Tobacco Industry

When Johns Hopkins researcher Dr. Genevieve Matanoski published a study in 1995 suggesting that lung cancer cases attributed to secondhand smoke might actually result from diet or other factors, her paper acknowledged support from the Center for Indoor Air Research.What she did not say was that the center, operated from modest offices near Baltimore-Washington International Airport, gets its money from the nation's four largest cigarette makers. More than 90 percent of the approximately $5 million the center gives out each year comes directly from the tobacco industry.

TYLER, Texas -- The tobacco industry has a lot of legal worries these days. But few of them are bigger than a 6-foot-5 physician named Gary L. Huber, who says he was bamboozled by the cigarette companies that financed his research.Now he is prepared to pay them back, and then some.Since August, the lanky, 58-year-old former college basketball player has emerged as that surprisingly rare character: the tobacco industry whistle-blower. Huber has become a central witness in Texas' lawsuit against the tobacco companies, and his quiet life as a diet doctor, health columnist and soccer dad in this town on the edge of the East Texas oil fields has been transformed.

WASHINGTON -- In a mixture of grass-roots concern over jobs and corporate worries about profits, 20,000 employees of the tobacco industry marched through the nation's capital yesterday, demanding that lawmakers drop a proposed tax increase on cigarettes.The two-hour march, from the White House to the Capitol, was capped by an hour of speeches by opponents of the tax increases, which are being proposed to help pay for health care reform. The most recent proposal would slap a 75-cent federal tax on a pack of cigarettes.

Upper Marlboro -- It's called "nesting," and it's nothing new.Nesting probably is the nation's oldest form of business fraud, dating back to colonial times. Who knows, maybe George Washington even dabbled in the practice.In nesting's most flagrant form, tobacco farmers hide inferior grade leaf in the center of 200-pound baskets of top-dollar tobacco. Or they slip rocks, cinder blocks and metal plow points into baskets to boost the weight at auction.Though centuries old, nesting has become so prevalent that it threatens a Maryland industry dating back to the first settlers at St. Clements Island.

MIAMI - Nobody tells Bennett LeBow what to do.Starting in the morning, the 58-year-old renegade financier likes to cook his own breakfast so he can eat exactly what he wants. All day long, Mr. LeBow demands control, losing his cool when he's stuck in traffic or provoking corporate chieftains with audacious takeover bids.This month, the majority shareholder of Liggett Group, the smallest of the United States' five major tobacco companies, struck again, breaking with the $50 billion-a-year tobacco industry by agreeing to settle a class-action lawsuit that claims the industry knowingly sells addictive nicotine products.

The network news divisions all claim to be fearless in their pursuit of truth through investigative reporting. Suggesting there is no one too powerful to go after on behalf of its viewers, advertisements for ABC newsmagazines even boast, "It's us against them."If you believe such claims, then you need to see "Frontline's" "Smoke in the Eye" at 9 tonight on PBS (Channels 22, 26 and 67). The hourlong report with correspondent Daniel Schorr examines how investigations into the tobacco industry by ABC and CBS News were affected respectively by a lawsuit from Philip Morris and the threat of another from Brown & Williamson.

ANNAPOLIS -- The tobacco industry opened the Maryland front of its national battle against local smoking restrictions this week behind a battalion of lobbyists pushing a comprehensive smokers' rights bill.But the industry ran into an equally determined enemy yesterday when Gov. William Donald Schaefer said he would veto the measure.Pushing his own aggressive anti-smoking campaign to erase Maryland's status as the No. 1 cancer state in the nation, Mr. Schaefer called the measure "a special interest bill."

The tobacco industry and some of its supporters are criticizing the effort of Maryland Attorney General J. Joseph Curran Jr. to rewrite the law to give the state a better chance in its $13 billion legal case against cigarette companies.Curran's effort to have the General Assembly undo part of a judge's adverse pretrial decision in the lawsuit is unfair, industry representatives said."The state's suit has been around for a couple of years," said Nat Walker, a spokesman for R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. "So it would seem to us that if there's some effort being made to change the rules in midstream, that does not seem fair to us."

NEW YORK -- RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp., the No. 2 U.S. cigarette maker, said its first-quarter profit fell 54 percent on falling domestic sales, bigger discounts and a payment tied to the tobacco industry's $206 billion settlement.Profit from operations at the maker of Winston, Salem and Camel cigarettes fell to $83 million, or 24 cents a share, from $179 million, or 52 cents, a year earlier. Analysts had expected the company to earn 28 cents a share.RJR and industry leader Philip Morris Cos., the maker of best-selling Marlboro cigarettes, offered a 55-cent-a-pack discount on their major U.S. brands to try to keep smokers after prices were raised by 70 cents last year to pay for the industry's $206 billion legal settlement with the states, but that helped RJR's rival more, analysts said.

Driving in his red pickup truck, Larry Wilson points to a housing development along Route 263 in Calvert County. "I remember that being an open field, and where these houses are, I used to plant tobacco," said Wilson, 54. "When I was a young teenager, I helped my father, and I helped other farmers, and that's how I made money to buy my school clothes and my first car." Wilson's family grew tobacco for four generations, beginning with his grandfather and ending with his 30-year-old son. Remnants of those tobacco days lie inside the dusty gray barn behind Wilson's three-story house in Huntingtown.