, with Dr. Kessler, with these organizations that advocate, ah, tobacco free environment for kids...and with the attorney's generals. We've got to work with everybody to come up with what's a salable solution. Because look, whether I happen to like it or not, these people are the referees. And if we come up with a proposal that they attack, maybe not all of them but the majority of them attack...we're not going to get any legislative result here. We're not, we're just not going to get it. These people are watching very closely. They represent the interest that we have to satisfy.

Q. When the June twentieth deal was announced, stock prices for the tobacco industry shot up. Somehow there's this irony. They can pay three hundred and sixty-eight billion dollars and then they're worth more?

McCain: Well, let me just say, I don't care where the stock market goes. But it went up because it gave the, the tobacco companies some degree of certainty I'm told. Ah, more importantly than that, can we go to the American people and look them in the eye and say, look, I've done everything that I can to keep your kid from starting smoking. Three thousand kids a day start smoking. That's our object. The stock market goes up. The stock market goes down. Frankly, I, I'm not happy that they would make more profits. But that's not my primary goal.

Q. What they want is some kind of partial immunity. Something which no other industry has ever gotten from congress. This industry which is known as the great deceiver, sound immoral. Sound like the bargain with the devil.

McCain: Umm-hmm. If there is a way to stop kids from smoking without providing them with anything, I'm all for it. But I have to, to deal, to play with the hand that I'm dealt. The attorney's generals of America, forty of them I believe, tell me that the only way that they can make sure that we're doing everything we can to prevent kids from smoking is by granting them some kind of, of protection. Now I have to listen to these people. They're the top lawyers in America. I have to listen to them. Do I have to go along with it? Not necessarily. But at least I have to listen to their views. And that of others. But I'm not for giving any benefit to the tobacco companies. But my question to those who say, you shouldn't give them any benefit what so ever out of this, is, then why don't you support making tobacco illegal? Well the answer is obvious. Because the enormous dislocation it would cause to the millions, forty million Americans, who do still smoke. That's the answer. So they're not willing to do that. But at the same time they want the best of all worlds and that is not to make any kind of a, of a negotiated settlement with the tobacco companies. Well, it's very hard to have it both ways.

Q. And the fears that we hear from critics is that every time the industry gets into congress, as they did thirty years ago, they will put loopholes in. They will figure out a way to out smart the American people again.

McCain: Well, the thing that's different this time, in my view, is that these advocacy groups, the American Lung Association, the National Cancer Society, all of these other organizations...stop kids, kids free smoke, etc. They're there at the table. They're in constant consultation with us. They've testified at the hearings. They will be, to some degree anyway, the arbiters or the, the referees as to whether this is good for America or not. And they now, and do, and will play, a key role in whatever settlement we've, we reach.

Q. Is the political problem here, who is going to offer up a concession to the industry first? The White House or the Senate or the House?

McCain: Let me just say, the White House has been AWOL for a long time on this issue. When the settlement was announced, they said they would have legislative language within thirty days. Ninety days went by. They came up with five principles. They still refuse to give us exact language. But, and I, and I accept that. I don't like it. But I accept it.

We are now working closely with the White House, with Erskine Bowles, with Bruce Reed, and we are working closely. We will move to get, forward, together with them. Hopefully. Because very frankly, the political reality is, if we disagree we're not going to get an agreement. And that's, ah, something that we, that I recognize.

Q. Your colleagues, your fellow Republicans, the one's who haven't turned down tobacco money, what do they tell you?

McCain: All of my colleagues want to develop a program that will stop kids from smoking. Whether they took tobacco money or not. And many of them have very different ideas. Senator Chafee and Senator Harkin have different idea. Senator Conrad has a different idea. Senator Jefferts has a different idea. That's fine. We need all of this input. And we need to build consensus. We need Republican, Democrat, and administration all working together if we're going to reach a resolution. And I have pledged to do that.

Q. Some people believe that whatever the legislation is, you'll wind up with the government of the United States and the states making a lot of money. Money they've already spent in some cases in their budget allocations. The lawyers will make a lot of money. The tobacco industry will stay in business. It'll save them for the future. And the forty million, mostly working and poor, people who are addicted smokers will support all this. And nothing will change.

McCain: Well, I think that the other options are, do nothing and let the status quo prevail. And then there'd just be a long many years of lawsuits, which the tobacco companies have a pretty good record of winning a lot of those. Or, doing something that is truly meaningful and important. But the important judgment will be made on one basis and one basis alone. Did the congress act to stop these three thousand kids from starting smoking every day? Did they or did they not? But this lawyers fee thing, I think it's obscene for somebody to make two billion dollars for anything. I don't care what it is. Ah, if they invented a cure for cancer I'm not sure they deserve two billion dollars. That's something that's going to be fought out for a long time. As far as the money's concerned, are we...yes, you're right. Everybody's has their hand out. Everybody's got their, ah, they want, ah, a piece of this action. But it seems to me that that division of money is a fight that should not detract us from our, ah, distract us from our major goal. And that's the problem of children smoking.

Q. And then finally, there's the federal grand jury. Our understanding is that every Wednesday and Friday here, the Justice Department is bringing witnesses who no one notices because they're there for Monica Lewinsky...but, every Wednesday and Friday a federal grand jury hears criminal witnesses in the case that the Department of Justice is developing related to the tobacco industry. Could that derail this legislation?

McCain: If the Justice Department determines that criminal activity has been engaged in by the tobacco companies, they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But unless that case can bring about a cessation of children smoking, then we as a nation and a congress must move forward to try to address this terrible problem that afflicts America today. And that is, three thousand children beginning to smoke every single day.

Q. You know, it comes back all the time in the discussions that we have with people is, here is this industry that is hugely profitable. That apparently, knew all these health risks existed, knew that their product was addictive despite what they said to congress, and what they want is to get off. They want to get of their in a sense, moral judgment and pay the piper. They want you to free them.

McCain: Well, ah, I would just make two points. Ah, one, is our goal, in my view, is not so much to punish, ah, the tobacco companies which I would enjoy doing. But that's a secondary issue compared to trying to kid, keep kids from smoking. Second of all, ah, Mr. Mike Moore who was the prime negotiator in this tobacco settlement, testified before our committee. He said, there are people who want to get mad. He said, what we need to do is get even. And the way we get even is to keep them from enticing kids into smoking. I think there's a lot of validity to his statement.

Q. But, Dr. Kessler, Dr. Koop, people we speak with say, how can you trust this industry? They will find a way to get new customers. If not here, overseas. They just want to survive. They know they're on the brink. And now they want congress to bail them out.

McCain: I've had several meetings a short a time ago as last week with Dr. Koop and Dr. Kessler. Dr. Koop and Dr. Kessler, both, have said senator try to, to get this thing, this issue, taken care of. We support you in your efforts. We may not support you at the end of the day with what the congress comes up with. But we want you to try and settle this issue. And that's what I'm trying to do. And that's what I think, ah, a lot of my colleagues are trying to do.

Q. Why you? I mean we thought Tom Bliley or someone or Waxman, or someone who had been involved in this issue for years, on one side or on the other, would have come into breech. And all of a sudden it's you.

McCain: Well I think that the major reason it's going to be the Commerce Committee...and I want to emphasize it's bipartisan. Senator Hollings, Senator Brow, Senator Wyden, and Senator Ford and many others, as well as Dr. Frist and others, are working together...is because the majority of the oversight, the majority of the responsibility for this issue falls under the Commerce Committee. And so, that's...we decided, ah, under, ah, Senator Nicols leadership that it was too unwieldy to go through every committee. So they decided to move it through mine. It happens I think, more because I'm chairman of the committee than, ah, any particular talent or, or oratorical skills that I may possess.

Q. Maybe it's your willing to take it on.

McCain: Ah, well, as you know I have been known to take on issues that, ah, are not exactly non-controversial. So, it's a great challenge. And I'm not convinced that we can succeed. But I want to be able to say that we made every effort.

Q. You don't have any predictions as to whether there'll be legislation this spring?

McCain: No. Except that to say, I think there's an awareness here in congress, that the American people will not look favorably on us if we go home the beginning of next October, in time for the elections, not having done something about children smoking.

Q. You were criticizing the White House and the lack of leadership. At the same time, people have pointed out to us that, that Bill Clinton is the first president to, in a sense, reject the tobacco industry and go against them. Could this be happening unless he was in the White House?

McCain: I don't know. I would like to hope that any president, at this stage in the game, would recognize that after what the AG's did, you have to move forward. He was in office for nearly six years before their was any movement. But look, I was unhappy that the White House did not move, move forward with legislative language as they said that they would do. But look, I can't, I can't look back in anger. I can't hold a grudge. The point is that now they are committed to working with all of us in a bipartisan basis. And I accept them at their word. And I'm working with them now. And I work with them until we either succeed or fail.

Q. Is this on a partisan basis, is the past alliance between the republican party and the tobacco industry, ah, a problem?

McCain: Well, I would argue that that alliance also was amongst, ah, democrats from southern states. I would say that alliance was much more regional than it was, ah, party affiliated. As, ah, republicans picked up seats in the south obviously that switched. But twenty years ago the tobacco supporters were all democrats because of the make up of congress. But no I don't, I don't think so. I think that, ah, ah...and I'm pleased with what Congressman Bliley is doing. And I think that Senator Ford is very, has been very helpful. So, ah, I think we can, ah, and will, ah, put that aside. But, a seminal moment, which when the fifty billion dollar tax break that was put in last year was repealed in overwhelming numbers, that was very significant of the diminishing of the influence of the tobacco industry in congress.

Q. Because?

McCain: Because it was repealed. And it was repealed in a New York minute.

Q. A New York Minute? When you heard about that, what was your reaction? When you heard, well there was deal June twentieth. And then all of a sudden there's this stealth amendment.

McCain: I was surprised. I was just surprised that it was in there. And I wasn't surprised when there was a, a strong effort mounted, ah, to repeal it. And it was repealed and it was repealed rapidly.

Q. Well you voted for it initially, right? I mean, it wasn't...it was in the bill or whatever.

McCain: No. It was in the budget. And as you know, ah, none of us knew that it was in there. Except for a few people until after the bill was passed. It was an omnibus bill.

Q. How do you slip in a fifty billion dollar tax break with no one noticing?

McCain: The same way you slip in a pork barrel project for you state, ah, or district. Ah, you go in conference and it's in a huge bill. And by the time people dig it out, ah, the bill has been passed. I mean, it's a, it's a terrible way to do business. And it's one of the reasons why the American people are often cynical about the way we do business here.

Q. No one noticed?

McCain: Well, I'm sure that, that a few people did. But the overwhelming majority of us didn't know about it until after it was passed.

Q. No one. And no one took credit for it?

McCain: I understand that no one has taken credit for that. Which is a bit unusual around here.

Q. Your colleagues aren't shy.

McCain: Well, around here, ah, I'm reminded of Jack Kennedy's words after the Bay of Pigs where he said, victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is one poor lonely orphan.

Q. What does congress have to say to the American people since it's taken so long for congress to do anything about this?

McCain: Well I don't know exactly what they say. Ah, obviously we've gone through a change in American society. Ah, when I was a young pilot in the navy many years ago, all of us smoked. Ah, cigarettes were in the C rashionings that soldiers had. Cigarettes and smoking was a way of life in America. I'm fascinated by the fact that it, ah, almost every movie I see they're still smoking. Which does have an impact on young people, by the way. And criticism of Hollywood has been strangely absence, absent throughout this debate. But I think there's been a change in American society. There's an emphasis on wellness, on health. And the, a greater awareness of the evils of smoking. And finally it's culminated in this effort that, ah, I hope we will successfully, ah, conclude. And, ah, it has to do obviously with trying to keep kids from starting to smoke.

Q. Why is it that the federal government, if congress didn't do anything, why is it that the federal government did so little for so long? There was no Justice Department lawsuit against the industry for deceptive advertising or anything other practices.

McCain: I think the FDA did make some efforts in resent years, ah, concerning tobacco and the use of it. And they issued some pretty, very, effective rulings. But I think the reason why any administrations didn't act was the same reason congress didn't act. For most of this, ah, countries history smoking was a part of our life. And it's only been, I would say, perhaps in the last twenty years that there has been a real effort made to educate people about the evils of smoking. There's still, look, there's still spittoons in the floor of the senate. That show you how quickly we move forward.

Q. There are a lot of countries where there are severe restrictions on tobacco advertising. Doesn't seem to make any difference if you smoke it.

McCain: That's an interesting issue because Dr. Koop has said that we don't know exactly how you go about stopping kids from smoking. One aspect of it that he's confident of is you have to get them at a very, very early age. And, there's no doubt that it's a complex issue. But I'm convinced if we devote the money to research and to study and to finding out what it is that can prevent kids from smoking, that we can succeed. But yes, there's also evidence that raising the price of a pack of cigarettes has done two things. One, not decrease smoking so much. And also generated a black market. So these are all issues that we have to be very careful when we approach them.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/settlement/

Ron Motley is a nationally famous plaintiff's attorney. His career was launched after he successfully sued the asbestos industry and forced them into bankruptcy. He was contacted by Richard Scruggs when the tobacco litigation started and became an integral part of the trial team. His Charleston, South Carolina law firm has gathered the legal battle tools necessary to defeat the tobacco industry, including hundreds of thousands of documents, whistleblowers, and damaging depositions. If the national settlement does not succeed, Ron Motley will be trying the state Medicaid cases around the country.

Q. Where did you grow up?

Motley: In North Charleston, South Carolina. My dad owned an AMOCO gas station and I grew up at an AMOCO gas station, being a Washington Redskins fan, pumping gas, washing windows, changing tires and I kept the books from age six.

Q. And we read that your mother smoked?

Motley: She did.

Q. Your father too?

Motley: No. Well, I don't remember my father ever smoking anything other than an occasional pipe, which is not all that bad for you. But my mother smoked two to three packs of Winstons a day.

Q. Did she die from it?

Motley: She died of emphysema. Essentially emphysema causes the victim to suffocate slowly over time. It is a suffocating disease.

Q. And you watched that?

Motley: I did.

Q. And is it true her addiction--that you were calling it an addiction?

Motley: Well, I really hadn't focused back then on what was addictive and what wasn't. If she wasn't addicted to cigarettes, then there is no such thing as addiction.

She actually would talk one of her sisters into sneaking her a cigarette. She would take the oxygen away from her and smoke a cigarette which was, you know, very dangerous because it could have exploded. It is deeply ingrained in my, in my mind. Well it is... To watch someone that you love very much die a slow miserable death, suffocating day by day, is a very unpleasant thing. And to know exactly what caused it.

And then when you hear the denials of the cigarette companies that they had never caused the illness of death of a single American citizen, having sat there and watched my mother suffocating. Having the doctors tell me and describe for me exactly what caused it. How it caused it and what it was doing to her.

It makes you very angry. At least it made me very angry. And when I get angry, I try to get even, if it is legitimate to do so.

Q. All of this tobacco litigation, these losses, the trials, these various trials you had to get up for or prepare for, they are different then for you? It is not like any other case?

