Citation Needed - Tobacco Whistle Blowers

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

Jeffrey Stephen Wigand (/ˈwaɪɡænd/; born December 17, 1942) is an American biochemist and whistleblower. He is a former vice president of research and development at Brown & Williamson in Louisville, Kentucky, who worked on the development of reduced-harm cigarettes and in 1996 blew the whistle on tobacco tampering at the company. This was adapted for 1999 film The Insider, with Russell Crowe portraying Wigand. Our theme song was written and performed by Anna Bosnick. If you’d like to support the show on a per episode basis, you can find our Patreon page here.  Be sure to check our website for more details.

Okay, here's a tough one. Who would you rather have crushed your head between her thighs? She Hulk, lady D or Luisa from Encanto Secks talk used to be about like you know boobs and stuff like question coward. Thank you Finally you're here get get get shredding No, no, we got a jam again. I'm coming. I'm coming Guys what is going on in here? Tom, this week's episode got me a Noah thinking. We've done a lot of not-so-legal things in our pre-show shenanigans, like a lot.

And, you know, maybe someone might wanna drop a dime on us. So we're getting rid of as much evidence as possible. Scripts, hard copies of episodes, everything. Yes, speaking of which, Eli, do you have a boat license? Uh, no. Oh, okay, damn it. That's gonna add a bunch. I'm on it.

Guys, guys, relax. You don't have to cover any of this. We're fine. We don't? No, no, it's just a comedy shenanigans thing. How much trouble could we possibly be in? Yeah, I guess you're right. It does have a point.

Kevin O's address is f***. So I'll start with the boxes on the left. Yeah, I'll take the ones on the right. I mean, it is though. Hello and welcome to Citation Needed Podcasts where we choose a subject to read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we are experts because this is the internet and that's how it works now I'm Cecil and I'll be spilling the beans, but I can't overturn this pothola gooms it on So I brought my co-conspirators first up a soy boy and another who loves mong Eli and he's often boy sees all people. Yeah. Is

one of my things now? Is that a can and thing? Sure. Thank you. The pro is brought up team. Whatever the munchies. Solid.

Also joining us tonight. A guy is into chickpea. Another little kill you for coffee. No, and Tom. That's good. A ammonia. That's true. Okay, true story. Before the world stopped, my employees used to bring me coffee and snacks before any

important meetings to make sure I didn't make hangry, uncaffeinated decisions. That's amazing. That is really true. I missed it before time. A lot more snacks. Two patrons. You're the reason Eli doesn't have a day job as a paralegal call for a god. If you'd like to learn how to enjoy their ranks,

be sure to stick around to the end of the show. And with that of the way, tell us Eli, what person place thing concept phenomenon or event we'll be talking about today. We'll be talking about a couple of tobacco whistleblowers, Cecil. All right, Tom, you wanted to somehow dispute the Truskin origins of cigarettes. Are you ready to downplay the humor of my biting satire from last episode? Well, you know, Noah, you might not know this, but whistling itself dates back to the Etrusascans. So really, we owe the whole episode to that. That is not true. I just knocked that up. Anyway, I don't send me an email about that Noah. Anyway, last week Noah told us all about the history of tobacco and Cecil

kept joking about the tobacco executives, tenting their fingers and laughing. And I couldn't help but think that no matter how much we try to satirize or parody the full, genuinely evil reality of tobacco company executives, no amount of satire can compare to the truth. And that truth didn't come to light without an enormous, absurd, ridiculous amount of effort. So I thought it'd add a little more color to those jokes and tell you guys the story of the two big tobacco whistleblowers, Merrill Williams and Jeffrey Wiggand. And can I just be the first to say it? Couple of tattletails. Now we're going to start our story today with the story of Merrill Williams, the first and less famous of the tobacco whistleblowers, likely because

Merrill makes for a rather challenging hero to love. Though our second protagonist is by no means a saint either. Merrill was born in 1941 in Baton Rouge, relocated as a child to West Texas, and then again, to Mississippi, completing possibly the most depressing travel hat trick possible in the United States. That's true. Horrifying. Now despite having lived in Mississippi, Merrill was clearly very bright as he completed

an undergraduate from Baylor, obtained as masters from the University of Mississippi and a PhD from the University of Denver in 1971. There'll be for you get too excited. I do have to warn you, his PhD was in theater arts or as it is now known in 2022, a doctorate in barista services. Yeah, when you get a PhD in theater arts, the P is for podcast. You guys all got real degrees and ended up podcasters. You tell me what's worse.

