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Excerpts from Lawyer Dissuaded Tobacco Researcher, Memorandum Suggests

By BARRY MEIER, New York Times [05/06/98]

The head of research for the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company believed in the early 1980's that the Government should regulate cigarettes but changed his mind after lawyers told him that such a move would hamper Reynolds's ability to market products, according to a memorandum by a company lawyer.

"When he first came to the company, he thought that perhaps the company would be better off under F.D.A. jurisdiction," an outside lawyer for Reynolds, whose parent is the RJR Nabisco Holdings Corporation, wrote in a 1983 memorandum referring to the research official, G. Robert DiMarco. "He now understands from what the lawyers have told him that this might not be good because it might affect the ability of the company to market its products in supermarkets and other places."

The disclosure is in one of several industry documents introduced yesterday by lawyers for the State of Minnesota in the final stages of its lawsuit against major tobacco producers. State lawyers said the records showed that industry lawyers mislead regulators and the public about the dangers of cigarettes.

In another Reynolds memorandum introduced yesterday by lawyers for the state, company lawyers in 1985 reviewed the potential damage from documents, released in smoking-related trials, from the Council for Tobacco Research, a industry trade group that supported scientific research.

Critics have long asserted that the council is an industry puppet. A footnote in the document notes that Charles Wall, a Philip Morris lawyer, said that internal records of that company questioned the "relevance" of the council's research and "excessive lawyer involvement."

Other documents introduced late yesterday by the state also suggest that despite urgings by a law firm, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, in 1992 that cigarette makers and their lawyers suspend financing of researchers supported by the council during the Government's criminal investigation of the group, one law firm considered a $40,000 payment to a scientist to "keep him happy" even though there was "no immediate value" to his research.

According to the memorandum, Shook, Hardy & Bacon, a leading tobacco industry law firm in Kansas City, Mo., wanted to make the payment out of a special fund because the scientist was a potential witness in a smoking-related case and had contacts with other researchers who might serve as witnesses during legislative hearings.

In the memorandum, a Wachtell, Lipton lawyer said the matter raised the troubling question of whether industry funds administered by the Shook, Hardy firm "were used to purchase favorable judicial or legislative testimony thereby perpetrating a fraud on the public."

But in a subsequent memorandum the Wachtell, Lipton lawyer said the payment to the scientist did not appear to violate its guidelines so long as the money was not used to finance research and was accounted for as a consulting or expert witness.

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