Motley: That is correct. I have handled cases in the past, Dalkon Shield, breast implants, explosions, automobile, train collisions and things like that. So where I have a personal anecdotal experience, as I do here.

Q. So this is not just for money, this is for revenge?

Motley: Well, I think you might say that the Mississippi case was the first and that was for revenge. And then I got into it and it is really for public health. It is, well, what we have been able to accomplish is, I am very proud of from a public health perspective.

But on a personal note, when I walked out of the Texas conference room on Friday, General Morales, the Attorney General of Texas said, "Your mother is smiling down on you now." And that was very touching, I thought, he knew that I had that personal anecdotal experience.

Q. There are a lot of people in this with personal connections.

Motley: It is very hard not to, 450,000 Americans die every year from cigarette caused diseases. There are very few people in America that haven't been touched by cigarette disease.

Q. So in a way, the asbestos cases, those were like a warm up for you to this?

Motley: Well it is, if you call having Mohammad Ali as a sparring partner. I guess you could call it a warm up.

I had some personal experience with asbestos, too. At my dad's service station was the closest service station to the Charleston Naval Base. And a lot of people, a lot of my dad's friends died of asbestos cancer. I didn't know it at the time, of course, and reflecting back and I ended up represent--actually representing some of my father's best friends, whom I had met at the gas station.

Q. So that was in a sense a prelude to all this tobacco stuff?

Motley: Yes. It was...

Q. How did you meet Dick Scruggs?

Motley: I met Dickie in, oh I'd say sixteen years or so ago. He was a recent arrival to the asbestos litigation and we had a somewhat fractious, contentious meeting in Dallas, Texas about something that was going on. And Dickie was rather outspoken in his views and his position was different from mine. I don't even remember what the issue was then.

But later, I had done some work for some of the other lawyers in Mississippi and he had a big case coming up and he came to Charleston. And we talked and he hired us and we sat side by side and tried a bunch of cases together. In Mississippi, very successfully. And he is a very talented lawyer and a dear friend.

Q. Is he different than other lawyers?

Motley: I have found very few cookie cut lawyers. Most of them are pretty much individualistic in characters. Dickie has a big heart and he is passionate about what he does and he is a very good lawyer and very able lawyer and I have enjoyed working with him.

Q. What was your reaction... He called you up about the Medicaid suit, right?

Motley: We started talking and we decided to join the cigarette companies and lung cancer cases where people were exposed to asbestos. And in the course of the trial, Dickie went off and tried a cigarette case with Don Barrett.

When he came back he told me that Mike Lewis had come to him with this idea. So rather than calling me, we actually sat down in a courtroom with a jury sitting there, side by side and discussed the roots of what became the Medicaid suit. Right in the middle of both of us trying an asbestos case. He took a, what do you call it? A sabbatical, I guess, for a couple of weeks and came back and he was really ready to go then against the cigarette companies. Because as you know, they lost.

Q. He lost that case and he is sitting in the courtroom. He turns to you and what does he start saying?

Motley: Well, before he went we had talked about naming the cigarette companies and the asbestos companies in the same case. Then when he came back he said he had a better idea than that and he described for me that he and Mike Lewis had talked. And then he and Mike Lewis and Mike Moore had talked.

And he assigned his best scholar in his firm and I did so, likewise, and they started working with Mike Lewis. And it took a long time to hone and fine tune the theories. We probably went through 25 or more different iterations or versions of what became the Mississippi Medicaid suit.

Q. But you were, you were excited about this, right?

Motley: Well, at first it was very clever, ingenious, we caught them off guard. I always like to do that. It was, it was challenging. It was unprecedented. And it was a good way to launch a war.

Q. So does this represent sort of the Mount Everest for trial lawyers?

Motley: Well, we saw the top of the mountain, but... And we decided we were going to climb the mountain but we hadn't reached the top 'til in the last six months. We started out at the bottom and we made it to the top and now we are on our way back down the other side. And it is exhilarating.

Q. Did you test this theory at all, with mock juries or polls or how did you...

Motley: Yes. We actually had engaged Dick Morris who, at the time was not celebrated as the President's personal pollster. He was a well known political consultant who did polling. And Dickie knew of him. And Mike knew of him, Moore. And we actually engaged him to do polling and on certain issues to refine exactly how we were going to approach this.

We actually hired him originally to look at the situation of suing cigarette companies and asbestos companies together. And then we segued over, went into consulting with him on these Medicaid suits.

Q. What was the scene like in the courtroom during the Wigand deposition?

Motley: There was... bedlam best describes what was going on inside. There was a sense of anticipation, eagerness on the part of those representing the state. A feeling of foreboding. It was so heavy in the room you could actually see the gnashing of teeth and the grinding of palms against one another by the defense lawyers. They were very worried about it. For good reason.

And, of course, right towards the end there was a moment were Dr. Wigand had second thoughts and I had gotten the word that he might not be coming. So we were all--heavy anticipation. And when he walked in the door amid all that hullabaloo in the media, it was a sense of relief on my part. And, I think, on his part too. But he was very nervous when he first took the witness stand.

Q. What were the tobacco lawyers doing?

Motley: Objecting. Raising hell. Trying to disrupt. At one point in time I actually told them why didn't they just go on ahead outside and I'd finish the deposition by myself with Dr. Wigand.

Q. Had you ever seen anything like this before?

Motley: Never. Never. I had never seen anything like this in a legal proceeding before. Never. Well, it was a deposition, it wasn't a court. It wasn't like a jury was walking in. It wasn't something like the OJ jury was about to return a verdict.

It was a... I had not experienced that much media attention to what is essentially a pretrial proceeding. But there must have been 50 or 75 media out there.

There was a lot of jostling for position. A lot of shouting by the media. Inside, the lawyers were... There was an intensity level. A lot of barking back and forth. A lot of paper shuffling. A lot of pacing. As I said, a lot of gnashing of teeth and things like that on their side.

Well, once the deposition started... We didn't really get started for 20 minutes. There were 20 minutes of prefatory statements made by the lawyers. There must have been 50 lawyers in that room. Forty-five of whom represented the tobacco industry. And then there were 4 or 5 of us representing the State of Mississippi.

So we were outnumbered, but they were outmanned.

At one point they claimed that the use of a chemical that is in the rat poison family was a trade secret. And Dr. Wigand and I had a moment of levity there when I said, you know, they are trying to keep the fact that they use a cousin of rat poison a trade secret. So that was kind of humorous.

Q. That is the cardomin, the flavoring?

Motley: Yes. It is in the same family as rat poison and coumarin was banned as a food additive worldwide thirty years before. The cigarette companies continued to use it in cigarette smoke. It has since been taken out of virtually every product.

Q. And these guys were claiming it was a trade secret?

Motley: Yes, they wanted to keep it secret. They didn't want the doctor to testify that they put a cousin of rat poison in cigarette smoke.

Q. Well you can understand that.

Motley: No, I can't. I would think once it was brought to their attention, they would have taken it out. But they didn't. So in this legal proceeding they wanted to keep it secret. Of course, Dr. Wigand answered my question.

Q. And essentially why was Dr. Wigand so important?

Motley: He was and remains the highest level industry executive to break ranks and testify, prior to Bennett LeBow, who was the Chief Executive Officer of the Liggett, Liggett Meyers Cigarette Company. But Mr. LeBow didn't have the hands-on knowledge that Dr. Wigand had.

What I mean by that is Dr. Wigand was the Chief Scientist. The Head of Research and Development for Brown and Williamson, so he had a lot of information of a technical and public health nature that was very important to us. He was involved in day-to-day decision making and he knew where all the skeletons were buried.

Using additives. Using ammonia to spike the nicotine level. We have since seen documents that... Every thing Dr. Wigand testified about, has come to pass from the standpoint of being established without question by documents that we have obtained since then.

The stories he told that the industry so vigorously protested and claimed he was not telling the truth about, we got documents to prove every one of those stories right. Every one of them.

Q. So obviously the smear campaign to destroy him was designed to destroy him on a personal level because they couldn't do it on a scientific level.

Motley: That's correct. The cigarette companies are masters at picking nits. If there is a nit-picking society somewhere, they have got to be original members of it. And they picked a few nits with a few things that he may recall. But substantively, on the merits, he is right on the money. So they were left with personal ad hominem attacks on him.

And you know, it was a rough time. We have become friends and it was a very rough time for him. It is still a rough time for him on a personal level because a lot of things in his life unraveled. But he stood up and he stood tall and he is still there.

Q. Give me an example of some of the other highlights that have gone on. I mean you have taken depositions of everybody from the CEOs to scientists.

Motley: I guess one of the most remarkable things was Robert Preston Tish, Lawrence Tisch's brother and the former Postmaster General of the United States who was a leading executive with Lorillard. And who sat on some of the industry-wide councils. Who, also, as a private citizen was very proud of the role his family had played in the Holocaust Memorial.

Yet he failed to remember and said that it wasn't a very remarkable incident when the American Cancer Society accused the American cigarette companies of creating the second Holocaust. And for this man, who is so proud of, and should be, of his community service to have completely overlooked 25 years earlier being accused of participating in the American version of the Holocaust because of the 400,000 deaths a year from cigarette smoking, was rather remarkable to me. That was shocking.

Another incident was with Dr. Frank Colby. He as a senior scientist for R. J. Reynolds for 35 years and then was assigned to their law firms. When I asked Dr. Colby, who had insisted--and this was in 1997--that no American had ever died from smoking cigarettes. That was his position. I asked him if he had read the deposition of Jeffrey Bible that I had taken, who was the Chief Executive Officer of Phillip Morris, the big parent company. Who said 100,000 possibly die every year.

And he looked me straight in the eye and he said, "Mr. Motley, I don't believe in that Bible or the Bible." And I said, "Are you an atheist." And he said, "Yes." It strikes me as rather remarkable that a company that has a scientist who is supposed to be in charge of scientific morality is an atheist.

Q. Just that he is an atheist?

Motley: Well he is an atheist and he is supposed to be in charge of morality and he says nobody has ever died. And he says they would continue selling cigarettes even if it was proven it caused cancer. I think that is fairly telling. To me, at least it is. For my humble Southern Baptist origin.

Q. That even if they agreed with you that they--it kills people they would keep selling them.

Motley: Oh, yes.

Q. How could he say that?

Motley: Well, he did. So did the Chief Executive Officer of Lorilard. He testified that if it were proved to him that cigarettes killed 150,000 Americans year in and year out from lung cancer. If it were proved to him, and he is a scientist as well as a Chief Executive Officer, Ph.D. scientist that he would continue to sell those products. Even if he knew his products killed 150,000 a year, from lung cancer.

It was chilling, I think. Chilling.

Q. This is A. W. Spears.

Motley: Alex Spears, yes. He is the same company that put asbestos in the cigarette filters.

Q. Let me take you back to Frank Colby. Didn't he have some interesting things to say about second hand smoke?

Motley: He was asked about secondhand smoke, environmental tobacco smoke. And he said he didn't think that people should not be allowed to smoke in public places.

And he said, "Why, people don't like to be around smokers, well they can walk out of the room." And the interviewer said, "Well, what about children. And he said, well children can walk." And he said, "But what about a woman holding a baby?" And he looked his eye right in the camera and he said, "Babies can crawl out the room, can't they?"

And that shows the attitude of the cigarette companies.

Q. Now these tapes and these depositions, these are things that you would be presenting in trial?

Motley: Oh, yes. We embarked upon several avenues of what we call pretrial discovery or finding out what the other side has said or done. One of them was to try to harvest as many old videotapes of television interviews of the cigarette company executives. Their testimony in front of Congress, in front of other agencies and the records of all those 800 law suits that you mentioned earlier.

We went back and we--actually [were] able to go back in one instance, for example, and show that Brown and Williamson had committed perjury in 1969 in an Alabama Federal Court case for a smoker who died of lung cancer.

Now, of course, they denied that they committed perjury. But I think I had a pretty good case. We were going to be able to use that evidence in the RICO case. So we thought it was pretty strong evidence.

Q. You were trying to prove that they are a racketeering enterprise, not just straight up fraud?

Motley: Right. Racketeers. And you know they liken themselves in some of the documents to the Mafia.

Q. What do you mean?

Motley: Well, in some of the documents they would boast about, I believe it was a Wall Street Journal article or it may have been New York Times, that likened the cigarette companies to the Mafia and the Tobacco Institute spokesman was very proud of that. And he quoted that analogy to the Mafia three or four times in different meetings, over time.

Q. To what end? What was his reason?

Motley: Well I suppose he was proud of the fact that they could get away with as much as they could get away with.

Q. And no one ever breaks ranks?

Motley: That's right. Before Ben LeBow and Jeff Wigand, that was true.

Q. Your relationship overall with Dick Scruggs, in asbestos cases initially and then even in these cases. It has been described as sort of... He is Mr. Outside. Outside the courtroom negotiating. And you are inside beating up your opponents. How does that work?

Motley: Well Dickie and my partner, Joe Rice are both very good negotiators from different aspects of the situation. Dickie is more of a politician negotiator, conciliator and Joe is a detail man. Both Dickie and Joe and I have the same court experience. That is, I do the courtroom work and they do the negotiating and conciliation and all that.

So, yes, mainly, my job is to try the law suit. Prepare it for trial. And their job is to try to find a way, a solution to the litigation problems. Although I'll say this, in the cigarette cases Dickie was heavily involved in discovery for a while until the negotiations heated up. And in the asbestos cases, Joe and I have tried many cases together in front of juries but in the last two or three years, it has become they are outside the courtroom and I am inside the courtroom.

Q. Well, you are in a sense the War Department and they are the State Department.

Motley: They are Eisenhower and I am Patton.

Q. I don't see two guns.

Motley: I checked them at the desk when I came in. You didn't see that sign?

Q. They are Eisenhower and you are Patton. And are you comfortable with that?

Motley: Oh yes. I am not a negotiator and they are very good at it. They are the best I've seen. And I am more of a warrior.

Q. Did you want to hurt the tobacco industry?

Motley: I suppose when we started this, that was a prime consideration. I have actually grown to admire, for example, Steven Goldstone, who is the CEO of RJR Nabisco who, when I questioned him told me that from that day forward... I don't know that they have done this and I will check. That in foreign countries they didn't require warning labels and didn't require telling pregnant women not to smoke, that his company would voluntarily do that. Unlike the other companies who only warn where the law requires it. I thought that was a forthright and public health spirited thing for him to say and do.

Q. But Shook, Hardy & Bacon?

Motley: I have no love lost for any of those guys. They were at the epicenter of the wrongdoing and actually were stage directors of it as well.

Shook, Hardy & Bacon. Is a law firm in Kansas City, started representing cigarette companies in the fifties. Became the ringmasters of the three ring cover-up circus and still representing the industry. Indeed I go up against a Shook, Hardy & Bacon partner on February 9th in Indiana. A lung cancer case in a missionary who never smoked.

Q. So what are a bunch of guys from Mississippi and South Carolina doing taking on the tobacco industry with all their legal talent?

Motley: Well, we took on that kind of legal talent with asbestos. Maybe not as many. Maybe not as well-heeled, but we are used to... When you take on these big corporations, we are used to engaging in combat with the biggest law firms.

