Who is dr jeffrey wigand

At the forefront of these changes was Dr. Jeffrey Wigand, who exposed corporate deceit and wrongdoing in spite of threats to his career and the personal lives of those around him. I found him to be extremely intelligent, driven and very courageous. Jeff was the first real insider at the corporate officer level to tell the truth about the industry. We will be forever grateful for Jeff's great personal sacrifice in our effort to save lives.

He is beyond snappish now. I realize that he is speaking to one of his legal investigators, who has been putting in hour days on his behalf, mounting a counterattack against his accusers. Wigand slams the telephone on the table. You know what the team can do! Sick of hiding in a hotel and living like an animal.

Everett Koop was going to introduce him. Wigand radiated glumness, an unsettling affect for a man who was in New York to be honored along with such other anti-smoking activists as California congressman Henry Waxman and Victor Crawford, the former Tobacco Institute lobbyist, who died soon after of throat cancer. A local TV reporter has come to my school to ask about my marriage.

They are trying to ruin my life. When I get back to Louisville, I may not have a job. A public-relations man in New York named John Scanlon is trying to smear me. I have five sets of lawyers who are representing me, and no one can agree on a strategy.

When I saw Jeffrey Wigand for the first time in Louisville, he was at the end of one crisis and the beginning of another. We had been scheduled to meet for our first formal interview that evening, and I waited for him to call me. Out of necessity, Wigand has become a man of secret telephone numbers and relayed phone messages; there is an atmosphere of conspiracy around any meeting with him, with tense instructions and harried intermediaries. On my voice mail in the hotel, the messages grew increasingly dramatic.

He will call you at four p. Some problems have developed. I am not sure I can have dinner. I am trying not to be served with papers. By the time Wigand decided to move temporarily into the Hyatt, it was p. I walked downstairs and knocked on his door. I was surprised by the change in his appearance in just one week. He leaned against the TV on the wall, diminished and badly shaken. He had hurriedly packed a few shirts; he was missing even the lesson plans for his classes the next day at the high school.

Before coming to the Hyatt, Wigand had broken down at home in the presence of an F. Over the next two weeks, he would hide in Room at the Hyatt, registered under another name. Wigand was fraught, particularly sour with one of his lawyers, Todd Thompson, when he walked into the room. He was sitting at a small table. On his shirt was a button that read: if you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

Why should I continue to pay her expenses? The deposition would be used in a massive lawsuit filed by Michael Moore, the attorney general of Mississippi, against the major American tobacco companies. Wigand is a key witness in a singular legal attempt by seven states to seek reimbursement of Medicaid expenses resulting from smoking-related illnesses.

Each year, , Americans die of such illnesses; through tax money that goes to Medicaid, the general population pays for a significant portion of the billions of dollars of health costs. If the state attorney general, with an assist from Jeffrey Wigand, were to succeed in proving that cigarettes are addictive, the cigarette companies could be forced into settling the hundreds of thousands of plaintiff actions that would result.

Wigand is tentatively scheduled to testify late this spring. If you think we are going to let you ruin our lives, you are in for a big surprise! You cannot keep the bodyguards forever, asshole. Wigand looked up to see his own face on TV. Mike Wallace was interviewing him. He is the highest-ranking executive ever to reveal what goes on behind the scenes at the highest level of a tobacco company.

The telephone rang. There was no pleasure in his voice. Suddenly, a copy of the death threat that I had just read was on the screen.

That night we had dinner at the revolving restaurant at the top of the Hyatt. As we sat down at the table, Wigand looked out the window. The legal department. That is where they are all working, trying to destroy my life. You kick them in the balls. The anti-tobacco forces depict Jeffrey Wigand as a portrait in courage, a Marlon Brando taking on the powers in On the Waterfront.

The pro-tobacco lobbies have been equally vociferous in their campaign to turn Wigand into a demon, a Mark Fuhrman who could cause potentially devastating cases against he tobacco industry to dissolve over issues that have little to do with the dangers of smoking. A part of his motivation is the need for personal vindication: Wigand is not proud that he was once attracted to the situation he came to find intolerable.