I got to be a picture. Wasn't yours the most expensive though, Eli? Me and mine was by far the most expensive. The HD is handling dishes. I wish it was dishes. No, you don't. I don't. For a time, Merrill taught class at several junior colleges, but by 1981, despite his sought after terminal degree in the theater arts, Merrill was somehow struggling to find work. He was a heavy smoker. His brand of choice being menthol

cools because again, it was 1981. He was also an alcoholic, which meant that he was going to need some real money because booze and cools are not cheap. They are actually very cheap in 1981. Marilyn rolled at Sullivan, junior college of business to learn how to be a paralegal, which is not a job that requires a degree, but is still many steps above anything, anyone with a PhD in theater arts will ever do. I realized we're dunking on PhDs with theater arts degrees, but the real losers stop at a PFA.

The real. Okay. Give up early. At this point, you were a white. I don't know if you want to. That's it. He's in the monger now. At this point, Marrow's wife of 10 years divorced him. And in that divorce, he lost nearly all of his belongings, except for a bicycle. And Marrow was forced to take odd jobs to try to get by. In 1988, Marrow had secured a position as a paralegal at

the law firm of Wyatt Taranton Combs, though the intervening seven years had not been kind. Williams was now not only divorced the ones, but working on finalizing his third divorce. He had declared bankruptcy four times and was behind in his child support payments. Merrill was not in the midst of his live laugh, love phase of life. Cecil Thomas ghost of Christmas, featuring me. We said no ghost of Christmas, featuring on the show anymore that this guy's nothing like you. He owned a bicycle.

But Merrill was in the middle of some interesting shit. Merrill had been hired by the law firm defending tobacco behemoth, brown and Williamson from litigation and opposing legislation to restrict tobacco use and tobacco marketing. Merrill's job was to work as part of a group to review the trove of documents provided by the tobacco giant for use by the firm in their client's defense. The only problem with that plan was that Merrill pretty much immediately recognized that what he was seeing was an awful lot of documents outlining the finger tenting white cat petting monical wearing evil lying bullshit that had made their client wealthy beyond any understanding. Okay. This memo is just three full pages of laughing in his birth with some dollar signs.

Yeah. And I'm looking at the rest. It's just free samples of cigarettes and crayon boxes. It's these tea or kids. By Christmas of the same year, Merrill began to squirrel away copies of the incriminating documents, and did some seriously clandestine shit to get away with this. These were sensitive documents, so we can just take them home and read them on the shitter.

To abscond with the docs, he tucked them into a mangurdle and then took them to copy shops to photocopy. But Merrill, proving he was a better spy than any of the actual spies we've talked about on this show. Never used the same copy shop twice in a row and was diligent about returning and replacing

the original documents to their box of origin once the copies had been made. Should I take this much care in my next relationship? Now, I'm overthinking it. I'm overthinking it. I love that our standards are so low now that remembered to put him back, qualifies as seriously clandestine shit at this point. Tom Cruise over here. He did this for years. In 1990, he shipped a cash of these documents to a friend in Orlando, and he said about

trying to get anyone at all to care. The tobacco industry had opponents at this time, but incredibly, even though Merrill had thousands of pages of incriminating evidence, he spent two years unsuccessfully trying to convince opponents of the tobacco industry to give a shit about this evidence. At first, he met with Richard Daynard, an anti-tobacco activist who put him in touch with Morton Mints, an investigative reporter with the post. Incredibly, after reviewing the documents, Mints felt that although the documents were

indeed damning, the tobacco industry was too powerful and the legal liability too high for him to run a story. Press is just like, yeah, I mean, thanks for risking your job and everything, but eh, tobacco lawyers are such jerks, you know, do you have anything on a woman? Literally. Love to attack a woman. On March of 1992, the old Merrill Williams luck kicked in again. And Merrill was fired from his job at the law firm and had a quintuple bypass surgery a month later. Thanks. Still, Merrill was determined to get someone to pay attention to the crazy evidence he had of murderous corporate malfeasance. So we contacted the US attorney's office. And despite the fact that

they were literally investigating the tobacco industry for fraud at this time, the US attorney declined to do shit about anything. Yeah. Well, fun fact. You'll be shocked to learn that the attorney general at that point was William Barr. Oh, she's doing it. Yeah. In retrospect, we probably shouldn't know how he was going to react to a report full of damning evidence. Exactly.