But the cigarette companies had more lawyers, more money and they threw more lawyers with more money at you than any industry I have ever been involved with.

Q. Some people say, it is all very nice you have been getting these settlements, but really how strong is your case? If you got to court, would you win? Have you won?

Motley: Well, no, we haven't tried any Medicaid cases and I have only tried one cigarette case, we lost that one. It was for a smoker.

I thought we were definitely going to win Mississippi. There wasn't any question in my mind we were going to win in Florida. There was some question in my mind about Texas but only because of where we were. We were in Texarkana, which has a strong anti-government history. A strong individual freedom, individual choice tradition.

And although I think we would have won there, it would have been more difficult, which was why when the Judge agreed with our plan and let us try the racketeering, the RICO claim first, that made it more likely that we could win than previously thought.

And you as me if we have a strong case? I have never seen a stronger case of corporate immorality. Aided and abetted by lawyers' unethical conduct and criminal conduct in any civil case I have ever been involved in.

Q. But you say that, I am sure you say that you are confident about almost any case you go to trial with.

Motley: Oh, I have been in court with some dogs before. An individual smoker case, suing the cigarette companies for damages is very, very difficult. Very difficult.

The reason I say we were going to win is because we did polling. I am not talking about the early polling that we discussed an hour or so ago. I am talking about polling on the eve of trial. We did focus groups. We did mock trials. We did sampling. We did all kinds of things to test our theories, to see how solid they were to the average citizen.

And as time went on, as there was more and more publicity about the wrongdoing of the cigarette companies, the audience was more receptive. It got to the point in Florida, for example, that we were running 80% in our favor.

In Massachusetts, we represent the State of Massachusetts. We, in Cambridge, I think it is Middlesex County, we are running 85% in favor or our lawsuit. So there has been a sea change, if you will, in the public's attitude.

Q. But in Mississippi, some people say you had a situation home cooked. You didn't have a jury. You had a former district attorney, one of the most popular people in town, Dick Scruggs. A local judge, all from Old Miss and rulings in your favor.

Motley: Well, we had rulings in our favor but most of the defense lawyers were also from Ole Miss, so... And as far as the home cooking was concerned, I didn't get the impression that the defendants were particularly convinced that Judge Meyers was in some fashion in our pocket.

As far as not having a jury, that is the law of Mississippi. If you bring a case for what we call equity, then you don't get a jury trial. You get a judge trial.

Q. So you thought you might have some difficulty with Judge Meyers?

Motley: No, I didn't... I thought that perhaps some of our counts in our complaint he may have had some problems with. But the evidence was so powerful that they had done wrong. And that is what equity is about, to correct wrongdoing, that I thought we had an overwhelmingly good chance of success.

Q. So in a way, and this was true in most of the cases you have seen so far and the cases that you'd see in the future, if they were to go to trial.

Motley: The state cases, I don't know exactly what kind of demographics we have, for example, in Montana. I do know we polled in Oklahoma and Kansas and Massachusetts and Michigan and other places, we have done polls. And we think that the public in those areas are very sensitive to issues of child pandering, by the cigarette industry. And we think that is their Achilles' heel.

And I think from the recent publicity and just tumult that has occurred over RJ Reynolds having targeted kids that you see that they are very sensitive to that charge. They are very guilty of that charge and they are going to be punished for that, one way or the other?

Q. Punished for it?

Motley: Yes.

Q. Well every time you are on the verge of punishing them in trial, there is a discussion of settlement.

Motley: Yes. Well, you know, I can't speak to what motivates the cigarette companies to do some things, but they don't want any part of this parade of horribles being presented to the American public. Not just to six jurors or the twelve jurors. They don't want Ben LeBow's full testimony. They don't want Jeff Wigand's full testimony. They don't want Gary Huber's full testimony to be revealed to the public. Because what would be revealed would just absolutely shock the American people.

Q. Beyond what is already known or suspected?

Motley: I don't know what you might suspect. I do know that you don't know everything. The public doesn't know everything that we have learned in these cases because the industry has been successful in getting judges to gag, what I call gag orders.

For example the deposition of Dr. Osdene remained under court order for almost nine months. Dr. Huber's deposition is still under court gag order. Dr. Colby's deposition, in part, is under court gag order. Dr. Wigand's deposition was leaked by someone, but it was under a gag order.

So the public only knows part of what we know. And some of the documents that we have are under court gag order. So that the media, and therefore the public, have not seen them. And what they show is an absolutely unparalleled, unprecedented industry that had completely committed immoral, unethical and illegal conduct for 40 years.

Q. And what is being discussed now, based on your description, it sounds like the tobacco industry is trying to grab victory from the jaws of defeat.

Motley: Well, I don't know how anybody could describe what is on the table now as a victory for the cigarette companies. Laying aside the financial aspects of it, they have agreed to a fundamental change in the way they do business in America.

It is unfortunate that one would describe conducting oneself in a legal, a legal, moral and ethical fashion would be a change. But the fact of the matter is, for forty years they conducted themselves immorally, amorally, unethically, illegally, sordidly. Almost like street drug dealers.

And so for them to change the way they do business, it is a shame that that...to say I am going to do business legally, morally and ethically has to be a change, but that is what the reality is in 1998. So for anyone to say that that is not important, I think belittles what was accomplished.

Q. People aren't saying it is not important, what they are saying is that the industry, by waving around hundreds of billions of dollars and all of a sudden agreeing to what you say they should have agreed to, is trying to stay in business...

Motley: Of course.

Q. ...is trying to avoid penalties.

Motley: Well, I don't know how paying 10 billion, that is with a "b" dollars in punitive damages is avoiding penalties. But, yes, they want to stay in business and what is the alternative?

Prohibition doesn't work. You have got 40 million Americans who are addicted to cigarette smoke. To nicotine. Where are they going to get it?

You want to create a black market? You want to give gangsters riding around in Black cars with their trunk full of cigarettes from Canada instead of booze? That is what you would face.

So what you have to do is, you can't ban cigarettes because people are addicted. So you have to regulate it. And you have to regulate it more stringently than any other industry and that is what the cigarette companies have agreed to have happen to them.

Q. In exchange for immunity from medicaid type suits, class action suits, basically any suit involving the kind of clout, like yours, that brought them to heel?

Motley: Well, I am not an advocate of immunity and I don't think what they proposed is a far cry from immunity. But what will probably happen will not be an immunity except, you are right, there can be no more class actions. But keep in mind there hasn't been a single class action against the cigarette companies that has gotten a victim a single penny. Not one penny has been gotten for victims in class actions.

Nobody has ever gotten punitive damages before and people forget that there is tradeoffs. They have agreed to no longer contest that cigarette smoke causes lung cancer. Now they have been fighting that for fifty years so there is not just this cloak of immunity.

There was a negotiation where they gave up some of their legal defenses and we agreed to recommend that some of the potential weapons available to a plaintiff be taken away. That weapon is punitive damages which has never been gotten before. And that other weapon is class actions, which has never achieved a single penny in a single victim's pocket.

Q. But further Medicaid suits and further third party suits would be out.

Motley: Why would there have to be a Medicaid suit because they are settling the Medicaid cases. From now, forever. They are not just paying for 25 years, they are paying forever.

Q. But the critics say also, if we get rid of third party suits in general. I mean, for instance like the one in Indiana...

Motley: Oh, no, no, no. Absolutely not. In fact, my firm... I guess I am the best example of why that is not true. We have taken on several dozen individual cases, since June the 20th, since the settlement was announced. And we intend to prosecute cases for individuals.

There is a woman whose husband is a very well known environmental scientist, who quit smoking... just for example, in 1967 and died of lung cancer. We are taking her case.

We have got five environmental tobacco smoke cases. We are taking cases. There is a law firm in Chicago that just boasted on national television that they have a thousand cases. So in forty years of litigation, you have got 800 cases, now here is one guy that has got a thousand cases.

Q. And these cases will be able to go forward...

Motley: Oh, absolutely.

Q. ...no matter what the settlement.

Motley: Absolutely, they will go forward. They will have no restrictions on their ability to collect money. They will have a restriction that they can't get punitive damages, but the industry is admitting that cigarettes cause disease. So I think that is a very good trade-off, myself.

And I am the best evidence of that. We are taking cases. We are not afraid to take the cases. We are taking them.

Q. You are going to make money off the tobacco industry...

Motley: I am going to continue to be a thorn in their side, even though there is a settlement.

Q. So when people say, the reason Ron Motley, the reason that Dickie Scruggs, the reason that Mike Moore have turned this into what you might want to call advocates for the tobacco industry's own settlement isn't because you are going to get all your legal fees?

Motley: First of all, this is not the tobacco companies own settlement. This is the peoples' settlement because the people who negotiated were forty elected State Attorneys' General and seven Governors.

As far as the fees business, yes we are going to make fees. We deserve to make fees. I don't apologize for that. But the making of the fees doesn't retard me from going forward with what I believe to be a good public health lawsuit. And that is, for certain discrete groups of smokers, and non-smokers particularly. Children whose asthma is caused to be worse because their parents smoke. Those kinds of cases my law firm is taking and we will prosecute those cases, whether or not there is a settlement.

Q. Who is leading that criminal investigation? Do you know?

Motley: I don't... My understanding is there it's three or four different ones going on. I haven't seen a whole lot of leadership until recently, so I don't know who is leading it.

Q. But if you were Jeffrey Bible, Steven Goldstone, if you were scared of Ron Motley. You might be a little bit more scared of the Department of Justice.

Motley: Any time you face bars, going behind bars, that certainly ups the ante. There is no comparison. The closest comparison between a civil case and criminal case is the RICO case. And that certainly... If someone's company were to be found guilty of RICO violations, racketeering violations, that would not look good to the stockholders. It wouldn't look good to the lending institutions.

But none of that is as comparable as being found guilty of a felony. That is terrible. A corporation suffers public image-wise for decades after they are found guilty of a felony. It is a terrible thing to have happen to a corporation, not to mention the individuals in a corporation to go to jail.

Q. And that could happen.

Motley: Michael Milken to talk about that.

Q. But it could happen here that the tobacco industry can't escape criminal prosecution. Would that disrupt all of these settlements and the whole deal?

Motley: The settlement of the civil liability does not affect the criminal prosecutions, so while it is helpful from a pressure standpoint to the state Medicaid cases for this parallel criminal investigation to go on, we can survive without it. And the criminal investigations will survive without us and without the state Medicaid cases.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/settlement/

Plaintiff's attorney from Mississippi, head negotiator and top lawyer in the Medicaid cases; Scruggs and Michael Moore have been lead negotiators for the national settlement. After Moore suggested the idea of the Medicaid cases, Scruggs became Moore's partner and together they gathered all the elements necessary to bring Big Tobacco to the negotiating table. Scruggs also brought famous trial attorney Ron Motley into the team, so they would be ready to go to trial if necessary.

Scruggs' brother-in-law is the Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who provided some of the key national connections. Scruggs' and Moore have been spending a great deal of time in Washington, DC convincing lawmakers to legislate the settlement into law.

Scruggs first became successful in national class action suits against the asbestos industry.

He brought that experience to bear on the tobacco industry, "making the stakes so high that neither side can afford to lose." He had the guts to protect two whistleblowers -- Jeff Wigand and Merrell Williams -- who no one else would touch. And he helped convince Bennett LeBow to defect from the tobacco industry's united front and turn state's evidence.Under normal contingency fee agreements, Scruggs would stand to make over $1 billion dollars on the tobacco cases. He defused this issue by agreeing to have his fees decided by a national panel of judges.

FRONTLINE interviewed Scruggs several times in late 1997 and early 1998.

Q. Did you ever think you would be sitting at a table and deciding that you were going to walk away from $250 billion dollars and what did that feel like? Scruggs: It wasn't that we were going to walk away from $250 billion. It was that the far-reaching health care reforms and tobacco control reforms that we had negotiated might be lost. I am still concerned that if Congress doesn't act that... [the] opportunity will be lost to reform the tobacco industry.

The money was an important public health tool. It was important to reimburse the states for their health care expenditures and to create a pool of money to fund the enforcement actions of the FDA. Other than that, it was the regulatory mechanisms that we were trying to put into place.

The restrictions on marketing of this product to children. To sort of, to try to reverse the trend in the proliferation of tobacco.

Q. You want people to believe, people who are looking at you as a personal injury lawyer, a pirate in the courtrooms of America, that you really just care about the public health? The money didn't matter.

Scruggs: The money mattered. It didn't matter as much as the public health. It is not often in life that you have a chance to make a mark on humanity. And we all got caught up in the opportunity that this presented to us.

Q. You got into the asbestos litigation. What did you learn about the value of representing masses of people?

Scruggs: It is a unique, it is unique type of law practice. On the one hand, you are not able to develop the unique lawyer/client relationship with your clients when you represent thousands of people. You can't spend the time you would like to spend with your client on an individual basis with each one of them. You have got to sort of organize the thing so that you can get them all to the doctor, get them all diagnosed, get them...the ones who have the disease. And you have to screen for exposures and that sort of thing. And then you have to get their cases filed and managed so it requires a great deal of organization to get that done properly.

Q. But it raises the stakes, right, in terms of what you can go after. I mean you can actually show up at the defendant corporation's door, in this case, and say I don't want just a hundred thousand, I want ten million.

Scruggs: It raises the stakes only if you have a judicial system that permits the aggregation or consolidation of a large number of cases at one time such that if they lose one case, they are losing, essentially, 4,000 cases.

And the costs are prohibitive. You have raised the stakes to the point where they really can't afford to go to trial and lose. We were able to, to convince the judge in our county to, to consolidate some 7,000 cases. Pick a representative sample of those cases to go to trial. And let that verdict be binding on all the rest.

Q. And that leads to a quote that I saw from you that says, "I like to get the stakes so high that neither side can afford to lose." Now what does that mean?

Scruggs: That means that ordinarily in mass tort cases there is no way to, to try any individual case because the defendant has the advantage. He can beat you one at a time or, even if you beat them one at a time, you have not put them in mortal danger.

When you raise the stakes through consolidations or bringing large numbers of claims together, you have... You have given them an incentive to settle what would not otherwise be present. And usually a good settlement is far superior to trench warfare, trial-by-trial litigation. Because then only a few clients get paid and the rest have to wait in line.

Q. So, when you and Motley appear on the scene in the tobacco litigation, you are already veterans of the asbestos situation.

Scruggs: The idea of the tobacco suit came up in the midst of the four month trial, asbestos trial in 1993. And we pretty much had that case in hand after about three months. We thought we were going to win it. We were mostly mopping up. The defendants were putting on their case and we were pretty much mopping up in the case. And I remember, one day in court when I mentioned to Motley that Mike Moore was interested in bringing a suit on behalf of the poor people of Mississippi, or the taxpayers of Mississippi, to collect, recover against the tobacco industry the cost to the state for treating poor people.

I thought I was going to have to put a seat belt on Motley. He was about to blast off.

He wanted to try the case right then. And we weren't even through with the asbestos trial. He was inspired, to say the least.

And Motley is a quick study and the idea of doing something on that scale inspired him. I mean, he was, he needed sedation after I told him about it.

