Facebook
Twitter
Pocket
Reddit
Email
Four decades after top tobacco executives discovered the health risks of smoking, they finally acknowledged these hazards under oath for the first time.
On this day in 1998, CEOs from top U.S. tobacco companies appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Commerce Committee. Officials asked the business leaders whether nicotine is addictive and if smoking causes health problems like lung cancer—several said yes to these questions, including Steven Goldstone, chairman and CEO of RJR Nabisco.
At the time, the tobacco industry was desperately seeking to shore up its reputation. Four years earlier, tobacco company leaders had appeared before Congress and said they didn’t think cigarettes were addictive, that evidence behind associated health issues was inconclusive, and that they didn’t market to children. Less than a month after the testimony, leaked documents revealed that the tobacco industry had known for decades that their products could cause premature death and acknowledged that they are addictive.
These revelations contributed to dozens of state lawsuits seeking to recoup billions of dollars in healthcare costs associated with smoking. Later in 1998, the country’s four largest tobacco companies entered an agreement with 52 state and territory attorneys general. They agreed to several terms, including to stop marketing to young people, paying states to fund smoking prevention programs, and to share secret industry documents. This led to further settlements with more than 45 tobacco companies, and today manufacturers are required to make annual payments to involved states in perpetuity.
Read more: “To a Cigarette Maker, Your Life Is Worth About $10,000”
The agreement had a major impact on Americans’ smoking habits: Between 1998 and 2019, U.S. cigarette consumption fell by more than 50 percent. Over that period, regular smoking among high schoolers decreased from a near peak of 36.4 percent in 1997 to 6 percent in 2019.
These societal shifts were long overdue. Researchers in the U.S. and Europe began suspecting a link between smoking and lung cancer as early as the 1920s, and decades of studies led to a pivotal 1964 report by Surgeon General Luther Terry. This report said that smoking was responsible for a 70 percent increase in mortality rates for smokers versus non-smokers, and it estimated that average smokers were nine to ten times more likely to develop lung cancer—heavy smokers had at least a 20 times higher risk.
The report “hit the country like a bombshell. It was front page news and a lead story on every radio and television station in the United States and many abroad,” Terry said two decades later. But the public generally remained uncertain that these findings were definitive, thanks in part to plotting by the tobacco industry.
Its CEOs had met in December 1953 to plan their response to the ever-increasing evidence of their products’ harms. They landed on an industry-sponsored research group, and “more than five decades of strategic and explicit collusion would follow,” according to historian Allan Brandt.
This organization, known at first as the Tobacco Industry Research Committee and later the Council for Tobacco Research, worked tirelessly to discredit evidence that their products hurt people, deflect bad press, and market new products that they claimed were safer.
While per-capita cigarette consumption began to fall in the decade following the 1964 report, it was only with the political momentum in the late 1990s that the industry faced real accountability.
More recently, people have drawn parallels between the actions of the tobacco and fossil-fuel industries—denying harms and funding self-interested research—and suggested that fossil-fuel executives might have devised these strategies in the first place. But mounting legal pressure against oil companies across the country and around the globe seems to signify that the tide is turning like it did for tobacco. 
Enjoying Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.
Lead image: Vectorbum / Shutterstock