Let me just see that evidence and that black marker over the black marker. And the next step is maybe genius or maybe just completely bonkers. And I don't know. I don't really care which because I really love how this went down. After failing to get the attention of the media or the US attorney, Merrill sued the tobacco company, Brown and Williamson. And the basis for his lawsuit was, and I am not kidding here, that all of these incriminating documents that he stole were stressing him out so much that that's what gave him his

heart attack. Okay, that's what gave him his heart attack. Okay, that's excellent grounds for all of you. Now the tobacco company countered and served Williams with a restraining order that said that since the documents in question had been stolen, Merrill wasn't allowed to talk about them, including with his own attorney. What? Now, that's absurd. I don't think you can get a restraining order

preventing you from talking to your own counsel. And the restraining order was eventually released. Uh, here's the thing Tom, the laws are a lot different in flavor country. Yeah, you know, around there they call a gag order a tracheotomy, totally different thing. How would he talk to his attorney to tell the attorney to stop? All this finally got Mariel some attention as a guy who had lots of chain smoking guns in his possession. And Williams made his way to attorney Richard Scrux, who had made a fortune litigating his best suits. who had made a fortune, litigating as pesticides. When they met, Merle was described as, quote, obviously very ill, very nervous, had been

drinking, and quote, an excellent strategy if you want to be taken seriously. Although Williams was a fucking mess, the documents refuted, quote, the three big lies of the tobacco giants that, quote, cigarettes don't cause cancer. nicotine is not addictive and that they didn't market their poison to kids. End quote. All right, good stuff, Marrow. That's really good. I mean, the surgeon general released a statement saying cigarettes cause lung cancer in 1964

studies on that for decades before. But the tobacco companies, I'm pretty sure they were doing la la la can't hear you during that whole time. Now we can finally get it. I don't understand this story. We already knew all this stuff. Yeah. I don't want to push the, this is like Trump button too often, but we did spend a year

litigating whether or not the president did a thing he bragged about doing on live television. Yeah. I see it. Yeah. And lost. Scroggs needed Williams, but Williams needed help. So Scroggs hooked Merrill the fuck up buying him a house and a sailboat and gave him a nice salary for a job as a paralegal that didn't require Merrill to show up for work and actually do anything. Basically he was a kept man, a trophy witness,

a litigation attorneys sugar, baby. Ascrogs with some help brought the stolen documents to representative Henry Waxman, who used them in the hearings with tobacco executives, a box containing copies of the same documents also mysteriously arrived at the door of UCSF professor Stanton Glance. The box labeled only Mr. Butz Mr. Emence. Nice. Butz was immediately recognized as immensely valuable. And professor Glance began to analyze and publish the documents. The documents that Merrill stole day after day in his mangurdle and carefully copied counted over 4,000 pages and would prove to be instrumental in the 1998 landmark 206 billion dollar settlement against Big Tobacco. Of that 206 billion dollars, Merrill received one and a half million.

Merrill died in 2018 in Ocean Springs, Mississippi from heart disease brought on by years of heavy smoking. Well, I feel like you probably deserve one and a half million dollars for having to find four thousand different copy shops in the Lexington metro area. That's just right. Anyway, it's time to take a little break. Hey, are you Robert Pilsen? Yeah, that's me.

I hear you have some information for me. Yeah, I'm sure you were followed. Yes, yes, I am sure. Excellent, excellent. My name is Merrill Williams and you need to see this. What is this? This is thousands of pages of damning evidence against tobacco companies.

They've been killing us and knowing it the entire time. Right, right. And... I would've been an- Oh, that's your whole revelation. Yeah, I mean, I've been smuggling these papers out my butthole for years. This is not like a, this isn't a huge bomb show. No, no, it is not.

Also, just a heads up, tell people about the butthole thing before you hand someone the thing next time. But they're killing people. These things are super addictive. Oh, no, yeah, we know that. It's on purpose. It is. Yeah, you know, it's for, we know that. It's on purpose. It is.

Yeah, you know, it's for killing the poor people. Why would you want to kill the poor people? Oh, okay. So you know how before the 1920s, like every 50 to 100 years throughout history, conditions would get so bad for poor people that they'd have like a little revolution? I mean, yeah.