Q. We think of Ole' Miss and, I mean I am old enough to remember the riots and what went on. And we don't think of Ole Miss as a bunch of lawyers who are going to get together, veterans of Ole Miss, and sue the pants off major industries in the United States. Is that just a Yankee stereotype?

Scruggs: It may be. I don't know that there is anything unique about Ole Miss or about Mississippi in this particular area. It turned out to be a coincidence, I think, more than anything else, that we took advantage of.

The coincidence being that Mike Moore was the Attorney General. He was our classmate and our friend. We had represented Mike in previous litigation against the asbestos industry, very successfully. The partnership had worked well.

We had gotten involved in tobacco legislation. We had money in our pockets as a result of the asbestos litigation, so all of these...all of these elements, by chance, came together. And I think that almost simultaneously we realized the potential we had there. With a war chest, with legal talent, with an Attorney General, a state official who was willing to do it. Is enthusiastic about doing it. And some bright legal ideas about how to get it done.

Q. And you did some thinking about what court to file it in, right?

Scruggs: We did, we did.

Q. With a judge who was another Ole Miss graduate?

Scruggs: That's right. Not our classmate again. And not a judge that we knew very well or had any prior dealings with to speak of. But, in fact, we didn't know for sure what judge we would end up with in the case. We went through two judges before we ended up with the judge that actually tried the case.

But the type of lawsuit that we filed, was dictated, really, by two things. We hired Dick Morris to do an in depth public opinion survey of Mississippians.

Q. Dick Morris of recent Clinton fame?

Scruggs: That is right, that is right.

Q. And how did you get to him? Through Trent Lott, right?

Scruggs: I had met Dick several years earlier through Trent. I think back in 1989. I asked Trent... I was representing the state, again Mike Moore, in a suit against the asbestos industry on behalf of the state.

Q. So you needed him to do what? To poll?

Scruggs: To poll the state. To poll public attitudes about asbestos companies. This is back in 1989 and Trent said, "Well look, Dick Morris is a guy who can do that for you, use him." So I called Dick, hired him, used him. And when we were anticipating the tobacco litigation, I did the same thing.

Q. And what did his polling show?

Scruggs: It showed that it would be very problematic to win the case. It identified the demographic groups who would be most like to be for us and against us. The poll results were fairly discouraging.

Q. Why would you guys want to take on tobacco? I mean, at that point, you also knew that there was a lot of down sides to tobacco. They weren't the asbestos industry. They could wipe you out.

Scruggs: This was an industry that had never been beaten. That had fortified itself for decades against litigation. Had prepared and covered every conceivable litigation angle. It was sort of like the challenge of climbing Mount Everest the first time. It had never been done. Uh, in theory you could do it. But nobody had ever done it.

Q. So, you went into the trenches and thought about it, and schemed, and came up with this unique plan.

Scruggs: Yeah, that's right. And we did it, I think initially, uh, just out of a professional, uh, inspiration to try to do something that had never been done before, to try to take on this industry that had literally defied the judicial system and the regulatory system for decades. And yet, was killing millions of people. Uh, you know, it was just a challenge that cried out for somebody to do it.

Q. You got a lawsuit, but you know that you're going to have discovery problems, you always do with this industry. They'll fight you to the Supreme Court. Then comes Merrell Williams. Who was Merrell Williams?

Scruggs: Merrell Williams was a former paralegal at a law firm in Kentucky that was hired by Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company to review all of its, uh, dirty linen, all of its documents. And Merrell Williams decided, uh, some time well prior to the time we knew about him, to photocopy and secrete away those documents, the ones that were explosive. And, uh, go about somehow making them public.

Q. Well, he went through a number of machinations, but these documents as I understand it, were so hot that before you ever met Merrell Williams, a variety of people backed off.

Scruggs: I'm just now learning about that. ... When he came to us, he initially came to Don Barrett, I spoke of him earlier. And, uh, asked for a meeting. We had a meeting with him, uh, in a restaurant in Jackson, Mississippi.

The old time deli in Jackson, Mississippi. And Don and I and another lawyer that worked for Don named Cindy Langston met with Merrell. He looked like warmed over death. He looked unkempt. Not quite like he'd been sleeping under a bridge but close to it. He was obviously very ill, very nervous, had been drinking.

Q. He thought you were an FBI agent apparently.

Scruggs: He did. I guess because I have short hair and out of town, he asked me two or three times if I were with the FBI. And I reassured him that I was not. But he was very apprehensive.

Q. He's nervous because he's got stolen documents.

Scruggs: We knew about a little of his background from press clips at that time. But he never admitted at the time that he had any documents. He talked in circles. I think he was basically taking our measure to see if we were likely to be people who would back him up or people who would turn him in.

Q. Now, eventually he does trust you. You. . . he says to you let's go to Orlando.

Scruggs: That's right. After some discussions with him over the coming, over the following two or three months in early 1994, uh, he, uh, confided to me and to Don that he had indeed had documents that were very explosive.

Q. In sum, when you looked through these documents, what was your reaction?

Scruggs: I looked at Merrell, and I said, "These guys are toast." We've got them. And it turned out that that was one of the more explosive documents in the group.

Q. Now, you've got a pile of stolen documents which Brown and Williamson knows are out there, right.

Scruggs: No, I don't think they knew they were out there.

Q. Well, they knew Merrell had something.

Scruggs: But they were not sure that he had not turned over all the documents he had. He had been ordered by a court up there to turn them all back over to Brown & Williamson and they didn't know for sure whether he had or not at this time.

Q. But you and Mike Moore, decide that the only way you can use the documents is to get them out there.

Scruggs: No, actually, it was on our mind at the time to use the documents in litigation. After reading those documents that day, I think it was a Saturday. I called Mike Moore who's in Jackson. I said, you've got to see these documents. Flew up about night down, had a couple of other lawyers on the team including Don Barrett, uh, look at the documents as well. Uh, and it was pretty clear that these documents were clear evidence that the testimony that the CEOs of the industry had just given to Congress a month earlier.

Q. That's where they go, we believe that nicotine is not addictive.

Scruggs: Well, they all seven raise their right hands and swore that in their opinion nicotine was not addictive and swore to other things. That it was clear that they had either lied, deceived, or misled Congress in that testimony. And that these documents showed that. Our view then, was that these documents, evidenced a fraud. And that we should take them to the people who were investigating the tobacco industry. That is the very Congressmen who are asking those questions. The congressional subcommittee that was at the time chaired by Congressman Henry Waxman. So, about ten days later, we got an appointment with Congressman Waxman. And we. . . Mike Moore and I flew up there. And personally hand carried those documents to him. It was about that time, uh, that or shortly thereafter that the documents appeared in the press.

Q. Stop for a second here. You walk into Congressman Waxman's office. This is his, in a sense, life work to get the tobacco industry.

Scruggs: Right.

Q. And you put on his desk 4,000 pages of files.

Scruggs: Right. Two huge boxes.

Q. And say to him, what?

Scruggs: We have documents that would indicate that the testimony that was, given before your community last month was a lie. And we felt that you were the person who should have these documents. You're the congressional oversight committee. And we don't know what else to do with them. We're certainly not going to give them back to the industry without making them known to some agency of the Federal government or someone who is in a position to do something about this.

Q. Did you tell him that they were basically stolen documents?

Scruggs: Yes. I think that we didn't tell him so much that they were stolen documents but that we had received them through a whistle blower. I think that it was implied that they were stolen documents.

Q. Well, you didn't have a subpoena, you didn't get them by subpoena. But they didn't give them to you.

Scruggs: No, they didn't. I don't think we ever used the word that these are stolen documents.

Q. You came by them through some fortuitous means.

Scruggs: Sure, through whistle blower action, that we got these documents. And clearly, uh, we were not supposed to have them. And I think, uh, Congressman Waxman was a little ambivalent.

Q. He didn't dive into the box.

Scruggs: No, he didn't. Not, right in front of us, he didn't.

Q. Did he step back?

Scruggs: He did. It was almost as if it was radioactive. He wanted to embrace them, but at the same time, he was afraid of them. It was like, almost a physical reaction. But, after some initial discussion about the documents and our characterization of what they were and why we had. . . how we had come into possession of them. And why we were bringing to them. Then asked us to meet with his staff. And his staff then proceeded to go through them like a hungry lion. They were just. . . they were amazed at the documents.

Q. Now, at the same time contemporaneously, a set of these documents we know wound up at the FDA.

Scruggs: That's right.

Q. And then shortly thereafter someone from the FDA apparently supplied them to The New York Times.

Scruggs: You know, I never did know how The New York Times obtained them. But I would imagine that the genesis of all that was through Waxman's office.

Q. According to Stan Glantz, then a Mr. Butts sends him a set of documents.

Scruggs: That's right.

Q. Are you Mr. Butts' father.

Scruggs: No, I'm not. I'm not Mr. Butts. Nor is Mike Moore. I may be subject to a paternity suit. But I am not Mr. Butts. Did not, uh. . . The only agency that we gave those documents to were - were the Congress -- Congressman Waxman. Later we gave copies to the Justice Department.

Q. And the FDA.

Scruggs: And the FDA.

Q. Why were these documents so important?

Scruggs: Because they showed the depth of the tobacco industries research to the pharmacological effects of nicotine. They showed the elaborate system that the tobacco industry's lawyers had set up to shield these documents from public view, abusing the attorney client privilege. They showed that the tobacco industry itself considered nicotine to be an addictive drug and that they were in the business of selling nicotine an addictive drug through the very words of one of their principle scientists and attorneys back in 1963. Those sorts of revelations, uh, were especially important to the Food and Drug Administration because the tobacco industry had denied that nicotine was. . . that cigarettes were being sold for the nicotine content. They were claiming, of course, if you remember, that nicotine was just a component of taste. And that it was just simply something that went along with the cigarette. When in fact, these documents showed the depths to which they had researched the pharmacological effects of nicotine.

Q. So, now you're at first what many people called hopeless lawsuit, had a documentary base.

Scruggs: That's right. Now, the documents, you'll recall. We didn't file the lawsuit until about a month later. But at the time we got the documents.

Q. And somehow through your delivering them to Washington, they go to Stan Glantz and they wind up on the Internet.

Scruggs: That's right. That's right.

Q. And eventually, they do become admissible.

Scruggs: Well, we were not sorry to see that happen.

Q. Now, fast forward a little over a year, and you wind up with a live witness to go with the documents. Who was the witness, and why was he so important?

Scruggs: The witness was, Dr. Jeffrey Wigand who was the vice president in charge of research and development for the same company for Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company. Uh, we had searched in vain for about a year or more, even longer than that because we first met Jeff Wigand, I think, in October 1996, 1995.

Q. 1995.

Scruggs: Prior to that the litigation had been going on for a year and a half at that time. And we had been researching it for probably two and a half years. We had searched in vain for a tobacco industry mole. Someone who was in the know, in tobacco, who would tell us what really went on inside that industry. There was no one out there who could speak from an insider's perspective. We had no one. There wasn't anyone that would do it.

He was the one person who had come forward, who - who came forward and talked about what really went on inside tobacco.

Q. What makes Wigand so important?

Scruggs: Jeff Wigand was able to bring the documents to life.

He could tell things that were not in the documents. The genesis of the documents. What led to various studies. Strangely enough, many of the documents he had not ever seen before and was amazed himself when he saw them.

As the Director of Research, the Vice President in charge of Brown & Williamson's research, many of these documents had been secreted even from him. So he was amazed himself when he saw some of the research that had gone on in the company that he was not even allowed to look at. Or not made privy to.

He also, of course, knew about things that had gone in Brown & Williamson subsequent to the date of most of these documents. These documents ended sometime, I think, in the late 1980s. Wigand was there up through about 1993.

So things that went on under Wigand's purview, international conferences he attended of other tobacco scientists within his company add greatly to the information we learned from the documents. Especially about nicotine and nicotine pharmacology.

Q. You bought Merrell Williams a boat. You bought him a house. Jeffrey Wigand, you paid his expenses, flew him around in your plane. Got him a lawyer. Sounds like you are on the edge there, ethically.

Scruggs: Some have said that, but I disagree. I think what we did was to grant a safe harbor for those who were willing to risk whatever they were risking. Intimidation and threats from the tobacco industry. We were willing to grant a safe harbor for those who were willing to step up and tell the truth about the industry.

I helped Merrell Williams. I didn't buy him these things. These were, in essence, loans that I made to him and he has, at the time, agreed to repay me one day for that. And I hope that he will. I trust that he will. I can understand how it might look like it was some sort of a payoff, but it wasn't.

Q. Wigand?

Scruggs: We both represented Jeff Wigand in defending him against Brown & Williamson and we found lawyers in Kentucky and paid them to defend him against Brown & Williamson.

Q. I guess the question is, with Merrell Williams, you knew that he did not come by these documents through a legal process. He walked out the door with the documents.

Scruggs: I disagree with that.

Q. Well it made a whole bunch of other people real nervous. I mean people who are dedicated anti-tobacco activists wouldn't even go near him.

Scruggs: That is true. I don't think you have a right to conspire against the public health and then cry foul when someone takes the documents that show that you have done that and make them public. Especially when you turn them over to law enforcement officials or the Congress of the United States.

I don't see... I think you almost have an obligation to do that. To, when you catch someone in the process of committing a crime or a fraud on the public health and you don't make that public, I think that is the crime. And so that what Merrell Williams did, regardless of whatever his motives were, and what we did was, in our minds then and now, a civic duty. A civic responsibility.

Q. But you had some great risk involved in there. Once the tobacco industry, once Brown & Williamson found out, they sued you.

Scruggs: They did.

Q. They had investigators after you.

Scruggs: They did. They followed us, they followed me. They put me under surveillance, did the same to my family. Sued us in federal court. Sued me. Sued Merrell. Sued any other lawyer, had a long list of John Doe defendants who had seen or had participated in turning these documents over. Presumably Mike Moore. And unleashed more or less a smear campaign of their own that we were paying for stolen documents is the way they spun that. Even though we turned the documents over, as we were compelled to do, to the proper enforcement authorities.

Q. And once you facilitated, let's put it that way, Jeffrey Wigand giving testimony in your case.

Scruggs: That is right.

Q. What... He did that at some risk.

Scruggs: At great risk to Jeff. They sued him, of course. They sued a number of news organizations in connection with Williams and threatened to in Wigand's case, to try to intimidate everyone into being silent.

It was great risk to Jeff. He was, he was a school teacher at a public high school in Louisville, Kentucky, having gone from making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to making what a school teacher makes in a public school system. They unleashed an unprecedented smear campaign against him. They hired investigative firms in the world to go into every aspect of his past. Drag out every, every piece of paper or transaction that Jeff Wigand had ever conducted to try to put a false light on it and on him.

They tried to show that he was a mental case, that he was a wife beater, that he was a shoplifter. I mean they came in with all sorts of allegations to actually smear him.

Q. Let me take you back to, let's say, November of 1995 when Jeff Wigand testifies. He is under possible threat of arrest in Kentucky.

Scruggs: Yes.

