Where there's smoke, there's ire

Jeffrey Wigand does not look much like Russell Crowe, the actor who played him in the movie The Insider. At 59 he is older and not quite as chiseled chiselled as the Australian beefcake, - and, unlike the paunchy tobacco scientist plagued by conscience in the film, Wigand looks like a paunchy scientist who works out.

The stocky build comes from half a lifetime of Japanese martial arts, which have earned him a sixth-dan judo black belt and dozens of trips to Japan since his first with the US military in 1960. He was back in Tokyo last week recently to promote World No-Tobacco Day, and he was not a happy man.

"Tobacco is a $45 billion industry that lubricates the wheels of power. You want to know how far it goes? The tobacco leaf is on the US dollar. We pay taxes to grow tobacco and then taxes to clear up the mess it leaves behind. And the industry has got away with it for so long with two lies: there is no causal relationship between smoking and health, and smoking is done through free choice."

Getting angry at the wiles and ways of Big Tobacco is what Wigand does these days, as one of the best known and most potent weapons in the anti-smoking movement's armoury. The former chief scientist of Brown & Williamson Tobacco is now a teacher and campaigner who runs a non-profit foundation called Smoke-Free Kids.

Wigand's journey from insider to anti-tobacco warrior began when he was hired at over $300,000 a year by the firm in 1988 to create a "safer" cigarette with fewer chemicals and less smoke.

The research led his team to put on paper something the industry had denied for fifty 50 years - cigarettes were addictive and dangerous - an admission that terrified the executives. "They knew they would have to produce this evidence in court if subpoenaed," says Wigand.

After he objected to putting ammonia in cigarettes (to speed up the delivery of nicotine to the brain), he was fired, but the company kept him tied to a secrecy clause through the umbilical cord of his severance and health benefits. When it began to strangle him, he blew the whistle on the industry's secrets - the cynical marketing to teenagers, women and racial minorities, the 6,000 chemicals in each cigarette, the lies used to cover it all up. And he did it in style on America's most popular news magazine programme 60 Minutes, although not before CBS executives tried to bury the show. It was the 1999 Touchstone movie, however, that made him globally famous.

Is the movie all true? "Mostly," he says. The death threats? "Yes, including two against my kids, one from a public phone outside a famous tobacco company building."

How far did he think the industry things would go? "This is a very cynical business. We know the companies conspire together to keep the health issues buried. They smuggle to avoid taxes; they pay top universities to produce research showing tobacco is not harmful. Will they go out and murder anyone? No. But they will intimidate you. A number of people involved in that movie had bodyguards, myself included."

The Insider is about a flawed but decent man surrounded by cynical, corrupt people with souls in hock to corporate tobacco.

While Al Pacino, as 60 Minutes's producer Lowell Bergman, is the film's rock-solid moral centre, whose indignant, gravelly-voiced sermons to lesser mortals banish all doubt about the righteousness of his cause, it is the tortured and all-too-human scientist, watching the bottom fall out of his comfortable middle-class world, who sticks in the mind. The prices exacted in the movie are real - Wigand's career, house, marriage and status went down the plughole with his decision to fight. More than once he is asked by his Tokyo audience if he has any regrets? "Not one," he replies.

The local organisers of Wigand's tour, dubbed "Second-Hand Smoke Kills", hoped his star power would attract people to their cause, but they have their work cut out in Japan, which has the second-highest, per-capita cigarette consumption in the world (after Greece). Even the idea that second-hand smoke might be a bad thing has some way to go in a country where finding a non-smoking restaurant or bar is about as easy as trying to milk a bull. More than once, when this writer has asked for a non-smoking table, the waitress has simply taken away the ashtray.

Despite having all the appearances of a mature, industrial economy, Japan's anti-smoking drive is "at least a decade behind the Europe and the US," says Wigand. Thirty-three per cent of all adults smoke - 53.5 per cent of men - with the numbers of children and women on the rise. Cigarette advertising still flickers in cinemas and on prime-time television, prices are low - about 280 yen (just over £2) a pack - and over 62,000 tobacco-vending machines make smoking easy for children.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the industry in Japan, however, is that it the government runs it - the finance ministry owns two-thirds of the giant Japan Tobacco, which sold US $41 billion worth of cigarettes last year. This helps explain why, despite killing an estimated 95,000 people a year, packs of Japanese cigarettes do not carry the "smoking kills" warnings familiar to many in the West, but merely tell gaspers "not to smoke too much". And JT is not shy about defending its corner, fiercely resisting a proposed WTO worldwide ban on tobacco advertising and vending machines.

The heavy reliance of the Japanese media on tobacco advertising meant they failed to turn out in force for this famous whistle-blower's main conference. A couple of the national dailies were there, but most of the television networks stayed away. Many of the questions hinted that those who came were there for who he is rather than what he is doing.

Had Russell Crowe, a well-known smoker, stopped smoking since working on the film? (No). Does he still get threats? (Yes). Afterwards, a couple of high-school students told him in halting English he was their "hero".

Wigand desperately wants more kids to hear his message, but knows it is an uphill fight. "Look at advertising for cigarettes. It's sexy, glamorous and cool - all the things kids love because they love to emulate. The only place we really have the companies on the run is Canada and parts of the States," he says. "Everywhere else, they're doing OK."

Does he still live in fear? "I showed up in a classroom in Georgia a couple of months ago and there were two policemen waiting to tell me someone had threatened my life. So it goes on and on.

"But guess what,: you've shot your best wad at me, and you haven't got me yet."

Wigand's "Smoke-Free Kids" website can be found at http://www.jeffreywigand.com/insider/