Right, so a bunch of us figured out that they actually don't do that if you kill a bunch of them. They don't? No, they don't. You can like start a world war and get everyone a disease that just kills poor people, or in this case, you can get them addicted to an expensive and deadly product. They'll be too sick and too poor to organize BingBang Boom, no revolution.

Okay, but now that everybody knows they're gonna like rise up, right? and to pour to organize BingBang Boom, no revolution. Okay, but now that everybody knows they're gonna like rise up, right? Mmm, I mean, honestly, probably not. We've been pushing the like smoke. It is your fault for killing you narrative since the 40s. So, you know, we'll give some little lady like a million bucks for her to die underneath, but, you know, slap ourselves on the wrist, but that usually does it. People don't really want a whole, but the young people and the

non smokers, they'll still rise up. They won't let you get away with this again. Probably have you met a poor person? They're like super gross. Yeah, sorry to waste your whole butthole thing, but can't really do anything with this. Sorry. Sure. Yeah. Hey, can I ask one more question? Sure, Marin. It's Merrill. What happened to all the good people?

Oh, it's funny. They went crazy or we murdered them. Right. Yeah. All right, I think I'm gonna go drink and smoke myself to death now. Yeah, man, whatever you wanna do, it's not really my business. Okay. Well, Tom, when we left off, tobacco companies wrote the quiet part on a memo and were

foiled by slimming undergarments and kinkos. What's the second half going to be about? Can you perhaps start out with like one crazy thing? I think I'll just, okay. Like the crazy thing about Big Tobacco, gotcha, right? I don't know how you saw that. It's almost like I read it. Cheese.

Goddamn. Right? I don't know how you saw that. It's almost like I read it. Geez. Oh, damn. The crazy thing about Big Tobacco is that the goddamn industry is so big and so wildly evil that it supported not just one, but two major whistleblowers. Like if whistleblowing were a job, Republicans would be defending Tobacco as job creators, rather than just defending them because they don't aid enormous sums of money. Our second whistleblower, a contemporary of Merrill was Jeffrey Wygend, though the two couldn't really be more different. Well, other than both being highly educated whites, this had American male assholes, but

yeah. Okay. Those are definitely combining threats. I see it, which are okay. Why it was born in New York in 1942. He was a gifted chemistry and biology student, and initially he hoped to study to become a doctor, though his uneasy relationship with his extremely strict Catholic parents caused him to drop out of college in an act of rebellion and join the Air Force in 1961. He was sent to an air base in Japan, where he ran an operating room. Well in Japan, Jeffrey learned he also had a knack for both the language as well as martial arts, studying both in earnest and eventually teaching English as a volunteer at a Catholic orphanage.

Okay, the martial arts thing is not going to help when he becomes a whistleblower. Everyone who does martial arts is lying all the time. That's just the fact. I mean, on this podcast, at least that's definitely a fact. And everywhere all the time. I know that wasn't a reference to your black belt and tight-window Eli, but it could have been, right? It works both ways. Second degree. Black belt. Now, upon returning to the States, he re-enrolled in college and went on to earn a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Buffalo. He landed a job with a German healthcare company and met his first wife, Linda, in a judo

class in 1970. Did he sweep her off her feet? Oh, that is pretty good. That is pretty good. I think it pretty good. That is pretty good. I think it's good. The pair would be married in 1971, but just seven months after they married, Linda learned she had multiple sclerosis. Despite his wife's illnesses, Jeffrey was making swift strides in his career, working briefly for Pfizer before taking a lucrative job at Union Carbide,

testing medical equipment in Japan. At this point, Jeffrey was only 34 years old, living in Japan, fluent in the language, making terrific money, and well regarded in his field. Linda, Jeff's wife, wasn't fairing well at all, unfortunately. Ever the methodical scientist, Wagon searched for experts and specialists to help Linda, but her condition worsened despite his efforts. In 1973, Linda gave birth to a daughter, Gretchen. But by this time, Jeffrey was barely present, unable to help his wife or to bear watching her worsen, Jeffrey simply abandoned his wife and daughter. While in Japan, he had multiple affairs he referred to as, quote,

playing around. And fairly swiftly, he became so separated from his wife and child that he didn't see them at all for several years. The disconnect was so severe that one of Jeff's friends commented that he thought Linda had actually died. Most difficult part about having an affair in Japan is figuring out the ins and outs of the pixelated crotch. Right? Square peg square hole. You're fine, right? I don't know about you guys, but I am ready to hear about what a hero this guy is.