Q. And you are being sued. Did you ever worry about that was going on?

Scruggs: Sure. But when you are in the middle of combat like that with people like we were fighting, all your thoughts are to whip--to beating them. We were going to beat them, no matter what the cost.

I mean it was one of these things that becomes a cause, a crusade. You are inspired to do it, regardless of the risk. You feel that there is so much justice in the cause that you are willing to take those sorts of risks to get what you consider to be a proper result.

Obviously Jeff Wigand felt that. Obviously Merrell Williams felt it. And all of the lawyers an the Attorney General felt that that's what, we were on a crusade.

Q. Didn't your wife, didn't your brother-in-law, didn't somebody come to you and say, what are you doing?

Scruggs: No. My wife was incredibly supportive throughout this. My brother-in-law had nothing to say or do about this. We didn't discuss it.

Q. But he did encourage you, at one point, to get into discussions with the tobacco industry.

Scruggs: Actually that is, it was the other way around. After the first Liggett settlement, this would have been in April of 1996, I read in the newspaper where the, where Steve Goldstone from. the CEO of R. J. Reynolds, when asked would R. J. Reynolds ever settle, like Liggett just did, responded, "We would be interested in a comprehensive resolution but not a piecemeal series of settlements."

It dawned on me then that there may be room to open up a dialogue to resolve these issues.

Q. Were the stakes now high enough so neither side could afford to lose.

Scruggs: The stakes were getting up to the point where neither side could afford to lose. And this was the first signal, or overture from the industry proper, not just a dissident like LeBow, but from a mainstream large tobacco industry, R. J. Reynolds, one of the target defendants in the case, that they were willing to consider a compromise.

I called Mike Moore. I said, "Mike I have got an idea that if, that I'd like to call Trent and see if he would be willing to try to broker a meeting with the industry, based on what Feldstone had said in the press." Mike said, "Okay, give it a try."

So I called Trent and I said, "Trent, you haven't been involved in any of this. You are probably considered to be tobacco friendly by the tobacco industry. You are someone that they would probably trust. You are someone that I would trust. Would you like to... Would you consider trying to set up a meeting to see if anything can be worked out on a national basis?"

Q. You are claiming that your main motivation here was the public health, doing something good and through all of this your brother-in-law is the majority leader of the Senate, one of the most powerful Republicans in the United States. And you never went to him? You never talked to him. And he never talked to you? You are in the headlines every day, you are killing his political party.

Scruggs: At the time, in early 1996, he was not the majority leader. In fact I think at the time he was not even the assistant majority leader. He was just a United States Senator. Not that I am belittling being a United States Senator.

Q. There were risks involved here that weren't normal to a regular law suit. This wasn't just a risk to the overhead of your law office by putting too much money into a case. What were the risks to you back then?

Scruggs: There was a risk of, I think, public humiliation was the worst one. If you are unsuccessful after taking on a task like this. Financial ruin. Discreditation, professionally. The wear and tear it puts on your family to read unfavorable things in the newspaper every day when you are not used to--not only not used to publicity, you are not used to national adverse publicity. Those sorts of things.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/settlement/

Moore is Attorney General, Mississippi and lead negotiator for the state Attorneys General in the tobacco settlement. A suggestion from Mississippi attorney Mike Lewis led Moore to the idea of suing the tobacco industry to recover Medicaid costs paid by the state in treating sick smokers. He hired Dick Scruggs, a friend from Ole Mississippi Law School, to research and develop the case.

The two of them, nicknamed Scro and Mo, then took their idea on the road and convinced other Attorneys General around the country to sue the tobacco industry. Their efforts ultimately led to the tobacco industry coming to the bargaining table and negotiating the June 20, 1997 national settlement agreement. This agreement provided the basis for the current debate in Congress over national tobacco legislation.

Before becoming Attorney General of Mississippi in 1988, Moore was District Attorney in Pascagoula, MS. He was named "Lawyer of the Year," by the National Law Journal in 1997. The following is selections from FRONTLINE's interview with Attorney General Moore in early 1998.

Lowell Bergman: Let's go back to May 94 or thereabouts. Back then, how did you describe the tobacco industry?

Mike Moore: Probably the same way I describe them now. The most corrupt and evil corporate animal that was ever been created in this country.

I believe they're the most corrupt and evil corporate animal that has ever been created in this country's history. They sell the drug, they make a drug, and they sell it knowing that it's addictive. They market it to our children, who they know will become addicts and they know that they will die from the causes of--of this tribute tobacco related disease. So yes, they're pretty evil.

Q: And they lie about it.

Mike Moore: I mean that's the bad thing. You know the two biggest mistake they made, Lowell, to me, and frankly the way we were able to catch them is they didn't tell the truth about their products, and they hid the dangers. And, they marketed to kids. But for those two things I don't think we wouldn't have had an Achilles heal.

Q: So in comparison to lets say, the dealers in illegal drugs, how do they compare?

Mike Moore: Well, a couple ways to measure that. all the illegal drugs in America cause twenty thousand deaths a year. All of them. Cocaine, marijuana, Heroin, all of them. Tobacco kills four hundred twenty thousand people a year. That's 21 times the n ber of deaths. They cost us billions and billions of health care dollars. Deaths are not quite as immediate as in the cocaine trade or in the illegal drug traffic, but they're much more detrimental, in my opinion.

Q: Let me take you back even further. Because you've come a long way. When you--you grew up here in Pascagoula?

Mike Moore: Right.

Q: When you were growing up as a kid, what did you want to be?

Mike Moore: Well, I guess early on in, in life I guess I toyed with the idea of becoming a priest. And then I discovered girls. So those things didn't work. I played in a rock n' roll band. I even thought at one time I would be a rock n' roll musician. My daddy quickly let me understand that the world is full of mediocre piano players. So, I didn't get very far there other than having a lot of fun through school and college making some money. Then I really wanted to be a lawyer during my high school years. And knew when I graduated high school that's what I was going to do. I was going to be a lawyer. And I wanted to be a lawyer because I knew that's a job that I could take where I can make a difference in people's lives. That's what I've done my whole career is make try to make difference.

Q: To do what, to make money?

Mike Moore: No, I really didn't know what field of law that I'd go into. I just knew I wanted to be a lawyer because I knew a lawyer was an advocate and somebody who could go into a court room and make a difference and fight for people and win -- right, wrongs if you, if you will. That is something that energized me. From the earliest days of my life, I have always got a good feeling. It is almost indescribable from helping someone. When you help someone and you made their life a little bit better, I just get a good feeling about it. And that feeling never left me. I still do. Whenever I do something good for somebody, I just feel good about it. I like it. It is a high for me. I mean maybe that's drugs for somebody else but that is a high for me.

Q. What are your politics like?

Mike Moore: I am a pretty conservative Democrat. I am conservative in more ways than most Republicans. But I, I also feel that you ought to treat people fair and just. And the law serves everyone not just the folks at the top of the spectrum. I also believe government can do a lot to motivate people. You don't hand out things to people but government officials can act in such a matter that they can inspire and motivate people to reach out and help themselves and maybe that sounds like a Republican to some folks but I am a Democrat.

Q: You are a Democrat because why?

Mike Moore: Well, I've always seen the other party, Lowell, as a party of exclusion. You know, you can't be a Republican because you are black, or you can't be a Republican because you not rich enough or you're not in this club or whatever at least that's the way it's been in my state.

Q: Why tobacco? Why pick on tobacco in Mississippi?

Mike Moore: Why not tobacco? In retrospect, you know it's easier to say this now then maybe in 1994 but, in retrospect, it was the -- the biggest challenge, the biggest legal challenge in history. If we could climb this mountain, so to speak, then there would never be one larger than this. No challenge greater. Nobody have ever beaten the tobacco industry before. We felt like we had a chance. We also knew if we won, we might just do more good than any lawyer had ever done in history. Might save more lives than most doctors have ever saved in history. So I mean, why not do that? Why not be a part of that? And as the movement grew through the years I became more and more convinced we were going to be successful.

I mean just the question you ask me, my mom and dad asked me why am I suing the tobacco industry? Most of my friends asked me, "Mike, you know this--this is crazy. They are going to come after you -- they may kill you, I mean this is nuts. You'll never win." But I knew somewhere deep in my soul, I suppose, that we really were going to win. Because it was the right thing to do. We were going to have a lot of obstacles. I didn't know quite how many when we filed it. But I knew we were going to win and I just never lost sight of victory.

Q: Is this a religious experience?

Mike Moore: I don't know if it was religious or not. I know one thing that we had a lot of breaks in this thing. We were very fortunate. A lot of courageous people came our way. I mean the Jeffrey Wigand's of the world, the Merrill Williams of the world and so many others. That didn't just happen by happenstance. That didn't happen because we were brilliant lawyers or there was some great magnetism that brought them here.

I think we had some help from above, I really do. I think that we were guided in this case and I think we are still guided in this case by a higher power.

Q: That's hefty talk from a politician.

Mike Moore: Well, you gotta understand from where I came in life. The source of any strength that I have in my life is a very strong faith in God. When I fought the supervisor wars here, which were public corruption cases, the first stop I made every morning was the church across the street from the courthouse. And nothing more than to go and say a prayer and ask the Lord to help me this day and the next day I would do the same thing. That is a source of energy for me, Lowell, maybe some people understand it and maybe some people don't. But if works for me.

Q: You are a practical politician. I mean back in 1994, you had to know that this would be a risky political move and that tobacco was very powerful?

Mike Moore: Well, I just always believed if you do the right thing, for the right reason and you never ever give up, no matter how tough it gets, that you are going to succeed. I am not naive enough to know or to not believe that you'll lose sometimes. But losing, to me is a temporary loss. I mean you may lose in one way just saddle back up and go at them a different way.

This is one of those fights against the industry that we couldn't give up and that's what I made the lawyers do. I made them promise that they were going to help me, you know you can never, never give up. And if I mean if you don't want to be, you know make that kind of commitment, then stay on the other side of the line. I mean if you want to come over here on this side of the line, I am never giving up. You guys may all go home but I am going to be in the ditch when you give up.

So it was that kind of fight. And it still is. This fight is not over. I am still fighting it. We got a long way to go. But it is worth it. It really has been worth it.

Q: Now tell me what happened when Mike Lewis called you up on the phone. You were in the office?

Mike Moore: Yep. Sure. Lewis, Mike Lewis and I were classmates at Ole Miss. We actually studied together. And he was almost like a big brother to me in school. He called me up one day and had the darndest story about a secretary and a secretary's mother who was in the hospital dying from heart disease attributable to tobacco related disease. You know he was almost fretting a bit because he couldn't do anything to help her.

And he wondered because he had sold everything she had and now she was on Medicaid and the state was actually spending dollars, wonder if there was cause of action that the state can bring against the industry. We just explored that a little bit on the phone and I hung up the phone I go "I don't know about that, I mean I don't know if that's a good idea or not". But he and his wife came down, who is also a lawyer, and talked to me another classmate of ours at Ole Miss and we talked about it. And I thought it might have some--some merit.

I wasn't convinced then, at that point, that there was a justiciable case, a real legal case against the industry. But I called Scruggs, a little while a few weeks later, probably, or maybe a short period after that and got him to work on it and Steve Boseman to work at it. And so the theory started being researched

Nobody had ever thought about this before. I mean this is such a novel theory of the law that we worked over a year researching and actually shopping our theories with legal experts across the country.

And we expected them to say we were crazy and what we got in return was "gosh, you guys may have just come up with--with the silver bullet here, this has, it's risky, but it has a chance". We start going, "Hmm, right here in Mississippi," you know.

Q: How did you recruit people to join in the lawsuit?

Mike Moore: Well, we began after we filed our lawsuit going around the country. Obviously as Attorney General went to talk to other Attorneys General. I tried to twist arms if I could, tell them how much proof we had. Insist that this is the right thing to do. Talk about the children issues every motivating factor I could think of to get them interested. Because, I knew the political pressure involved in this. I mean suing the tobacco industry is not a smart political move, especially back then.

Because they come after you. And they did. They sent former Attorney General, hired as lobbyist, to every Attorney General in this country, they sent business representative, industry representatives. Uh not just tobacco but the whatever state it was in. In Louisiana, they sent a chemical industry and oil industry to the state Attorney General said "You better not do this or we are coming after you." You know, its bad for business, I mean in my own state, my governor sued me. You know, the business community came after me saying that this is bad for business in Mississippi.

So I knew the political price that some of my brothers and sisters would have to pay. But the biggest argument I had is, "This is the right thing to do gang. This is going to save a lot of people's lives. And these guys are targeting your kids. I mean, just weigh it out, political pressures vs. the children of this country, where do you come out as Attorney General?" And I would have to tell you that I am so proud of the men and women that are Attorneys General of this country cause they came out for the kids and came out for the public health.

Q. What role did Merrill Williams play in the events?

Mike Moore: Probably the two most dramatic events with people would be right here in this building, where we are right now, when I met Merrill Williams, back in probably early 1994. Merrill brought us the famous Brown & Williamson documents here in Mississippi, which are probably still the most damming documents ever produced against the industry.

The fellow I met that day was a guy who was scared to death. I mean, remember I've been prosecuting criminals all my life and I've had all kinds of witnesses turn states evidence. I have never met anybody that was more afraid of losing their life being in some accident -- this guy was sweating, I mean you could almost see his heart pounding in his chest. He, he spoke, you know, a few words and backed off a few words. I mean you had to pull the information out of him.

I met him in this room right over here, and he started handing me some documents and when he handed me the now famous Addison Yeaman memo that says "we are in the business of selling nicotine an addictive drug", I mean I knew we had the goods on the industry. Having just seen them testify before Congress that you know that "we swear that nicotine is not an addictive drug", I knew why he was sweating. I knew why he was scared to death. So that was pretty dramatic.

Q. What about Jeffrey Wigand?

Mike Moore: Then there was Jeffrey Wigand, a fellow who I believe has as much character and integrity as anybody in this whole fight. Because Jeff had some real choices to make. And I saw him make them. When Jeffrey made the choice as a Brown & Williamson executive to leave--I know he got fired, but he, he could have contested that. And then when he came here and agreed to testify for us and take the deposition that day out on the beach in front of Dick's house, I mean he made a decision again for what is right.

I mean he knew that they were going to come after him. They were already after him. He knew that his family was going to be hurt. But he knew what he was doing would probably would do more good for this country than anything anybody had done for public health for many, many years. So, I mean I just I was so proud to see somebody with such courage because that he wouldn't get anything out of it. Nothing. I mean he was losing, that was a losing decision for him. But he gave so much.

Q. How important were these whistleblowers?

Mike Moore: So, I mean those two guys, Merrill Williams and Jeffrey Wigand, we wouldn't be here today where we are with the three hundred sixty-eight billion dollar settlement without the courage of those two people. And for people who criticized Jeffrey for any of the blemishes in his life or Merrill Williams, I'd have to ask them to examine themselves and see would you have the courage to stand alone against one of the most powerful industries in this world and do the right thing? Most people would have to answer no.

Q: Tell me about Scruggs.

