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Excerpts from: Cigarette makers pressured drug companies, report says

By Barbara Feder Ostrov  [08/14/02]
 
 San Jose Mercury News

Cigarette makers pressed drug companies to tone down their public campaigns for nicotine patches and other smoking cessation aids in the 1980s and 1990s _ and the drug firms agreed because they feared losing lucrative sales of agricultural chemicals to tobacco companies, according to industry documents and Bay Area researchers.

In one case, Philip Morris canceled large orders of chemicals from a sister company of the maker of Nicorette gum, resuming only after the gum manufacturer significantly weakened its anti-smoking marketing materials, according to Philip Morris documents.

In another case, the parent company of a tobacco manufacturer also owned a firm that made nicotine gum, putting the conglomerate in the conflicting position of selling both habit-forming tobacco products as well as products to break that habit.

These cases and a third, all dating from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, are detailed in a report by University of California-San Francisco researchers Lisa Bero and Bhavna Shamasunder in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association. The companies named in the report downplayed its findings, but the researchers and anti-smoking advocates said the study points to troubling links between drug and tobacco firms. "I wasn't so suprised that financial ties existed," Bero said in an interview Tuesday. "I was surprised that the pharmaceutical companies caved in and changed their advertising. Nicotine therapy is a great market."

Bero, a professor of clinical pharmacy, and Shamasunder, a research associate, reviewed nearly 200 documents posted on industry web sites. The once-secret documents were made public as part of 1998 national tobacco settlement that ended lawsuits filed over smoking-related health costs.

Bero argues that consumers need to know more about the ethics of financial ties between the pharmaceutical and tobacco industries.

"A lot of this happens behind the scenes and we just don't know about it," she said.

A spokesman for Philip Morris dismissed the revelations.

"From our perspective, these are old documents. Certainly they do not reflect the actions we'd take or the positions we'd hold today," Brendan McCormick said. "We acknowledge that cigarette smoking causes serious diseases in smokers and that it's addictive. We communicate on our website that to reduce the health risks of smoking, the best thing to do is quit."

In the report, the researchers explain how Philip Morris influenced Marion Merrell Dow, subsidiary of Dow Chemical Company, to reduce its marketing materials for Nicorette gum from a comprehensive newsletter to a single sentence: "If you want to quit smoking for good, see your doctor."

In addition to Nicorette marketing materials, Philip Morris objected to Dow's efforts to encourage workers at one plant to quit smoking, a Dow-sponsored study showing that smokers incurred higher medical expenses, and grants to anti-smoking coalitions.

"We had been assured that Nicorette would have a low-key introduction and would be aimed only at those smokers who had to quit for medical reasons," a Phillip Morris executive wrote in a confidential memo.

Dow "cannot realistically expect a customer to spend millions of dollars for materials, when the profits from those sales...are used to attack that customer's product," the memo continued.

Philip Morris resumed purchases only after Dow abandoned its Nicorette newsletter and stopped donations to anti-smoking organizations, the documents show.

A Dow spokesman described the JAMA article as "overreaching" and noted that Dow had divested itself of its pharmaceutical operations in 1995. Dow still sells some chemicals to the tobacco industry, but the quantities are minimal, John Musser said. Nicorette is currently marketed by GlaxoSmithKline

"Regardless of the extent of accommodations made in this instance, Nicorette continued to thrive and was a very successful product," Musser said.

In another case, a Swedish-owned conglomerate included both a tobacco company that made chewing tobacco and a pharmaceutical company that developed the technology for Nicorette gum and a nicotine inhaler used for smoking cessation. The close ties between these firm, the researchers note, created an ethical quandary in which their parent company could profit by creating an addiction _ then selling products to break it.

In a third case, Philip Morris and other tobacco companies pressured pharmaceutical firm Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis) to drop its "Smoke Busters" ad campaign for the Habitrol nicotine patch and restrict its marketing to smokers who wanted to quit, rather than all smokers.

At stake were lucrative sales of tobacco fungicides made by another division of Ciba-Geigy, as well as contracts for tobacco pesticide testing. Phillip Morris and other companies expressed their concerns about the ad campaign to that agricultural division, according to an internal Philip Morris memo. That division then pressured the Habitrol divison to change its marketing stance. Ciba-Geigy also faced pressure from state lawsuits alleging false advertising and deceptive trade practices, which were later settled.

In 1992, Ciba-Geigy ultimately created internal "ground rules" for marketing Habitrol. Among them: "We do not endorse positions which would take away the freedom of choice for smokers."

Novartis officials did not immediately return a phone call from the San Jose Mercury News.

John Banzhaf of the antismoking group Action on Smoking and Health described the article's findings as a "shocking revelation" that could open up pharmaceutical companies to litigation from smokers.

"Tobacco companies keep talking about the right to smoke," Banzhaf said, "But they don't seem to recognize there's a right to quit."

Added Anne Landman, a Colorado-based American Lung Association official who has extensively researched the tobacco industry's once-secret files: "For the first time in history, we are starting to see more about corporate behavior. We're starting to pay more attention to corporate behavior."

Landman described the Nicorette case in a 1999 article in the Journal of Tobacco Control, but the UCSF researchers discovered the advertising changes that resulted under Philip Morris' pressure.

"Little do consumers know they are the pawns in all this," Landman said.

Information about the JAMA article is available at http://jama.ama-assn.org/

Philip Morris documents are available at http://www.pmdocs.com/