SMOKING GUNS

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

AFTER DWELLING IN THE LAND OF EUphemism and caution for 11 years, Ian Uydess had finally had enough. Enough, he says, of seeing lawyers in the laboratory, his language vetted for such dangerously accurate words as "addictive." Enough too of not being able to do the job he believed he had been hired to do: develop a safer cigarette for Philip Morris, the world's largest tobacco company. Uydess, an associate senior scientist at Philip Morris for 11 years, quietly resigned from his job in 1989. Not until two weeks ago, however, when he witnessed the spectacle of his former employer playing hardball while cigarette maker Liggett worked out a settlement in six huge lawsuits, did he decide to make a big noise. "This is a social tragedy that is being played out here, and it's got to stop," Uydess told TIME. "If there's any way I can help stop it, I want to do that."

Last week the Food and Drug Administration released affidavits given by Uydess and two other former Philip Morris employees, William Farone and Jerome Rivers, that threaten to push the tobacco industry farther out on a legal limb. All three men directly contradict the testimony of former Philip Morris ceo William Campbell before Representative Henry Waxman's 1994 congressional subcommittee. At those hearings Campbell, along with six other tobacco ceos, swore that he did not believe nicotine was addictive, and that Philip Morris did nothing to manipulate or increase nicotine levels in its products.

The new statements read like an upside-down and backward image of Campbell's testimony. Campbell told the Waxman subcommittee that "nicotine levels in tobacco are measured at only two points in our manufacturing process: prior to the tobaccos' being blended, and then 18 months later when those leaves have been manufactured into finished cigarettes." But according to Uydess, "Nicotine levels were routinely targeted and adjusted by Philip Morris." Rivers, who was a shift manager at the Richmond plant where the company made reconstituted tobacco, stated that the nicotine level in the product was measured "approximately once per hour."

Why? Because, says Uydess, management was acutely aware of nicotine's addictive powers, euphemistically termed "impact." For instance, Uydess said, the company test-marketed a low-nicotine cigarette but gave up when it did not sell and focus groups reported that it seemed to be "missing something." Philip Morris, explained Uydess in his affidavit, "clearly understood they would have trouble sustaining the sales of a good-tasting product that was too low in nicotine."

Uydess, 49, was hired by Philip Morris in 1977 to help develop a safer cigarette. As he describes it, a job that at first held genuine intellectual excitement grew increasingly like an episode of The Twilight Zone. "I observed an inner company within Philip Morris that appeared to conduct research out of normal channels," he explains. One project, which was finding that nicotine sparked brain activity similar to that produced by cocaine, was moved to Germany, Uydess alleges, because of its sensitive nature. Then there was the experience of his close colleague, experimental psychologist Victor DeNoble, whose lab was next to that of Uydess. In the early 1980s DeNoble devised an experiment in which rats could manipulate a lever to dose themselves with nicotine, which they soon began doing--an indicator, DeNoble says, of potential addictiveness. In 1984, not long after demonstrating the experiment to top Philip Morris executives, DeNoble says, he was told by a superior to "shut the equipment off, kill the animals and turn over our badges." He and his associates obeyed. "We were just in absolute shock," he says.

Uydess was dismayed, and claims that management withdrew support for some of his own promising research as well. "You could feel a tightening of things," Uydess recalls of this era. "All of a sudden lawyers started coming down from New York to visit. Seeing that lab disappear..." He finally quit in 1989, but he never publicly challenged Philip Morris until last week, when he and his wife Carol decided together that the principle was worth the pressure and notoriety that immediately descended on the family. "This is something that has been in my gut for 20 years,'' says Uydess, who fears he is being shadowed by tobacco-company investigators.

Though he admits it may be naive, Uydess hopes that blowing the whistle on his former employer might force the company to do the right thing. "Philip Morris has the technology, the facilities, the people to implement change," he says. "If they found out there was an ingredient in their kids' cereal or their wives' cosmetic products that caused even a rash, they would go nuts, they would demand the heads of the people who put it there; and yet they don't recognize their own accountability in this very same area."

In light of the new affidavits, Waxman has asked the Justice Department to extend its perjury inquiry to statements made by tobacco executives to the fda, and Uydess, Rivers and Farone may join former Brown & Williamson executive Jeffrey Wigand as star witnesses in at least one of the state lawsuits against the tobacco industry. (As it turns out, Wigand tried to recruit Uydess for B&W's safe-cigarette program, but Wigand was then fired in a confrontation with management remarkably similar to the Philip Morris scenario.)

For now Philip Morris stands by its story. A spokesman comments merely that "the company is looking forward to cross-examining these individuals," while an internal March 20 memo to staff members from chairman Geoffrey Bible twice declared, "We intend to prevail." And last Friday, Philip Morris ran an ad in some 40 newspapers indicating that the company has not given up the struggle. The ad asks, in bold letters, "What does Philip Morris have to say about the allegation of nicotine manipulation"? Its answer: Plenty.

--Reported by Greg Fulton/Atlanta and Elaine Shannon/Washington

With reporting by GREG FULTON/ATLANTA AND ELAINE SHANNON/WASHINGTON