Philip Morris U.S.A. Details Additional Misrepresentations by Congressman Waxman

Business Wire, August 1, 1995

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--August 1, 1995--On July 24, Congressman Henry Waxman, in statements on the House floor, made a series of charges against Philip Morris based on allegedly "secret" documents pertaining to Philip Morris research. In fact, the documents Mr. Waxman cited were produced to the plaintiffs in the 1988 Cipollone case -- a case Philip Morris won in court.

More importantly, Mr. Waxman's characterizations of those documents are simply false. Repeatedly, Mr. Waxman eliminated critical passages from the documents he claimed to be quoting and seriously mischaracterized both the purposes and the results of Philip Morris' research activities.

1. For example, Mr. Waxman suggested that Philip Morris conducted research on the pharmacological effects of nicotine on children. That is false.

The proposal was simply to conduct a prospective study designed to track children with certain attention deficit disorders to see whether they were more likely than children without such disorders to become smokers in later years. The study was proposed to be conducted in collaboration with respected, independent medical professionals working in the Richmond area who were interested in learning more about the behavior of such children when they grew up.

Such research on the types of children who later become smokers was neither uncommon nor inappropriate. Scientists outside of Philip Morris had spent decades considering why people start smoking and the differences between nonsmokers and smokers. These studies of the "personality" of smokers included studies tracking identical twins and surveys of adolescents. Indeed such studies were so common that they were reported in the 1969 Encyclopedia Americana.

The portions of the document that Mr. Waxman deleted from his speech also show that Philip Morris had no intention of giving cigarettes to children and that this was simply a prospective study. The document actually states:

"In recent years it has been found that amphetamines, which are strong stimulants, have the anomalous effect of quieting these children down and enabling them to concentrate in the face of distractions which otherwise would have disrupted their attention. Many children are therefore regularly administered amphetamines throughout grade school years. The wisdom of such prescription is open to question, and some published reports have suggested that caffeine, in the form of coffee or tea for breakfast, would produce the same end result. We wonder whether such children may not eventually become cigarette smokers in their teenage years as they discover the advantage of self-stimulation via nicotine. We have already collaborated with a local school system in identifying some such children presently in the third grade; we are reviewing the available literature on the topic; and we may propose a prospective study of this relationship. It would be good to show that smoking is an advantage to at least one subgroup of the population. Needless to say, we will not propose giving cigarettes to children." (Emphasis added to show text deleted by Mr. Waxman.)

F.J. Ryan, "Relationship between Smoking and Personality," in Smoker Psychology Monthly Report-June 10, 1974, at 2.

2. Mr. Waxman's characterizations of Philip Morris' studies of smoking and stress among college students as something insidious are also false. Again, in his speech Mr. Waxman edited out portions of the documents which indicate that the college students -- who were all over 21 -- engaged in these studies voluntarily and were free to discontinue participation at any time.

Indeed, Mr. Waxman ignored the fact that such research in which smokers were exposed to mild electric shocks to simulate a stressful situation were already part of the scientific literature before Philip Morris conducted this research. For example, in the late sixties and early seventies, Professor Stanley Schachter at Columbia University and his assistant, Paul Nesbitt, conducted just such research. The mild shock in the Philip Morris study was administered to the subjects' fingers.

This independent university research involving mild shocks was hardly a "secret." In fact, the research by Professor Schachter was published in a 1972 book on the subject of smoking behavior. Philip Morris merely proposed to replicate the type of experiment conducted by such researchers at Columbia and other universities.

Philip Morris likewise made no attempt to hide the fact that such research was being sponsored by Philip Morris. Indeed, in 1977, the Journal of Experimental Psychology published a study funded by Philip Morris entitled "Effects of Stress on Cigarette Smoking and Urinary pH," by Professor Schachter and others which used a virtually identical methodology to test the effects of stress on cigarette smoking behavior. Schachter, et al., "Effects of Stress on Cigarette Smoking and Urinary pH," Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol. 104, No. 1 (1977), 24.

3. There are many more examples of Mr. Waxman's deliberate misquotation of the Philip Morris documents. For example, Mr. Waxman said one document showed that a Philip Morris researcher told the Philip Morris Board of Directors that "people smoked to obtain 'the pharmacological effect of smoke.'' What Mr. Waxman did not tell the American public was that there was little scientific basis for that statement, which was described in that very document as "basic exploratory research."