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The Frank Statement: Seven CEOs Who Chose to Lie
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
In December 1953, the mouse painting studies proved cigarettes caused cancer — and within weeks, seven tobacco CEOs signed a public document committing to deceive the world. This is how the tobacco cover-up was engineered.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's the question that should have ended the tobacco industry in nineteen fifty-four. If you knew your product caused cancer, and you knew that your own scientists had confirmed it, what would you do?
To understand what those seven men were responding to, you need to go back to December nineteen fifty-three. A researcher named Ernst Wynder, working with Evarts Graham and Adele Croninger, had spent months painting concentrated tobacco smoke condensate onto the shaved backs of laboratory mice.
In December of that same month, the presidents and chief executives of the major tobacco companies gathered at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. The meeting was organized with help from a public relations firm called Hill and Knowlton.
It ran on January fourth, nineteen fifty-four, as a full-page advertisement in more than four hundred newspapers across the country. It was signed by the heads of every major tobacco company.
What made the Frank Statement significant wasn't just the act of deception itself. It was that the deception was organized.
While the industry was managing its scientific credibility problem, it was also doing something else entirely. It was building some of the most effective marketing machinery in American commercial history.
The most consequential development in the history of tobacco litigation didn't come from a government investigation. It came from a paralegal named Merrell Williams, who worked for a law firm representing Brown and Williamson.
Then came Jeffrey Wigand. Wigand had been the vice president of research and development at Brown and Williamson.
By nineteen ninety-eight, the legal and political pressure had become too concentrated to withstand. Forty-six state attorneys general had filed suit against the major tobacco companies to recover healthcare costs.
The final move is still in progress. As cigarette sales began their long decline in the two-thousands, the major tobacco companies began acquiring or developing electronic nicotine delivery systems.
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