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Settlement, Suppression & Survival: Big Tobacco's Last Stand
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Jeffrey Wigand knew exactly how Brown and Williamson engineered addiction — and what it cost him to say so on camera. This chapter covers the suppressed 60 Minutes interview, the leaked documents that couldn't be un-leaked, and the industry's desperate final battle before the 1998 settlement.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Louisville, Kentucky. Nineteen ninety-five.
To understand why Wigand mattered, you need to understand what he had actually seen from inside Brown and Williamson. He wasn't a peripheral figure.
Lowell Bergman was a producer at CBS News. He'd been working on a tobacco story for months, and he needed someone who could speak from the inside.
Wigand's interview didn't arrive in a vacuum. By the time Americans watched him on sixty minutes, something else had already happened that the tobacco industry couldn't undo.
What Wigand and the documents together revealed was the structure of something that had been running for decades. It started formally in nineteen fifty-three, when the mouse painting studies at the Sloan-Kettering Institute showed conclusively that tobacco smoke caused cancer in laboratory animals.
While the industry's PR machinery ran the doubt campaign publicly, the marketing side ran a different operation. The Marlboro Man arrived in nineteen fifty-five.
By nineteen ninety-eight, the accumulated weight of the documents, the Wigand interview, the congressional testimony, and state litigation had produced something the industry couldn't negotiate its way out of. Forty-six state attorneys general had filed lawsuits against the tobacco companies seeking reimbursement for the Medicaid costs of treating smoking-related illness.
The tobacco companies didn't fold after the settlement. They adapted.
Jeffrey Wigand lost almost everything before he gained anything back. He lost his job.
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