It has become a dramatic convention to project onto whistle-blowers our need for heroism, when revenge and anger are often what drive them. There is a powerful temptation to see Jeffrey Wigand as a symbol: the little guy against the cartel, a good man caught in a vise. However, Wigand defies easy categorization.

National reporters arrive in Louisville daily with questions for Wigand: How lethal are tobacco additives such as coumarin? And what does it feel like, Dr. Wigand, to lose your wife and children and have every aspect of your personal life up for grabs and interpretation in the middle of a smear?

When Jeffrey Wigand tells the story of his life, he does not begin with his childhood. He is a corporate Everyman, part of a world of subsidiaries and spin-offs, golf on weekends and rides on the company plane. The son of a mechanical engineer, Jeffrey Wigand grew up in a strict Catholic home in the Bronx, the oldest of five children. When he was a teenager, the family moved to Pleasant Valley, a town in upstate New York near Poughkeepsie.

I always had the feeling how much was being done for us, how much we owed for this opportunity! A gifted chemistry and biology student, Jeff flourished in the quiet atmosphere of the science labs and hoped to study medicine. Then he suddenly announced to his parents that he was dropping out of college and joining the air force.

It was Wigand was sent to Misawa, an American air base in Japan, where he ran an operating room. He volunteered as an English teacher at a Catholic orphanage. According to one investigator, he was there for about a month. Seven months after they married, in , Linda developed multiple sclerosis. At the time, Wigand was still working for Boehringer Manheim in New York, but he moved on to Pfizer and then was recruited for a lucrative position at Union Carbide.

He was to form a subsidiary to test medical equipment in clinical trials in Japan. He was 34 years old, fluent in Japanese, basking in his new status. In their daughter, Gretchen, was born. Wigand has a quality his brother recalled as a kind of personal shutdown—an ability to close off his emotions when things get difficult.

She went home to Buffalo. She was a sales rep. He was, he later remembered, attracted to her cool demeanor and willowy good looks. Lucretia had spent part of her childhood in Louisville, the daughter of two doctors who separated when she was eight. They married in Soon Wigand moved on to a grander position as a senior vice president at Technicon, responsible for marketing blood-testing equipment.

Wigand was filled with ideas, but he was often testy. Bob Karlson, his mentor at Ortho, recalled pulling on his ear at meetings to tell Wigand to pipe down when he got out of hand.

He was a perfectionist who kept a file of correspondence with businesses he dealt with whose products were flawed. In one instance, he returned some hardware to a catalogue company. In another, he demanded reimbursement for a cleaning bill for water-damaged items. Wigand had a tendency not to share information, even with Lucretia. In he was made president of a small medical-equipment company called Biosonics in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania. Wigand recalled a power struggle with the owner of the company, who recently wrote an article in Philadelphia Forum about his experience with Wigand, accusing him of having bullied female employees and in one instance of having shined a light on his subordinates while he was asking about a company matter.

Wigand denies both charges. For one year Jeff Wigand did consulting work. He finally decided to pursue his dream of being a doctor, but Lucretia convinced him he was too old. You know nothing about tobacco. You had—what? Heard said he wanted to develop a new cigarette to compete with Premier, a product made by the R. Shortly after he began the interviews, Wigand took up smoking. I wanted to understand the science of how it made you feel.

From the beginning, Lucretia encouraged the move to Louisville. Along with his medical practice, he owned tobacco land. Besides, she had just had a baby, and she believed that life in Louisville would be a boon for the child. I talked to a lot of my friends from college. On his good days he believed he was helping the world. On the other days he was a guy with a family who earned a large salary. He had a feisty, urban, go-getter personality in an unusual city; Louisville was a Velveeta town, clannish and sophisticated, once ruled by old families such as the Bingham publishing dynasty.

Wigand believed that he was there to shake up the ossified atmosphere. Three months after he was hired, RJR withdrew Premier from the market because the taste was unpleasant, acrid, and synthetic. Had Wigand been shrewder, he might have thought that he was now in a trap. There was no real reason for a non-tobacco man to remain at the company. But he attempted to keep his contrarian nature under wraps. He went to company parties, and Lucretia volunteered to help at the Hard Scruffle steeplechase, a charity event.