Mike Moore: We, it's funny, as time has gone one we've become Scrow and Mo or Mo and Scrow. Dick is one of the most unique fellows I've ever met in my life. He is a genuine person from this stand point, when I met Dicky, he didn't have anything. He was married. Well, I say he didn't have anything, he was married to a lovely lady and he had a son. And they didn't have any money. He was going to law school. He and I met in law school. And he got out of law school and practiced law and did ok for awhile.

And now obviously he's doing very, very well. And you know able to buy big planes and boats and all kinds of things. But he is still exactly the same person as I met in law school. He cares about people. He is generous, there is not an arrogant bone in his body if you really know him. He contributes not only of his time, but of his money to things and never ask anybody for credit. He doesn't even want anybody to know that he's doing things to help people.

He's a sensational lawyer, a great strategist, and a damn good friend. I picked well when I asked Dicky to be involved in this. But I knew I was going to pick well because I wanted someone who, no matter how tough it got, would not run. I mean and who would have the resources and wouldn't be afraid to invest them all.

And people don't know this, Lowell, Dicky and his wife Diane, invested everything they have in this case. And the reason I know that is because we had we got to a certain point where we had to go out to actually get more funding from other people. Include other people in this case, other lawyers had to split what possible legal fees that maybe paid down the line what other people who really didn't have anything to do much with the case.

I mean, even if he had to spend every penny that he had, he knew it, and I had the commitment to fight this battle till it was over. And luckily he's got a wife like Diane who let him do it. And it could have gone, this thing could have bellied up easy, and Dicky would have been back broke, without anything, and have to start all over again. So, I mean that's commitment and that's why I get a little bit defensive when people start coming out and saying all these lawyers are going to make a bunch of money. Nobody's ever sacrificed the way some of these folks have for a cause that's going to benefit the entire nation. And I don't think I can say that about every lawyer involved in these cases. But I know I can say about the ones representing Mississippi.

Q: Tell me about Ron Motley.

Mike Moore: Ron Motley. What a character! The best thing I can say about Ron is he is one of the most heartfelt people I have ever met in my life. He is a very emotional character. Uh, he uses that emotion in the courtroom for his clients. He's a wonderful trial lawyer because he believes. He really deeply believes in the people he represents. In this case, I saw Ron working at 3 o'clock in the morning, 4 o'clock in the morning, get two hours of sleep, and he's calling me on the phone at 7 o'clock in the morning saying, "look, let me read page 16 of this deposition to you, you're not going to believe this. I mean he was enthusiastic. His talent and his motivation, and his acceptance of this case as a life mission, uh, is probably one of the things that got us far as we've gotten so far. He's gonna be a benefit to every other state that has him as a lawyer.

Q: Can you remember somebody coming to you, "what are you doing, Mike?"

Mike Moore: Well, you know, several people did. My parents thought I was nuts, filing a lawsuit against the tobacco industry. My best friends told me that this would be the last political thing that I'd ever do in my life. The political advisors in the state and out of the state told me that this was not a smart thing to do, and if you ever had any aspirations for higher office, you can forget them. You may not even win the election, re-election campaign, because they're going to run somebody against you. And they'll fund them, and they'll talk dirty about you and they'll spend a lot of money doing it. So, the truth of the matter is, Lowell, I didn't care. I mean I really didn't care.

Q: Now wait a second. You really didn't care?

Mike Moore: I really, really didn't care. I like to consider myself a public servant. I mean I got into this business for one reason, to make a difference. And if I'm not going to do something because there is political threat, on the other side, or because this is going to be tough, I'm not worth myself. No, you can't make a difference many times if you're not there to make a difference. I understand that. You got to understand me. I never think I'm going to lose. I always think I'm going to win. And maybe that's naivete, uh, it's driven me through my life pretty successfully. I knew I was going to win. I knew the chances. And I've lost before, but I knew this was right. Man, I know it's hard for people to understand. I knew this was in my soul I knew this was the right thing to do and I knew it had the potential to do more good than anything I'd ever done in my life. So what if I lost? So what? I don't get to be Attorney General? I don't get to be a United States senator? I don't get to be some politican, who cares? I will have done more good for this country, even in losing, by exposing this industry than any other opportunity I'd ever have in my life. So why not do it? I didn't see it as a possibility of a loss.

Q: Sounds like some kind of madness was overcoming people in Mississippi.

Mike Moore: Well, you know you could say it was madness. But it was more damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. You know, we knew we were right. We knew we were going to be criticized. We tried to be as smart as we could in calculating how to file the case, who the opponents were going to be, we were pretty about how we did it.

Q: Did you home cook the case by filing in Pascagoula?

Mike Moore: Well, I'd say that we made sure that we were going to have a fair playing field. The tobacco industry, when they came to Mississippi, and they saw that we filed a lawsuit in my hometown, in Dickey's hometown, hometown law firm. A half way popular attorney general, they knew that they had a challenge on their hands. Uh, when they couldn't use their gimmickry to get it removed to federal court or coerce some judge or others to move it to a jury trial rather than a judge trial, they knew they were in trouble. We knew they were trouble. Then when we were able to get the other states involved, which is where they really fought us, uh, and they, the biggest thing they did in my state that helped me eventually, but hurt me at first, is they coerced my governor into suing me, and then they sued me. It took a year of effort to beat that lawsuit. But when they lost that, they were history. I mean, when the Supreme Court of my state said this trial will go forward, they were through, and they knew it.

Q: You know, one of the key moments in all this, I think tactically, strategically was when Bennett LeBow and Liggett said, "hey, we want a deal". Tell us what happened.

Mike Moore: Well, uh, another one of our Ole Miss Law School classmates who we included in the trial team, Don Barrett, had a relationship with a lawyer in New York, Mark Casowitz who had a relationship with Bennett LeBow. And, uh, Don, to make a long short, Don and Mark began to talk about a possibility of working with the small Liggett Tobacco Company and possibility of a settlement. And Don talked with us and, uh, things proceeded on for awhile and we had meetings, you know, we met in Miami, we met in Memphis, we met all over the country, uh--

Q: In secret?

Mike Moore: Oh, absolutely in secret. If this got out, I mean, this would be a, the tobacco companies would do everything that they, the big tobacco companies do everything they could to kill Bennett LeBow and his company, just like they're doing now. So it had to be done in secret. And we were able to keep it a secret. That's probably the only secret we were ever able to keep, is the Liggett One settlement. Nobody knew about that until the day before we announced it. , and it probably was one of the most remarkable events in this four year battle. Because for the first time, a tobacco company agreed to pay money, and cooperate with the plaintiffs in a lawsuit. It shook the industry, uh, pretty strongly. They didn't act like it, but it did.

Q: Hubert Humphrey opposed it.

Mike Moore: Yah, I tried to get Skip involved in the Liggett One settlement. You know it's funny. I had Bob Butterworth of Florida, who is my friend and partner throughout this thing, who gets very little credit, but who is as instrumental as anybody else in our success. Bob immediately agreed to be involved in the Liggett settlement. He saw the potential. Scott Arshbarger, you know, Attorney General of Massachusetts, I go to see him when he's on vacation, down in Florida, and Scott agreed, after one hour of session that he would be involved. Uh, then we called Daryl McGraw in West Virginia, the Attorney General there. He said, "Mike, I'm with you. If you think this is a good thing, we're going." So the fifth state that was involved was Minnesota. Dick and I flew, along with Bob Butterworth, the three of us flew to Minnesota to meet with Skip Humphrey, and we never met this Mike Ceresi guy, but he was there that day. We couldn't have been treated more harshly. They thought we were nuts. Uh, they thought this was a bad idea. Uh, and didn't want to have anything to do with it. It was almost like it wasn't their idea, so it must not be good. So we left, knowing we had four states, uh, we wanted to have five, so Louisiana. We got Louisiana to file a lawsuit. They filed a lawsuit, flew to, uh, Washington and joined in the settlement. So, at that point, there were six states involved and five settled with Liggett. It worked the same way with Minnesota the second time, when we did the Liggett Two deal. Uh, we had 22 states, I believe at that time who had filed lawsuits, a few less than that because we got a few more when we were going to do the Liggett settlement. And Minnesota again didn't want, didn't see the worth in the Liggett Two settlement, with all the documents and admissions and all the things. And they didn't agree to sign on until all the other states were lined up, we were walking across to the press conference, and then they agreed to sign on to the settlement and stood there with the rest of us. And I'm glad, it was, it was, it was helpful. But Minnesota has, from the very beginning just drew a line around their state and they wanted to do their own thing and they didn't want to be a part of all that we were doing, uh, building the army. They just, they just felt like they should just do their own thing and let us do our own thing.

Q: Well, I think what they say is that you're a great advocate, you're for the anti tobacco movement, you've done a great job, but they're doing the real lawyering.

Mike Moore: Well, I guess the difference is, I was involved in my case, from the very beginning. I did the discovery, I read the documents, I was prepared to try the case myself. I don't believe Skip's done that same thing. He's let Mike Ceresi, uh, and those lawyers run his case for him, and that's fine, but it's just a difference of opinion. Also, from the very beginning, said to every other state in this country, anything that I have, you can have, witnesses, documents, whatever. And that's how we were able to elicit and get all these other states involved. Minnesota, basically said, "we want you to dump all the documents in Minnesota, and then you've gotta come sign all these agreements and you can't tell anybody about it." We would have never been able to beat this industry if they were able to cordon us off, state by state, like that. So, I hope they do well. I mean, we want Minnesota just to beat the pants off tobacco, when they, when they try the case.

Q: Now, Bennett LeBow continues to complain about how he's been treated. He gave you, he broke, if you will, the Great Berlin Wall of tobacco.

Mike Moore: Well, you know, I'm proud of what Ben LeBow did. I've grown to know him more and more through the years. He was very, very helpful to us. We're going to make sure in this national settlement, that LeBow and Liggett are taken of. And I think we'll have a lot of congressional support to do that. So I don't really think he has anything to complain about. He's still very helpful to us. I mean, he's lobbying as hard as he can for the settlement, if it excludes him. Uh, in other words, if it makes, gives him the ability for his tobacco industry to have some growth and make some money.

Q: So the keys were two whistle blowers and a defector.

Mike Moore: I think, we could not have done this without those three things. I mean some, like Minnesota and others will tell you, "Oh, Merrill William's not important, and Jeffrey Wigand's not important." They wouldn't be where they are without Merrill William's documents and without Jeffrey Wigand and without Bennett LeBow. We just saw the value of that early on, and we grabbed hold of it and used it to our best benefit.

Q: And you created, if you will, a safe haven here in Mississippi?

Mike Moore: We did. You know, and, people, I don't know they ask me, "why Mississippi?" You know, "why did Merrill Williams come to Mississippi and why did Jeffrey Wigand and all these documents?" But, we had a safe haven for the truth for, I believe. Uh, and we weren't afraid to risk everything to protect these people. Merrill Williams has been protected here. He lives here in Mississippi now. Wigand has been a beneficiary of Dick Scruggs and many others who tried to help him in his life. You know, we hired the lawyers that represented Jeffrey Wigand and Merrill Williams and many others in the lawsuits that the tobacco companies brought against them. I mean, as you know, you were integrally involved yourself in many of those things. Nobody else was willing to do it. Nobody, Lowell. I mean, there weren't any lawyers in Louisville, Kentucky that were going to come to the aid of Jeffrey Wigand and Merrill Williams. With court orders out there threatening to do everything from holding them in contempt to take their bar license away from them. I mean, nobody else was going to help them. We just took the chance down here, knowing somebody would take action against us.

Q: With Merrill Williams, his documents were stolen from lawyers. Let me put myself in the position of a general counsel for another major corporation-- Are you saying, Mr. Moore, that you as the attorney general, can be above the law, and make public documents that are trade secrets, possibly even more valuable than that?

Mike Moore: No, I'm saying with the background information that I had at the time, and understand what it was, I saw with my own two eyes, seven tobacco executives raise their right hand and swear, before Congress, that nicotine was not an addictive drug. They had no evidence of that whatsoever. And then, the very next couple of weeks, I had in my hand, a memo that proved that they were lying. This is evidence of a crime. And when an Attorney General of this country has evidence of a crime, he has a duty to put it in the hands of those people who can do something about it. So where did we take it? We took it back straight to that same committee, the Henry Waxman's committee, and put those documents on his desk, for him to do what he needed to do with them. We sent them to the Justice Department. We sent them to the Food and Drug Administration. And we saved a copy to use in our case.

Q: And you knew they were going to end up in the New York Times?

Mike Moore: I didn't know where they would wind up. Uh, I just knew that I had done my job in putting them in the right places.

Q: By the summer of 1996, you're starting to talk to the tobacco industry. Communication's starting to happen.

Mike Moore: We had some, what I would call, uh, secret, indirect communications, uh, with the industry by summer of 96. That's right. And we were working jointly, uh, with the Food and Drug Administration, with Dr. Kessler and some of his top assistants. Frankly, we've been working with them for four years. Uh, they've helped us, we've helped them. Uh, that's been a good working relationship. Uh, and I think, uh, without their assistance, again, that they're a player who, if they were missing from this battle, we wouldn't be where we are.

Q: In a sense, they're there because the President of the United States let them be there?

Mike Moore: That's right.

Q: Dr. Kessler served at his discretion?

Mike Moore: That's right.

Q: So, how important was Bill Clinton's lack of tobacco company support, if you will, or alliance with them to your effort?

Mike Moore: Well, President Clinton, I have to give him a tremendous amount of credit, because he made the right decision on coming forward with the FDA rule. There was a lot that went into that, as you know, many of the same players, the Merrill Williams documents, the Jeffrey Wigand, the assistance with the FDA, uh, all those things helped buttress the President in making that decision. But he still made it.

He made a decision, I think, that took a lot of political courage, because at that time, he was facing re-election. A lot of tobacco states, a lot of democratic vote that he needed, uh, he could have lost that. And Kessler and President Clinton and I think with Al Gore's push, they all made the right decision to push the children's issue especially. Well, that buttressed the Attorney's General claims, because, one of our main claims was that they targeted the kids. So, it was, it was then a federal state effort, uh, moving forward. And I think that shook the tobacco industry a little bit.

Q: How did you meet Dick Morris?

Mike Moore: I'm trying to think the first time I, I met Dick. I met Dick Morris through, uh, Scruggs. Uh, he had done some work, uh, with Dick in doing some polling. I think even on our case, uh, there was some polling that was done about the advisability of whether judge or jury or whether, uh, the people of this state would really reward the state for uh, the losses from the tobacco industry, which the results came back that they wouldn't. So it was not a, we found out it was not a very popular thing to do to sue the tobacco industry. Uh, as a matter of fact, I think it was like two to one against us, uh, but we did it anyway. But, I met him several times, uh, through Scruggs, and then, I dealt with him a lot of times since then.

Q: The talks started, they floundered, basically they became public the first series of talks.

Mike Moore: We thought we had a nice plan working, a proposal for a national resolution, but it was still in the works. It was an early drafting stage and the Wall Street Journal, uh, somehow, uh, got a hold of an early draft and leaked it on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. People picked it apart, like it was a roadkill, you know, attacked by buzzards.

