October 2000 • Post-Assembly Edition • Dallas
Tobacco team hits audience hard with message
BY SHERI PORTER
Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore
"Washington, D.C., is the only place in the world where you can't give away $368 billion."Call them the dynamic duo. Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore and former tobacco company chemist Jeffrey Wigand, Ph.D., teamed up to bring a crowd to its feet at the close of the Sept. 20 AAFP Scientific Assembly special evening presentation, "Inside the Tobacco Industry."
The pair's grueling odyssey through the court system, which brought incriminating tobacco industry documents to the public eye and made the industry pay for damage to smokers, was made famous by the 1999 Hollywood film "The Insider."
Moore spoke first, and his message was clear: Don't let our hard work and sacrifice go to waste. "Millions of dollars didn't just fall out of heaven," Moore said, alluding to years of court battles.
"The settlement money can change the future of public health if it's used properly," said Moore as he strode around the stage in his shirt sleeves. He held up the state of Mississippi as an example of a state doing it right. Mississippi, he said, is spending 100 percent of tobacco settlement funds on tobacco education and smoking cessation programs.
Moore chastised states that are not. "Any of you from Texas?" he asked, squinting out into the audience. "We're gonna whop up pretty good on you because Texas isn't doing much." He was referring to the tactic many state governments have taken of squandering tobacco settlement money on unrelated budget items, such as tax cuts and road repair.
Former tobacco company chemist Jeffrey Wigand, Ph.D.
"Write to Congress to enact laws to regulate and control and bridle this industry."'Logic-free zone'
Moore also took a jab at Washington, calling it the "logic-free zone" for its inability to pass a bill in 1998 for a federal settlement agreement that he sweated for and he claims "had everything in it."
"Washington, D.C., is the only place in the world where you can't give away $368 billion," he said, eliciting laughter from the crowd.
Wigand, now affiliated with Smoke Free Kids Inc. in Charleston, S.C., followed Moore and was introduced to the audience through clips from the movie. Wigand, like Moore, paced the long stage, detailing how he went from being a well-paid Brown and Williamson Tobacco Co. executive in 1989 to being the centerpiece of a Hollywood movie and a key player in the tobacco settlement case.
But Wigand's main message, like Moore's, was that there is a substantial pot of money available to states, and that money needs to be used to address a public health crisis.
"We have a settlement to prevent 3,000 kids a day from being addicted to a product that, when used as intended, kills you," Wigand said.
Plan of action
Wigand called for a plan of action from the audience as he noted a general lack of cohesiveness in the medical profession in its response to the tobacco industry.
"This is the only industry I know of with no regulatory body," Wigand said. "Write to Congress to enact laws to regulate and control and bridle this industry."
He touched on the tremendous power of advertising and called on the audience to work to combat tobacco advertising that hooks kids on an image. Use the kids as messengers against tobacco use, Wigand said. "Youth have a dramatic effect when we empower them as mentors."
FP Report is published by the AAFP News Department.
Copyright © 2000 by American Academy of Family Physicians.
FP Report | Headlines |AAFP Home | Search