Right? Are you all in? I'm still waiting for Tom Boosh to explain how that last guy was clearly very bright. Okay. That's fair. That's fair. The PhD again, theater arts. So grain of salt.

In 1981, Jeffrey met Lucretia, a sales rep for Johnson and Johnson and the two married in 1986. I couldn't actually find anything about whether he got divorced from Linda or if she passed away, but I don't think it matters since it clearly didn't matter to Jeffrey. Nevertheless, Jeffrey's career continued to advance, so we had a reputation for being something of an asshole. Yeah, it was no. Now, while working at a company with the terrible name of Technicon, he was so testy that his mentor, Bob Carlson, recalls, quote, pulling on his ear at meetings to tell why he can't pipe down when he got out ofson, recalls quote, pulling on his ear at meetings to tell

Wigan to pipe down when he got out of hand. And quote, judo throwing PhDs around the on the show. A The point of all this backstory and there is so much more is that Wigan does not a great guy. He's not a particularly noble or honest or kind man. He's not someone who spent his life in service of good works by all accounts. And there are volumes of accounts.

Why again, do is an enormous asshole. He's a shithead, irrascible bully. And I think this is actually important because when I tell you the next part of the story, you have to remember that the actions of Brown and Williamson were so egregious that they sparked the moral conscience of a man who abandoned his wife because she got sick and never spent any appreciable amount of time with his own daughter, a man who bullied his colleagues so much he had to be physically restrained by the God damned ear. Yeah, it was definitely the tobacco companies went too far and not psychopaths need to create conflict. It's the first one. If nothing else though,

all of these facts justify Russell Crowe in the casting. That is true. A Jeffrey Wagon was approached after 17 years in the healthcare industry by Alan heard the head of research and development for the conglomerate that owns Brown and Williamson. They were trying to develop a low tar cigarette to compete with a competitor and they offered wagon day $300,000 salary and more importantly, a bunch of ego stroking. He was given a budget of $30 million, a staff of over 200 people, and the title of head of R&D. He took up the job and incredibly took up smoking as well. So the pair moved to Louisville for work and for a while,

Wagon was able to reconcile himself with the evil of working for tobacco. Some days, he was able to convince himself that his work would make cigarettes safer, but really he was there for the prestige and for the money. He was a big swing and dick at B&W, and he loved it. Kind of. As much as Wagon loved the attention and the money, he was at heart an actual scientist. So when he was showing the research labs at B&W, he was appalled and shocked to see that there was no sophisticated labs. The

staff had no toxicologists or physicists on it staff. The equipment in the lab looked better suited to a 1950s science class than a multi-million dollar research facility. In fact, it almost looked like all that science was just a show. Is that a Spencer's gif's plasma ball with a cigarette tape too? Although you clearly just hired people to swirl around beakers with colored liquid. They don't do any sort. They have clipboards with blank paper on them. I asked them what they were doing. They just said regular science. This is all they know. Why do we have a fog machine? Why do we have a fog machine? I didn't get it.

Not long after he was hired, Wagon met with the legal team, where he learned of the extraordinary measures the company took to avoid being the subject of any kind of honest, rigorous discovery. Staff, the science staff were told by the legal department not to make lists, memos or notes on their science documents that were created were shipped overseas in a process referred to as document management,

but which could better be described as obstruction during meetings of scientists where it was discussed if making cigarettes less, quote, biologically active and, quote, code for cancer causing the minutes of those meetings. That's what they were saying. The minutes of those meetings were routinely redacted or revised way down, sometimes from like 13 pages down to three. Why can was himself asked to sign off on these revised and reduced minutes? Do you keep replacing the same word with one phrase, your code is pretty easy to crack. The newlywed game audience knew what making whoopie was. Right.

