Wigand & Konuma: the courage to challenge Big Tobacco| Tabaccologia

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On that spring morning in 2009, Friday the 17th, as I stood at the traffic lights on my way to work, as I often do, I was handed a copy of Metro, a free newspaper with a staggering national circulation. As soon as I parked, before I got out, I leafed through the paper and came across a wonderful interview with Jeffrey Wigand by an American journalist, Elisabeth Braw. For those interested in tobacco, Wigand is a legend who, with his painful but historic testimony, has torn the veil of omerta and deception of the tobacco multinationals (Big Tobacco) and inspired the successful film Insider, starring Russell Crow and Al Pacino. The following September, after a few hours of searching on Google, I managed to find his email. I decided to contact him and ask him to write about his experience for us, and to my amazement, after a few hours I received his reply, very friendly and helpful. Therefore, in 2010 we had the honour and pleasure of publishing two long articles in Tabaccologia about his experience as an ‘insider’, with first-hand news and details. Simply stunning. Since then, Wigand has been our valuable contributor from across the Atlantic.

Thanks to him, science and independent research have been able to gain access to the secrets of Big Tobacco, through the desecration of nearly 80 million pages of confidential and top-secret documents that were declassified and made public online thanks to a ruling by the State of Minnesota [1] against Philip Morris International Inc. (PMI) and other multinational tobacco companies [2,3]. As a top researcher for the giant Brown & Williamson (B&W), Wigand exposed how the tobacco industry deliberately made addictive cigarettes and lied about them. When Wigand blew the whistle, his employer did everything in his power to ruin his life, discrediting him, making him followed, recording his University lectures and threatening his family. His wife left him, taking their daughters with her, and Wigand was only able to find new employment as a teacher at the local high school.

Today, Wigand is a sought-after expert on the world of tobacco, speaking to young people and doctors through his organisation Smoke-free Kids. Wigand is still convinced that it was worth taking that big step and that he would do it again because “I got my dignity back and maybe even saved some lives”. His only regret is that those who know as much and more than he does have not made the same choice to stand up to a world that has made profit at any cost its primary goal.

A decision he made when, under federal protection, he gave this dramatic account of how B&W and all its sister companies had drugged nicotine to make it more penetrating: “We used to ammoniate the nicotine so that it could penetrate the blood 100%, like an intravenous injection.”

Today, Wigand is strongly committed to primary prevention of smoking, both to give young people the right information and to expose the tobacco industry. They are still not transparent because they still use flavourings and sweeteners mixed with nicotine, which increases the addiction to such an extent that it becomes physically painful to stop smoking.

In this interview, the final question was: “Will there ever be a cigarette that is not harmful?.” The answer was dry and peremptory: “NO.”

After 30 years since Wigand’s NO to Big Tobacco, we register another important NO to the tobacco industry, and in this case to Philip Morris, from the rising sun. The 21^st century insider is Shiro Konuma from Japan.

Konuma, a medical expert in public health who joined PMI with the naive intention of working on a less harmful cigarette, denounced in The Bureau of Investigative Journalism the sums PMI paid to scientists at the most prestigious Japanese universities to prove IQOS’s harm reduction [4-7]. Shiro Konuma had no idea his career was about to take a dramatic turn when he accepted a position with PMI. As a renowned public health expert with a medical and diplomatic background, Konuma was attracted by the promise of contributing to a revolutionary change: the end of traditional smoking. The company had launched IQOS, a device that ‘heats’ tobacco without burning it, presenting it as a less harmful alternative to traditional cigarettes. “It seemed like a unique opportunity to improve public health”, Konuma told The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, “but I soon realised that there was something deeply wrong and disturbing”.

Konuma’s story leads from the boardrooms of Big Tobacco to the campuses of Japan’s most prestigious universities, where IQOS happens to be the world’s number one seller, and finally into the corridors of government power.

At the centre of all the financial flows is IQOS, the core of PMI’ $13 billion a year portfolio of smokeless products. In Japan, where IQOS sells more than anywhere else, it has become a major player in the country’s tobacco market. Konuma believes that public health has been compromised in the process.

Most surprisingly, PMI itself made the same admission in a confidential written submission to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in December 2016: “Switching to the IQOS system has not been shown to reduce the risk of developing tobacco-related diseases compared to smoking cigarettes... The smoke that users inhale contains a number of chemicals that have never been studied over the long term”. And if the warning came from them, it is to be believed [4-7].

These two cases, Wigand and Konuma, show once again the true face of the tobacco industry, cynical and ruthless, bent on pursuing its business by any means, devious and illegal.

References

1. Minnesota Attorney General litigation, n° C1-84-8565, 2d Distr. Min.
2. University of California San Francisco Parnassus Campus Library Truth Tobacco Industry Documents..Publisher Full Text
3. Ong EK, Glantz SA. Tobacco industry efforts subverting International Agency for Research on Cancer’s second-hand smoke study. Lancet. 2000; 355:1253- 9. DOI
4. Pulce AG. Così Philip Morris ha pagato gli scienziati per promuovere la IQOS. Il Salvagente. 2024. Publisher Full Text
5. Johnston F. Revealed: Philip Morris funded tobacco research with undisclosed payments. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. 2024. Publisher Full Text
6. Johnston F. Science for sale: Philip Morris’s web of payments to fund tobacco research. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. 2024. Publisher Full Text
7. Johnston F. “I asked myself, why is he going public?”: working with a Big Tobacco whistleblower. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. 2024. Publisher Full Text