On Friday, 24 September 1993, I kept a telephone appointment with Jeffrey Wigand that had been set up by a mutual colleague. This was our first of dozens of telephone conversations (to this day, I have not met Jeff in person) and I took notes of our talk. Jeff was reaching out to me to see if I could assist him in “whistleblowing” on his former employer, Brown & Williamson (B&W). I was committed to helping him—although I must admit I suspected that he was an industry spy, even as he claimed that he was the former director of research and development at B&W. I knew that this made Jeff the highest level whistleblower in the history of the tobacco industry.

While still employed by B&W, Jeff had sat in the audience at public meetings of the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) on Fire Safe Cigarettes in Washington, DC, United States, and I was one of the 15 congressionally appointed members representing the American Burn Association and the American Public Health Association. After observing me at the meetings, Jeff felt that I would be sympathetic to his cause. Jeff asked if I could introduce him to members of Congress so that he could be “forced” to testify. All of this was in order for Jeff to tell the world what he knew about the corporate practices of B&W. And the corporate practice that I was most interested in was whether or not B&W was developing or had developed a fire-safe cigarette—or as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a cigarette with a “reduced propensity for igniting upholstered furniture and mattress fires”. This was the first question I put to Jeff that Friday afternoon. His answer was not surprising. He told me that all the cigarette companies had …