Right. By the way, you should make whoopie a Supreme Court justice. Oh, shit. So what do you think it means, Eli? Goldberg. Well, I can begin to try to do his job hiring scientists and ordering modern science stuff like computers, which they didn't have until he's. He worked on reverse engineering competitor products to see what they were made of. And he studied fire safety and ignition propensity for different materials. But while he was ostensibly the head of R&D, he discovered that he was not actually completely

in the know. Research on nicotine was being done overseas. And soon, code words began to pop up in conversation at dinner parties with executives, words like aerial and hippo. code words began to pop up in conversation at dinner parties with executives, words like Ariel and hippo. These would turn out to be research studies from the 1970s on the known health effects of cigarettes. What? Okay, hey, tobacco companies, if you're doing studies about how your company was marketing cigarettes to kids, maybe don't name them after Disney characters. Yeah, specifically a character known for being suckered into a terrible decision by a deceitful

villain and an animal known for being insanely dangerous, but kind of cute way to obvious skate. That's the perfect cry. Now, why can't could not now deny that he was working for an organization that had many years before concluded that their products were killing people. A claim tobacco companies continue to not only deny, but also to employ aggressive legal tactics to destroy anyone who dared suggesting otherwise.

This realization was Wigan's road to Damascus moment, quote, it was like being aware and not being aware. You look back on things that happened when you were present and you say, quote, hell, they knew about that all along. And by day, I mean me, I'm the good guy in the story. Compared to relative. Yeah. In the story about tobacco execs. Yeah. Right. A wagon began to keep a journal, a scientific diary of his time working for B&W. He noted things like being promised a medical advisory board. And then he noted when that board failed to materialize. He began to see that the company's efforts to improve their snuff products were

aimed at getting young people started on their tobacco and nicotine products as early as possible. He began to see that the company understood that by and large, if you don't get people hooked by the time they were 18 or 20, they were very unlikely to ever use tobacco. So the product itself required getting kids hooked on tobacco as soon as possible. All the churches in the world are just whistling and looking way conspicuously. As is the entire US military. Unsurprisingly, all these misgivings were not well hidden by Wigand and by 1991, the company knew something was wrong. Soon, Jeff's performance reviews were filled with corporate speak bullshit like

difficulty in communication when they really meant behaves like a giant asshole. When wagon read about the tumor causing properties of the additive, cumerain, he demanded the chemical be removed immediately from B and W's products, but was told that removing the known added carcinogen would impact sales. What? Wagon himself quit smoking. Okay, you're taking out the cummering. I'm switching to fucking palm all this is ridiculous.

We'll set that. That's a crazy focus. Okay, we wouldn't want a bunch of carcinogens in our carcinogens there. But come on, man, what would be the point? A furious at being shut down. Wagon's vocal personality got him in trouble at the company and he was put on notice and subsequently fired. At first, Wagon wasn't too worried.

He was a well-known and well-regarded research scientist with decades of experience, but after he struggled for a bit to find work, he began a complaint about his severance package. Word of his complaints reached B&W W who did what they always do. They sued claiming breach of contract. Wagon was going to lose his medical benefits. He eventually signed a strict confidentiality agreement, but the episode stuck in his crawl further animating Wagon's disgust with the company. Okay, giving kids cancer is one thing, but four months of cobra, you got yourselves a war, my friend.

Around the same time, a reporter for CBS is 60 minutes, Lowell Bergman found on his porch a box full of scientific papers and documents from Philip Morris. Bergman could tell the documents were important, but he needed a scientist familiar with the specifics of tobacco R&D to help him understand what he had. Bergman sought out Wigand and eventually the partnership between Bergman and Wigand began. According to Wigand, if BMW hadn't pissed him off with the whole severance lawsuit, he

probably wouldn't have entertained the notion of working against his former industry, but by now he was pissed. The Philomorous documents, which Wagon was instrumental in interpreting, proved that the company had invented years earlier a fire safe cigarette. That is, a cigarette that was much less likely to just burn on its own if left undetended. Philomorous invented the fire safe cigarette and then chose not to introduce it into the market. CBS ran a story on the so called, quote, hamlet project named because the product asks the question to burn or not to burn a cute little play on words that is way less cute when you consider that almost a thousand people a year dying in fires caused by smoking.

Okay. Yeah. The cigarette that stops burning, that's good stuff. Counterpoint though to quote the bard, William Joel, you didn't start the fire. That's your fault. Pretty sure Francis Bacon wrote that song. Yeah. I don't know if you're in all of that.

In 1994, Congressman Waxman held hearings calling tobacco executives to testify. Wagon watched the testimony and became incensed. Here were his former bosses sitting in front of Congress, testifying under oath that they did not believe that cigarettes were addictive when they knew damn well, when everyone at any level of authority in tobacco knew Dan well that they were not only addictive, but that they had actively worked to make their products more addictive, even when that made them less safe. The lying to Congress, that's impossible.