Even people who had been involved with this began to make public statements against it. It was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen. And of course, we were a bit perplexed, because, wait a minute, we, we hadn't done this yet. This is just an idea. And of course, we quickly found out how Washington worked. Uh, dpeople leaked things to the newspapers for the sole purpose of finding out how everybody's gonna respond to it. I mean, that's how that game works. What a way to do business.

Q: So, you first hear about Philip Carlton from the White House and then it's my understanding that you then hear from one of Ron Motley's partners about a possible meeting?

Mike Moore: No, that's not exactly how it happened. We were meeting with Bruce Lindsey and he asked us whether or not we knew a guy named Phil Carlton. And I think we had also heard that Phil Carlton was suppose to be trying to contact us although I had not received a phone call from him. And Bruce told us that this Phil Carlton guy, whoever he was, neither one of us knew at that time, wanted to meet with him and wanted meet with us. And so, Bruce told us he was going to meet with Phil Carton. We went back and met with Bruce again after he had met with Phil Carlton and of course what he wanted was he wanted a copy of our first proposal. He wanted the industry to have a copy of what the proposal was that we were drafting because at that point, as you remember, what our strategy was is to get a bill done that we thought the industry will never agree to. And have congress pass it, basically cram it down the tobacco industry's throat cause we never thought they would agree to the restrictions on marketing and advertising and many other things that we wanted to protect the public's health. Bruce wouldn't give him a copy. And we wouldn't give him a copy. The tobacco industry was frustrated they knew we were about to make a play in Congress. And they knew maybe Trent was going to help us with this and they didn't know what it was. And they couldn't get a copy anywhere. So, that's what this constant calling and urgency to try to they were actually trying to stop something but maybe also trying to start something at the same time.

Q. What happens next?

Mike Moore: The way we finally got a direct meeting is that I got a call from the White House. I talked to Bruce Lindsey, and Bruce said that the President wanted us to at least meet with the tobacco industry. At that point, we weren't wanting to meet with them. You know we were trying to hold off meeting with them. Cause we just didn't believe, we didn't trust them. We didn't believe they would actually do the things we thought we could get passed in Congress.

I mean we had already been burned one time you know by letting people in on this thing, we just we wanted to get our own deal and get it passed through Congress. Whether the tobacco industry liked it or not, as naive as that sounds.

But when, you know, the President of the United States through Bruce Lindsey tells me he wants me to meet with the industry. I mean who am I to say I am not going to?

So I called Scruggs, I say Scruggs we got to change the plan here, we need to meet with them. So Joe Rice, who was working with us, ended up going and meeting with Carlton and Meyer Capwell and couple others the first--they wanted to meet with us.

And so we agreed to do it. So the meeting, the first meeting was set up to be in North Carolina, which I was pretty hesitant to go to North Carolina because I mean these guys were pretty much after us. You know I was afraid we were going to get tricked I was afraid it was a trick.

I didn't know what it was. I mean, tell you these guys had sued Dick and all these unnamed John Does they had taken out after Merrill Williams, they taken out after Jeffrey Wigand. They called me everything in the book. I mean, I wouldn't I wouldn't just go up there and just show up in North Carolina for God's sake and meet somebody I never met in my life.

Q: Enemy territory? Who were the people who came from the tobacco industry?

Mike Moore: Phil Carlton and I believe Meyer Capwell, for sure. I don't know if there's anybody else there or not. But Joe went and told them that we would meet with them. We just wanted to see what they had in mind and they told Joe that they were sincere that they really wanted to set up some meetings. So what we did is when Joe got back and called us, we set up a meeting and what we called neutral territory. It really wasn't neutral territory.

We had Phil Carlton come meet us at the Campaign for the Tobacco Free Kids in Washington DC, at Matt Myers' place. And so, we had Matt Myers and myself and Dick and I believe John Cole go and meet in Washington at the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids with Phil Carlton.

Q. What happened at that meeting?

Mike Moore: I wanted to see his credentials. I wanted to know that he represented the industry. He is a former Supreme Court Judge. I did a lot of checking on him before he showed up. As I am sure he did a lot of checking on me before I showed up. And, he was a very genuine fellow. He was very businesslike and assured us that the industry wanted to have face to face meetings, and I made several conditions for a meeting.

I mean what I told him was that the only way I would meet is if they would bring the Chief Executive Officers of the industry face to face. I wanted Geoffrey Bible seated right across the table from me. I wanted Steven Goldstone seated across the table from me. Because I wanted to look them eye to eye, man to man to judge their sincerity.

I didn't want a bunch of tobacco lawyers. I had had it with tobacco lawyers. Don't send me these lawyers who are involved in these cases cause you know they have no credibility with me, whatsoever. And they said "well I don't know if we could work that out but we'll try." I said "Well if you can't there won't be any meeting."

So I got a call the next day and they said that they'll have Bible there and Goldstone there and I said that was fine. And they picked them a team of negotiators and my job was to pick a couple other Attorneys General. We were trying to keep it at 4 and 4. That's what we were trying to keep it at. Believe that or not.

Q: Two CEO's.

Mike Moore: We were going to have a couple of CEO's who would come make some statements and they would leave and be available for they didn't know how long these negotiations were go on. And they would replace them with negotiators who were not tobacco lawyers, new guys. Meyer Capwell, Arthur Golden and many others Bob Fiske and the like.

Q: Boy that's high power little group there.

Mike Moore: Real high power group.

Q: Bob Fiske, former US Attorney in New York, former special prosecutor.

Mike Moore: That's right That's right. These were high dollar players, and very smart, very shrewd negotiators. So my job at that point when I left the meeting in Washington was I had to select some Attorney's General to be part of the negotiating team. I had to reach out and grab people who I can trust number one to keep it quiet because these had to be secret negotiations.

We walked into what was a pretty big ball room with a big long rectangular table. And in front of the table was Geoffrey Bible, you know there to greet us when we walked into the room and Steve Goldstone. It was strange. I mean it was you know when the grip on the hand shake was, you are thinking to yourself, these are the guys that I've been you know railing against for the last four years. These are these are some folks who've done some bad things and you know I'm walking in the room shaking hands with them. And you know the usual nice things gestures that you do and glad to meet you etc. and I don't know if I was glad to meet them or not but I was glad that they were there. What I wanted to see and I am sure what the other Attorney's General wanted to see what was it that they were going to say. And more importantly what was it they were going to do.

At the first meeting with Phil Carlton, I had given him a copy of what we had hoped to accomplish with a resolution. We had some goals and objectives that all 22 Attorneys General at that time who had cases had sign on to these are the things we wanted.

Q. What was said at that first meeting?

Mike Moore: Steve Goldstone was tired of being called a drug dealer. He was tired of being called someone who is marketing to kids, and ruining their lives and causing people to die. I think he fundamentally didn't want to be, uh, described as that.

I think it was heartfelt. I really do, don't get me wrong. I don't think they're good guys because of that, but I think that had gotten to him. That every single day, you're killing kids. You're marketing to children. I think it had gotten to him, personally. He was a lawyer, remember. I mean he was a lawyer representing the tobacco industry, and then moved into the job of chief executive.

Well it was kind of a different position for him. He wasn't a lawyer anymore representing them. He was them. So, I'm not sure he liked that. But, you know, so we started negotiations and it was pretty amazing, Lowell, the things they started saying that they would agree to do.

Q: Why did the industry come to the table?

Mike Moore: I think a number of things. The change in public opinion from the time we filed our lawsuit in '94 to the time that they began. And that in my estimation was accomplished by the work that the media in this country had done, exposing the truth about the industry. The power of the state's lawsuits because they'd gone from one little case in Mississippi to 40 cases in this country. The FDA rule. The President of the United State's involvement. Congressional hearings in the past. The work of all the public health advocates. I think everything built on itself to bring the industry to the realization, they had to have a day time. They had to have a peace of some sort.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/settlement/

Matt Myers is Executive Vice President and General Counsel of the National Center for Tobacco Free Kids, a Washington based anti-tobacco lobbying group. As a private lawyer in the eighties, he lobbied Congress and won a doubling of the per pack cigarette tax. In 1996 the National Center on Tobacco Free Kids was created with private donations from groups such as the American Cancer Society and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It launched an intensive anti-smoking campaign to reduce smoking among children. While Myers was working at the FTC on warning labels, he enlisted the support of then Congressman, Al Gore and it was this connection that made Myers a central player in the settlement debate. As negotiations began, the White House insisted Myers be part of any talks to ensure that the public health perspective was included (the very first meeting between the Attorneys General and a Tobacco Industry Emissary, Phil Carlton, took place at Myers' offices in March of 1997.) As a longtime critic of the tobacco industry, Myers confounded his fellow health advocates when he joined the negotiations.

"One of the best examples of the fact that the tobacco industry knew long before the Surgeon General, just how deadly it's product is, is by looking at how they had clearly, carefully planned. When the Surgeon General's report came out in 1964, tobacco industry members of Congress were already situated in key position in each and every committee of the Congress of the United States."

Q. Matt, you are a veteran of the tobacco wars. Give me an idea back three or four years ago, before all this started in a way, of the power of the industry. Its political and legal power.

Myers: It is remarkable, when you consider that it has been over 30 years since the Surgeon General found that without any doubt, tobacco was the number one preventable cause of premature death and disease in this country. If it had been any other product that caused 1/1000th of that sort of problem, we as a nation would have acted and acted decisively. This industry wouldn't continue to exist if it was any other product.

Q. How did they do it? Who worked for them? I mean, to people who don't know how powerful they were, what did they look like to you?

Myers: The tobacco industry has used its political power and financial muscle to tie Washington up in a way that no other industry ever has done before. If you look back to 1964, Surgeon General, President of the United States declare this to be the number one cause of premature death and disease. Causing one of the worst deaths we know. Lung cancer.

And yet, when the Federal Trade Commission proposed simply to put strong health warnings on it, Congress swooped in and literally cut them off at the knees. The Federal Trade Commission as an agency didn't recover for decades to the swipe they took. It was so bad, frankly, that the person who was the Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission in 1964, when confronted with a report in 1980 by the staff of the FTC, recommending stronger health warnings said, "I will never vote against the tobacco industry again in my entire life. You have no idea what it is like to go up to the Congress of the United States and face those people under those circumstances."

Fifteen years later that man was still terrified of stepping out and doing what was right against this industry.

Q. Who did they have working for them? I mean, lawyers, politicians, who was on their side?

Myers: You know, one of the best examples of the fact that the tobacco industry knew long before the Surgeon General, just how deadly its product is, is by looking at how they had clearly, carefully planned. When the Surgeon General's report came out in 1964, tobacco industry members of Congress were already situated in key positions in each and every committee of the Congress of the United States.

So when the federal government proposed action, it was a tobacco state senator or representative who was presiding over the committee that said, "No how, no way, not now, not ever." They knew it was coming and they were the first of the industries, long before we had this with any other industry, to recognize that the key to continuing your action was to get your members of Congress in the right place. To make the right political contributions at the right time. And to organize your constituency back home in a way that would have been sophisticated for 1980, let alone 1964.

It is one of the real worst examples of pure corporate power used to undermine sound public policy.

Q. Just so I understand, we now know that these various different companies met together and conspired together?

Myers: The documents that have come out in the last four years are incontrovertible. These companies sat down in a room together and devised an orchestrated scheme to deceive the American public about what they knew about their product. And undermine the will of Congress in terms of taking on the industry in a way that they would have if it was any other industry.

Q. You are an attorney. It sounds illegal.

Myers: I think it was illegal. It was certainly immoral.

Q. What was your reaction when you heard that the State of Mississippi had filed a Medicaid suit.

Myers: I have to admit my initial reaction was skepticism until I began looking at the legal theories that were behind the lawsuit. And it was only after spending time carefully analyzing the case that I began to realize that this might be something truly different.

Q. And when you first met Mike Moore and Dick Scruggs, what did you make of them?

Myers: You know when I first met Mike Moore and Dick Scruggs, I was struck by a couple of things. That Mike was a charismatic figure who had an ability to carry off things that others probably underestimated. And the last thing that Dick Scruggs was, was some hick lawyer. This was a bright guy with broad visions. And that this was the sort of guy the tobacco industry ought to be afraid of.

Q. Because?

Myers: Because Dick Scruggs had the experience and the breadth of vision to mount a challenge against the tobacco industry, unlike any other that they had seen before.

From his experience in asbestos, where he was one of the lead lawyers in bringing down the asbestos industry, it was clear he really had a sense for the jugular. And in this case it was clear that he had a better understanding than those who had been close to the tobacco litigation for years, of the weaknesses in the traditional cases, and the type of claims that could well strike a very different and more responsive cord in juries.

Q. Your organization is, describe it, what does it do?

Myers: The National Center for Tobacco Free Kids is slightly less than two years old. We were created out of a number of foundation grants and grants from voluntary public health organizations to be the nations largest non-profit organization fighting the tobacco industry.

Our primary focus on public policy changes that will reduce tobacco use among children, but not to the exclusion of trying to reduce overall tobacco use.

Q. So when you got a call, I assume, from Dick Scruggs or Mike Moore in March of '97 that the tobacco industry, some guy named Phil Carlton, wanted to talk. That the White House wanted to meet with them, what was your reaction?

Mike said to me that he had gotten a call from a fellow by the name of Phil Carlton who I had never heard of. That Carlton wanted to meet and wanted to enter into a series of discussions on behalf of the tobacco industry.

And Mike said to me that he wasn't going to do so. And just wanted to make sure that we were on the same wavelength. That he knew that I had been contacted. He had been told that I had been contacted.

And he, for the first time, told me that somebody from the Costano Group, the class action lawyers in Louisiana had also been called. And that he had been talking to them. And at least on behalf of the Attorney Generals, Mike's inclination was not to have a meeting. He didn't think it would be productive. That he thought it was a side show at that point in time.

And so, if I was comfortable with that posture, they were just going to go ahead and continue to prepare for trial.

Q. So Mike Moore contacted you after this initial meeting with Mitchell's partners and said he had been contacted, but he didn't believe it. He thought it was hot air. So what changed his mind? As I understand it, they all met in your office.

Myers: Well Mike would have to be the one who tells you that because I didn't get the call. What I understand happened is that Bruce Lindsay from the White House and Mike Easely, the Attorney General from North Carolina called Mike and said, each in their own way, we would really like you to at least have an initial meeting. You don't have to have a second meeting, but at least have one.

And so Mike called me and said he had received these calls. That he thought out of respect to the individuals who had called that we had to have the meeting. Was I willing to do so?

He suggested he thought it would be better if we met together and could we do it in my offices? So I said yes. And it was literally the next afternoon the meeting took place in my office, with Mike Moore, myself, a representative from the Costano Group in Louisiana, Dick Scruggs and Phil Carlton.

Q. What was going on in your mind when you are sitting down to a meeting with somebody from the tobacco industry who says we are going to change.

Myers: My view at that point was that it was still nothing more than a smokescreen. That this was exactly what they had always done before. Anybody who had followed the history of this would see that every four years or whenever they were in deep trouble, a key tobacco representative would stand up and say, we recognize that we need to make change and we are prepared to do it. We want to live like honorable citizens in the United States.

And I thought this deserved the same credibility that every one of those other statements deserved. That was my personal view at the time.

