Word: wigand
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...Even if Wigand were mysteriously to vanish tomorrow, however, antismoking advocates are convinced the deck is at last stacked in their favor. Through earlier litigation and the efforts of other whistle blowers, 30 years of internal documents have been exhumed that appear more damning than any single witness. They confirm, for instance, that, as one Philip Morris executive put it in the early 1970s, "smoke is beyond question the most optimized vehicle of nicotine and the cigarette the most optimized dispenser of smoke," and that as early as 1963 B&W executives knew nicotine was addictive. "Of course...
...fighting the Cipollone case in New Jersey; though the jury awarded the husband of Rose Cipollone, who died of lung cancer, $400,000 in damages, that verdict was overturned on appeal. Tobacco experts insist they are undaunted by the slew of new lawsuits, and they point out that Jeffrey Wigand has yet to be cross-examined. In fact, five law firms are representing B&W in its breach-of-contract lawsuit against Wigand, who notes dryly, "I'm just a little schoolteacher, and they are how many? Pretty even odds, I think...
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Wigand, a devotee of things Zen since a stint in Japan as an Air Force medical technician, sits remarkably calmly in the eye of a storm he helped create, maintaining what may be the most realistic vision of how far the tobacco wars can ultimately go. "I'm not an antismoking activist," he insists. "I think people are going to continue smoking, no matter what." And that inescapable fact, in the end, may be the best weapon Big Tobacco...
THERE ARE TWO JEFFREY WIGANDS. ONE IS the grave, embattled, righteous man millions of viewers watched on 60 Minutes last month as he offered up potentially devastating inside information about the machinations of his former employer, tobacco giant Brown & Williamson. Then there is the somewhat antic teacher his high school students know and love. One day recently he was darting about the dingy science classroom at DuPont Manual High School in Louisville, Kentucky, like a gnome on triple espresso, questioning and wisecracking in his rapid-fire Bronx rasp as 30 ninth-grade advanced physical-science students went over results...
Though much has been made of the fact that Wigand once earned $300,000 a year as vice president for research and development at B&W and is now reduced to a $30,000 teaching salary, in many ways Wigand's new profession suits him better. After a long career in the biomedical field working for such companies as Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, he was unprepared, he says, for the rough-and-tumble culture he encountered at B&W when he started work there in 1989--a corporate environment dominated not by the scientists but by advertising and marketing...