I've had this kick me sign on my back since I left three years ago. Can anyone. Yeah. Yeah. Right. I know it's different when you're killing a half a million people a year, but like, you know, the CEO of little Caesars says that their product is delicious too. Why would this think of that? Not to your face. He doesn't. Not to Congress. I like that their main thing is that it's hot and ready.

They don't really are. Yeah, that's right. Right, yeah. Present. The problem was that he had signed a confidentiality agreement. And so he was constrained from publicly refuting their lives. Instead, why can be in working? And I am not making this up secretly for the FDA, like an FDA spy. He worked with FDA commissioner David Kessler to get him up to snuff on all the science of ammonia additives and nicotine impacting boosting science.

Wigins Insider knowledge also helped the FDA get around the industry tactic of document dumping. Now typically when a subpoena demands discovery documents, the tobacco industry will respond by delivering those documents. But they are buried among literally tons, sometimes tens of tons of other documents. They back semi-trucks up full of documents. This is a profusion of material so immense and purposefully disorganized that it renders the discovery process impossible.

Oh, they have like document shufflers then, right? So like they like inserted into the big pile, just randomly actively, yeah, they actively will bury him amongst random print printouts from the internet and garbage just and they'll back up huge semiconductor trailers. And like, yeah, here's a jazz for go fish. I feel, I feel like that's a legal one with that fish. I feel like that's illegal. Yeah, one with done something like that's covered by air, but law. I feel like he's be able to go to the judge and be like, no, they printed off the little Caesars menu.

And he's like, yeah, what are you doing? A Wigins insider knowledge man, he could ask for specific documents. He'd ask for lab reports and specific studies. It's like really knowing the porn hub search engine. Spoken like a man who doesn't have to put up with Google constantly adding Facebook to anything. He searches for it. Okay. For all of his help, why can still wasn't able to fully blow the whistle. Okay. So not like knowing the porn hub search engine. Mike Wallace from CBS was beginning to get frustrated. Why again had the first hand knowledge to blow the lid off the smoke screen that still obscured the truth of the dangers of smoking, but he

wasn't able to do much more than act as a kind of secret consultant. It was only after the New York Times ran a series of articles and published the papers stolen by Merrill from our earlier story that why again to finally agreed to go on record. Okay, we knew this. Why does it even matter at this point? Like cigarettes cost cancer, Darth Vader is Luke's dead. The tobacco people were like, whoa, spoiler and Congress believed it. Yeah. Why do we need CBS to do anything at this point? Because Congress did believe it. Except CBS at this point got cold feet.

The legal arm of the tobacco industry was so powerful and their hooks in so deep with just about everyone with money and influence that without even threatening a lawsuit, why again, story was shelved, though the interviews were completed. After a change of ownership at CBS, the interview was cut and edited into a rough episode and screened. And everyone at the screening agreed it might be the most important story they had worked on in their lives. Once more, however, CBS quashed the story for fear of taking on Big Tobacco.

Okay. So we're all agreed. We are scared little babies who peepee in their pants. Yeah. Right. You can find the thing that they were too terrified to say was, yeah, it looks like that surgeon general's warning is spot on. Right. B and W then began a multi million dollar smear campaign aimed at destroying wagon. They served him with papers claiming he violated his confidentiality agreement. They threatened him with jail time. Teams of investigators began to dig into his life, leaking and amplifying elements of his personal life and actions, painting him as a bitter, disgruntled drunk, a wife, beater, and a thief.

They met with Chris Wallace and Bergman and tried to convince them that Wagon wasn't credible, that airing any story that relied on Wagon would be a terrible mistake. Hey, 60 minutes, do you guys have MS? Because if you do, this guy will 100% leave you for Dateline NBC. I guarantee you. Oh, shit. I guarantee you. In like a year.

But this tactic was a bit too much because Bergman and Wallace knew why, and although they agreed with the general consensus that he was an unlikable asshole, they also had done their homework as journalists, and they knew this was all part of a smear campaign, and that any story they would now run would have to involve the story of this attempted discrediting. Yeah, for sure. So you know what that meeting, the tobacco people were like, hey, this is officially off the record, Mike Wallace.