At the same time, my view was that you didn't have a choice about whether you listened or not. That it was simply wrong not to listen and then make an independent evaluation.

Q. So in March when you are having your first meeting with Phil Carlton, you already know that some of your colleagues aren't going to be happy, that you even had that meeting.

Myers: Now, we had done other things since the November meeting had broken down. After the November meeting broke down, we engaged in a series of discussions with the CEOs of a number of voluntary health organizations and other major health organizations. Saying to them, we still need try to come up with a set of principles. We have go to be ready because we won't be able to withstand an effort to come up with a compromise. If we don't set forth a solid agenda that makes sense, the White House and the Congress simply isn't going to listen to, no, not without regard to what is on the table. We simply won't deal with those people.

We have got to be able to make a case and to do that we have got to have an agenda that makes sense. Because otherwise we won't be listened to and that is what has happened to the public health community every time in the past. And if we are going to influence the outcome, we have to be substantive, we have to be focused.

Q. You can't just be nay sayers.

Myers: You just can't be nay sayers. That works for people for whom tobacco is their whole life. It doesn't work for members of Congress. It doesn't work for the press. It doesn't work for the public and it won't work for the White House.

And so if we are going to want to be able to say no, we had better know what it is that what we want and what we don't want. And if we are going to push the White House to do the right thing, we had better know substantively what that is as well. It is the only way to be a key player in which will clearly be something that is going to happen, whether we like it or not.

Q. In your mind, when you are going into that first meeting, what is going on?

Myers: Well, my mind was actually pretty clear. I thought I was going to one meeting. That the meeting would relatively rapidly break down and the it would be business as usual. I had a very hard time envisioning any situation where the industry would really make an offer in enough detail to make it worthwhile to continue to participate in discussions with them.

That was 100% my mind set. I couldn't envision this being anything more than one afternoon.

Q. You go in. You sit down. George Mitchell comes in, as I understand it.

Myers: I was late. I mean the great irony, the only person who doesn't have a case. I was late to the meeting because I was coming from the Hill. And I had trouble finding a parking place.

They were already seated. George Mitchell. Phil Carleton had apparently introduced everybody. When I walked into the room they were already seated there. People stopped when I came in. The thing that struck me about it actually, more than anything else, was Goldstone and Bible coming up to me and very personally commenting about how pleased they were to meet me. And how they thought that I would be surprised, what they were going to have to say.

So I sat down in the room. The room has probably been described to you already. Mitchell finished his talk which, frankly, said nothing. And...

Q. George Mitchell was the greeter.

Myers: Yes. That is exactly what he was. The greeter. He had no substantive role whatsoever. His job was to use his name and reputation to bring people into the room and then do nothing else. And I was struck by that. I was struck by it with a phone call to me. I was struck by the role he played that day. And then he turned it over to Bible and Goldstone.

Q. When in the meeting did you have a flicker that maybe these guys were serious?

Myers: Bible and Goldstone spoke. They are both very persuasive individuals, but they only spoke in platitudes. So, you know, my thought... My reaction was if you were hearing them for the first time, if you didn't know anything about the tobacco industry, this would have been pretty persuasive stuff. Although there was no meat to it.

My reaction to it was, these guys are good. But whether there is anything here yet, is still to be seen. After they spoke, the meeting broke. They left with George Mitchell. And then their lawyers came back and going through the agenda that the state Attorney Generals had laid out, item by item, made general representations about things that they were willing to do.

The general representations were concrete enough to be different. But general enough to not be certain how different. Concrete enough that it demanded a reply to try and draw them out and see how much more was there.

What was clear from the very get-go was their demands of what they wanted were completely outrageous and totally unacceptable.

Q. They wanted immunity.

Myers: They wanted immunity from everything. I mean they wanted... They, you know, their request was for peace now and forever. They never wanted to walk into another courtroom again. They didn't want to face criminal immunity, they didn't want any civil...

Q. Civil prosecution.

Myers: Criminal prosecution. Yes, that is right. They didn't want to face criminal prosecution. They didn't want to face any more lawsuits. They weren't willing to say, but they said they were willing to pay a lot of money to do that. And willing to change every aspect about how they do business.

You couldn't listen to that and say, immediately, that is so far off the charts. That is so beyond the realm that it is impossible.

Q. These are the people that you been trying to beat, put out of business, if you will, for decades.

Myers: These are people I have called the greatest mass murderers in the history of mankind. People who have no moral gyroscope. I believed that when I walked into the room, I believed that after I listened to them. And I ultimately said to myself, and this is something I had thought about beforehand so whether it was right, wrong or what have you. Maybe it is the training as a trial lawyer.

But the ultimate goal here can't be dominated by the extent to which I despise those people and what they have done. The ultimate goal really has got to be focused on what can we do to change how tobacco is marketed and sold in this country. The number of people who have died in this country from tobacco. And do it in a way that meets basic principles with moral and social justice.

Q. Who is Steve Parrish?

Myers: Steve Parrish has been the mouthpiece of Philip Morris for a decade. Yes. But it may be hard for you to see, but I went into the meeting with the conscious thought that I had to separate personal feelings about the individuals from the public policy goals that we needed to achieve. That is not an easy thing to do.

Q. Isn't it in the back of your mind that your colleagues, your allies are saying he is doing that in secret if they found out you were meeting with the enemy in secret and they didn't know. Weren't you taking your life work in your hands?

Myers: In some respects, yes. I did some things to try to decrease that risk. That very night I had the President of the organizations I work with set up a conference call with the CEOs of a number of the major health organizations. The Cancer Society, The Heart Association, AMA Academy of Pediatrics. I believed at that time, The Lung Association as well then. I will have to go back to double check exactly. I didn't set up the conference call. So that within a day we would be in a position to at least let the leadership of those organizations know that there were conversations going on.

But the other question, the one that you raised, is one that I really only began to focus on over the week-end. This conversation, first conversation took place on a Thursday afternoon, if my recollection is correct. There was another meeting on Friday afternoon. And enough energy just went into preparation for focus on those meetings.

It was really only over the weekend where you had a chance to step back a bit and say, okay, now... And try to figure out where you are in all that. And, that juncture, I recognized full well that if this went wrong, that this would make it very difficult for the work I had, you know, committed to doing with a large number of people.

Q. Well some people say that you got carried away. That you had not right to negotiate on their behalf.

Myers: And I didn't negotiate on their behalf. There are two ways to look at it. There is three ways to look at it. And in the different perspective, each had merit.

I told Goldstone, Bible and everybody else I wasn't there on anybody's behalf. That if they wanted me to be there on somebody's behalf then they had to give me permission to go and consult with all of them to do that.

Q. Why did they have to give you permission? Why didn't you just say, hey, I can't negotiate with you guys, I am just one person. I have to go talk to my people.

Myers: Well, but I did that. Because in the very first conference call with the very CEOs, I raised the issue of whether there ought to be other people there. And whether they had suggestions of who it ought to be and whether they wanted other people there.

And the conclusion they reached at the time was that they hoped I would be willing to keep going for a while, while they figured out the answer to that question.

By the time that the discussions became public, which was really less than two weeks later, we had already begun talking seriously about trying to insert other public health representatives into the process. And immediately after they became public...

Q. But you were there on June 20th, you endorsed the settlement.

Myers: I did not endorse the agreement. I did not sign the agreement.

Q. You said it was a great step forward.

Myers: And it was. It was. I said the agreement was flawed but it provides the best opportunity for change that we have ever had.

Q. Here is what your critics say. This is the draft proposal. They tell me, look to page 37. Title 7, paragraph C. $500 million dollars shall be spent annually in such multi-media campaigns. That is, public education campaigns...

Myers: Right.

Q. ...Designed to discourage and deglamorize the use of tobacco products. To carry out such efforts, an independent non-profit organization, made up of prestigious individuals and leaders of the major public health organizations shall be created, etc. And they shall contract or make grants to non-profit, private enterprises who are unaffiliated with tobacco manufacturers or tobacco importers. Who have demonstrated a record of working effectively to produce tobacco product use and expertise in multi-media communications campaign.

What the critics say is, this is your organization. That this was a payoff to your organization, directly.

Myers: I wrote those words. I wrote those words. I'll take direct responsibility for them. I wrote those words based on the best of what we know you have to do to produce an effective counter- advertising campaign. I wrote those words based upon the comments of many of those same people about what was wrong with the advertising campaigns in states like California and Massachusetts in an effort to insulate it from public political pressure.

I also said that the National Center wouldn't accept one penny of that money so that there would never be a question that that was designed to enhance our organization.

Q. How do you explain that your colleagues, who you worked with so many years were so bitter about your participation in this deal? And, in fact, in the deal even being announced.

Myers: This agreement and all that it has led to has provoked the most fundamental passions, many of which for good reason. It moves us forward so far in answering fundamental questions. Questions that were just literally hypotheticals only a year ago.

What really are the ultimate policies we want to enact in this country? What are our real goals with regard to the tobacco industry? What are the moral questions about political trade offs of this magnitude? They should have and they did provoke the deepest most passionate feelings. Feelings that have been an undercurrent but you didn't have to get to. As long as you were only tinkering at the edges of this problem. And that is what we were doing before now.

This agreement has provoked the deepest, most important public policy debate about tobacco that this nation has ever had. And anybody, in any single position with regard to it is going to be subject to some level of criticism. I knew that when we at the National Center decided to participate that I was taking a serious risk.

You know, I got into this business for one reason and that was that this country's history of reining in the tobacco industry is beyond deplorable. I think it is one of the great tragedies of this century. And if there was an opportunity to do something to make a fundamental change, I was willing to take a risk to do that.

Q. Well, but your colleagues would say, they were on the ropes. They were going to get wiped out by these Medicaid suits. They may still get wiped out in Minnesota as we speak. And you were providing them a way out. A way to survive.

Myers: I guess there are a couple of answers to that question. They were on the ropes, but we have to ask to what end and at what risk? The outcomes of those lawsuits was, and remain, uncertain. Having worked with those Attorney Generals, I know that the vast majority of them were prepared to settle their cases before and will be prepared to settle them in the future.

Having studied those cases and looked at the law, you can't get away from the fact that those cases bear substantial risk and that those courts are not likely to order fundamental wholesale change. Bankruptcy ultimately isn't going to be an answer.

Q. You don't believe that you, in a sense, have been outsmarted by the industry. I mean I have a document from 1980 from British American Tobacco that basically outlines a deal. Let's change our policy. Let's stop youth smoking. Let's not try to get more young people to smoke. We have got the wrong strategy in the United States. And it concludes that the problem to date has been a severe constraint of the American legal position.

This problem has made us seem to lack credibility in the eyes of the ordinary man on the street. Somehow we must regain this credibility. By giving a little, we may gain a lot. By giving nothing, we stand to lose everything.

Myers: If we accept them giving a little, then we will have lost. That is why it is so fundamental important that we focus on what it is we, as a nation, want. Not what the tobacco industry wants to give. If we demand from Congress that they enact the right policies, policies that go far beyond anything the tobacco industry was prepared to give, even in those negotiations, then we have an opportunity to bring about the sort of fundamental change that we are not otherwise going to see.

Q. So are you saying that what you did on July... Are you saying that what you did on June 20th was, in a sense, make them think you endorsed the deal but actually outsmarted them because they can never go back?

Myers: What I think we did throughout the process is change the debate about what is possible and that the June 20th agreement was the starting point for the public and Congressional debate. Now only history will tell us whether they outsmarted us or we outsmarted them.

But what I do know is that without that agreement, we wouldn't be having the debate today in Congress or in the public about what to do with the tobacco industry along these lines. We wouldn't have legislation being seriously considered of the threat, toughness and expanse that we have today.

There has been a sea change in Congress on which side to be on of this debate, since June 20th, that is unprecedented in the 20 years before it.

Q. What do you mean?

Myers: There are members of Congress now that are supporting tough action against the tobacco industry who never voted with us. Never voted with us before. We have members of Congress who have endorsed the most stringent regulation by the food and drug administration. Who, only a year and a half ago, signed a letter to the FDA urging them not to assert jurisdiction over tobacco.

We have members of Congress sponsoring legislation with the toughest possible controls on the tobacco industry who, only last summer, voted not to give the Food and Drug Administration enough money to enforce simple youth access restrictions. This debate has forever changed how members of Congress are agreeing to deal with the tobacco industry in an extraordinarily positive way.

Q. Then why are some of your colleagues so worried that the tobacco industry will slip out of their clutches, if you will, in Congress?

Myers: I share those concerns. I mean there is no other way to put it. I share those concerns and that is why the public debate, I think, has been so constructive.

Congress' history of tobacco is a history of failure and backroom deals that were bad for the American public. You can, however, say that we have the tobacco industry on the brink of oblivion, with wholesale public attitudes change and not also recognize that that could well give us an opportunity to do something in Congress that we couldn't do before. If we do it right. You can be frozen into inaction by past mistakes or you can learn from them and try to make change.

Q. Is it really a done deal already because there is so much money involved?

Myers: Fortunately, the answer is no. It is not a done deal precisely because of the passions that it has provoked. For once this is not going to be a deal that is done behind closed doors without people paying attention.

Q. Well let me ask you about what you are willing to give them. Are you willing to give them immunity from punitive damages?

Myers: First and foremost, my role in this process has changed. I am no longer sitting in a room negotiating with the tobacco industry. The debate has moved beyond June 20th to the halls of Congress. What Congress has got to decide is not what the tobacco industry wants, but what is good public policy.

As an advocate for the public health, my job is to make sure that Congress does the best possible job.

Q. Okay. What is the best possible job? What are you going to trade for all this public health money, for all these reparations, for all these payments, for all these education campaigns. Will you give them, would you advocate giving them immunity from punitive damages.

Myers: I would never advocate giving them immunity for anything. I didn't advocate it in the June 20th agreement. I didn't accept it in the June 20th agreement. I wouldn't advocate it now.

Whether there will have to be a trade off at the end is something that is impossible for me to predict. If we in the public health community do our job, there shouldn't have to be a wholesale trade at the end.

Q. If the tobacco industry is willing to put up $60 billion for past punitive damages, would you give them a buy on past punitive damages. If they are just going to pay $60 billion up front?

Myers: It is a question I can't answer for you. My initial inclination is that the issue of past punitive damages is one of the most difficult ones. I objected to the negotiations about past punitive damages throughout the negotiations. The agreement on past punitive damages, as everyone knows, was made on a day that I wasn't at the negotiations.

Q. You do agree, however, that $500 million should be paid to an organization or organizations that are involved in public education against smoking?

Myers: I agree and everyone in the public health community agrees that a well funded independent public education campaign is a crucial part of any comprehensive plan whatsoever. I also have agreed that our organization has said from the get-go that we wouldn't accept that money, so that there would never be any question about our motives.

Q. Do you agree with the view that giving them immunity from class action suits is actually giving them nothing because existing precedents are you can't sue in a national class action anyway.

Myers: I put it differently. I happen to believe that the law of class actions means that they are not likely to be a powerful tool for the public health. But I think that is a reason why they shouldn't be given immunity from them.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/settlement/