As if they weren’t addictive enough

As if they weren’t addictive enough

These days, if a character smokes it’s because they’re self-destructive, a villain or a troubled high school student. “Addiction Incorporated” traces tobacco’s nosedive from respectability. Santa Claus used to unwind from his long night’s work with a Lucky on the back cover of Life magazine, and Ronald Reagan liked to light up Chesterfields. Now we hear about proposed new government health warnings that are more likely to make you gag than smoke your first cigarette.

The man who set this all in motion was Victor DeNoble, a scientist for Philip Morris, who started with the well-known fact that nicotine was addictive and discovered that a chemical called acetaldehyde made it even more addictive. Originally hired by Philip Morris to find a substitute for nicotine the idea was to create a less addictive cigarette; as the tobacco industry put it: Dead smokers don’t buy cigarettes DeNoble reported his findings which led Philip Morris to change its mind and decide it could outsell its rivals by adding more acetaldehyde. Meanwhile, the Tobacco Institute was claiming there wasn’t any evidence at all that cigarettes were addictive.

You may be thinking DeNoble is the same whistle-blower played by Russell Crowe in “The Insider” (1999). No, that was Jeffrey Wigand, a scientist employed by Brown & Williamson. DeNoble’s research was obtained by ABC News, which declined to use it after consultation with corporate bosses. Wigand leaked to “60 Minutes” on CBS; network executives were also skittish because those were still the days when there were many cigarette ads on TV and Big Tobacco had never lost an expensive lawsuit.

The first half of this documentary covers familiar ground; everybody already knew they were addictive my parents both died of smoking cigarettes! but Big Tobacco had always denied it. Then along came DeNoble with lab rats: Pushing a button gave them a rat-size dose of nicotine. The first hit made them throw up, but soon they were hitting the button 90 times a day. DeNoble was the industry’s most damaging witness because he could testify that Philip Morris knew it and had hoped to capitalize on that knowledge.

The second half of the film opens with a series of historic congressional hearings chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), who, after establishing beyond dispute that the industry knew nicotine was an addictive drug, brought in the heads of the seven major tobacco companies to testify; they’d always refused to appear in the past, but this time they showed up so Waxman drops a surprise: He swears them in; under oath, do they agree it is addictive or commit perjury? All seven raise their right hands and swear smoking isn’t addictive. And then DeNoble delivers his history-making testimony.

DeNoble, who was the first in his family to attend college, grew up in a working-class neighborhood. That happened after he found out he had dyslexia and “I wasn’t stupid like I thought.” He would have become famous if his Philip Morris findings were published in a journal. But instead of allowing that to happen, his bosses made him withdraw and destroy his research paper then fired him. Today, he talks against cigarettes on national tours funded by money from Big Tobacco’s settlement with the government.

“Addiction Incorporated,” directed by Charles Evans Jr., doesn’t tell a new story; it wraps up very recently with Obama signing the legislation DeNoble’s research set in motion. It’s a good movie, animated with rats, never dull particularly when it features Rush Limbaugh fulminating against the Waxman hearings (Limbaugh is an aficionado of cigars).

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