And Mike Wallace was like, yep, totally. This doesn't count as something that happened reality timeout. I love the people think we have phrases that are magic like that. Like, like, I'm not a cop. No, obviously, the journalist can go back or you should make, whoopie with a Supreme Court Justice. There's all sorts of magic phrases. Wait, what? On February the fourth, 1996, why can finally appeared on 60 minutes? And in that episode, why can outlines the ways that B&W manipulated their product to increase the available nicotine

in order to make the product as addictive as possible, often at the cost of safety, which obviously contradicted the congressional testimony of the lying scum two years earlier who claimed that their products were not addictive. Since his testimony, Wagon has received death threats concerning himself and his family, and he now often has to travel with personal security. The smear campaign and the stress of acting as a whistleblower cost Jeff his second marriage and irreparably damaged his relationship with his family. And he continues to be the target of harassment. Now far be it from me to suggest that it was worth it,

but I do have to note that in 1996, 487 billion cigarettes were sold. The impact of these whistleblowers has been enormous. The total number of cigarettes sold in 2020 was down to 203.7 billion. Okay, that's something. That's huge. That's a big number. Yeah. Yeah. If you had to summarize what you learned to one sentence, what would it be, Tom? That just because we haven't found the tobacco executives volcano layer in no way persuades me that there is not a tobacco executive volcano layer. That's fair. Are you ready for the quiz? I am. Let's do it. All right, Tom, which of the following is the best book about a whistle being blown on a crime and then getting blown again louder and still

pretty much happened. Hey, the biography of Jeffrey Wigand, codename deep throat cancer. The straw that got put on the camels back, but didn't really fucking change anything. Plus cigarettes got sold, but more vapes got sold still bad. And they make a whole bunch of money or see the Mueller report. Oh, too soon. Too soon. It is a straw that did not break the camels back. B that is correct. All right, Tom,

which of the following was an actual tactic used by cigarette companies to get kids to start smoking? A, a 1962 commercial starring the Flintstones. Oh my God. B was a grown-up cartoon. Yeah. The introduction of cartoon mascot Joe Camel, who, according to a 1992 survey, was more recognizable than Mickey Mouse or C. This was my favorite. Prize giveaways for smokers that included trips to Disneyland, water parks and Chuck E. Cheese. Oh, fuck. It's gonna be all of them, isn't it? Chuck E. Cheese, where a kid can smoke a manful. It's all of them.

It was an answer. Yeah. All right, I got one for you, Tom. What is the best cigarette-based judo move? Oh, hey, the lucky strike. Be Winston. Oh, it, the lucky strike. B, wind stun. Oh, that's good. See, the Paul Mall and a well, or D, the camel clutch.

Oh, the camel clutch. Okay. The camel clutch. Oh, I'm sorry. It was secret answer E, all of the above. They're all okay. Oh, no, no. I'm going to lose. I want to lose E all of the above. They're all. That's all okay. Oh, no.

I'm gonna lose to all of the above. That's right. There you go. All right, well Cecil arbitrarily declared me the winner and wrote the question that I used. We're gonna give him essay honors for next week. Nice, all right. Okay, well for Heath Eli, Noah and Tom,

I'm Cecil, thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week and by then, I will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, listen to Eli and Tom's new show, Dear Old Dads, it's a real thing. It's not a joke. It's not a joke like it's an Eli made to the end of every podcast.

It's a real thing. It's anywhere you get your podcast. And I wanted to be called Dad Pod, but a bad guy who was taking this. It got taken, it was great. You know, I use it to be called Disorted Pops, but they didn't listen to me. You didn't, you don't want to use a name for your podcast

that somebody else already used to be confused. So dumb, literally. It'd be terrible, yeah. And if you'd like to help keep the show going, you can make a per episode to nation. Patreon.com slash citation pod. That's not citations, pod, it's citation pod. Here's the serialer. Or leave us a five-star review. Everywhere you can. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect to the sense of social media

or check the show notes. Be sure to check out CitationPod.com. So you've convinced the poor people to hate each other based on what colors they are. Exactly. And the best part is they now teach it to their kids themselves. We just set it up. And we're going to have to do something. They've been support people to hate each other based on what color they are. Exactly. And the best part is they now teach it to their kids themselves.

We just set it up and then forget it. Oh, I'm telling you, Monty, it's just so easy. It's up. It's it's maryl. Whatever you say, man.