He surely appeared to be highly ambitious, money-hungry, a potential captive to the firm. In Louisville, the Wigands bought a two-story, red brick house in a pleasant suburb. When he toured the lab for the first time, he was startled, he told me, to observe how antiquated it seemed. There was no fundament science being done. How, he thought, could you be serious about studying the health aspects of tobacco or fire safety without the proper experts?

However, Wigand says that he did not learn of those studies until after he left the company. The firm is reputed to have its own in-house scientists and tobacco researchers. Nine months after Wigand went to work, he attended a meeting of bat scientists in Vancouver, British Columbia. There was a feeling of excitement among the scientists that they could reduce health risks for smokers. By then Wigand had grown used to the euphemisms of his new industry.

At the meeting, Wigand would later testify, roughly 15 pages of minutes were taken by Ray Thornton, a British scientist. A copy was sent to Wigand, who circulated copies to upper management. In a recent deposition Wells testified that Raymond Pritchard, the then C. As a foreign corporation it has never enjoyed quite as much political influence as the American tobacco companies, which donate vast sums of money to organizations as diverse as the African-American political caucuses, the Whitney Museum, and the political-action committees of dozens of candidates, especially Bob Dole.

In the late s the Federal Trade Commission F. They never mixed. You have lots of nice benefits. I was a different animal. He worked on reverse engineering on Marlboros, attempting to discern their unique properties; he studied fire safety and ignition propensity.

After Vancouver, Wigand continued to push for more information. They did the work on nicotine overseas. Wigand began to keep an extensive scientific diary, both in his computer and in a red leather book. I saw two faces, the outside face and the inside face. It bothered me. O James Burke during the recall of shipments of Tylenol after a poisoning scare in At first he believed that Ray Pritchard was a man of honor like Burke.

At lunch from time to time, he complained in private to Pritchard about Thomas Sandefur, then the company president. Wigand had come believe that his safe-cigarette project was being canceled. Sandefur used to beat on me for using big words. I never found anybody as stupid as Sandefur in terms of his ability to read or communicate. There were problems with bacterial fermentation, Wigand told me. They could not get a consistent taste or particle size.

They could not understand the tactility of soil bacteria and how it worked on the natural flora. What was the effect of ammonia to flora?

Most moist snuff deteriorates after packaging. If you could find a way to sterilize it, you would slow up bacterial fermentation and have a safer product.

No one had done this for four years. You have to look at the age somebody starts smoking. According to The Journal of the American Medical Association, 3 million Americans under the age of 18 consume one billion packs of cigarettes and 26 million containers of snuff ever year.

He was disturbed by a report that on the average children begin to smoke by I felt uncomfortable. I felt dirty. How did they know I was trouble? I was asking some pretty difficult questions: How come there was no research file?

I know a lot. My diary will reflect those meetings. He withdrew into a stolid isolation. Lucretia knew something was wrong, she later told me. There was also a major additional problem at home, a hole in the center of his life. His older daughter with Lucretia had serious medical problems. I finally sought out a respected adult urologist, who made the diagnosis of spina bifida.

This required spinal surgery. Neither Lucretia nor her father would comment on this subject. At work he grew increasingly vocal. For Wigand, the critical moment occurred when he read a report from the National Toxicology Program. The subject was coumarin, an additive that had been shown to have a carcinogenic property which caused tumors in rats and mice. The makeup of coumarin was close to that of a compound found in rat poison, but until no one understood the possible dangers. The new report described its carcinogenic effect.

Wigand told 60 Minutes that when he went to a meeting with Sandefur, Sandefur told him that removing it would impact sales.

Wigand got the impression that Sandefur would do nothing immediately to alter the product, so he sought out his toxicologist, Scott Appleton. Wigand says he asked him to write a memo backing him up, but Appleton refused, perhaps afraid for his job.

Appleton declined to comment. Driven by anger now, Wigand says, he determined to examine what happens when other additives are burned. He focused on glycerol, an additive used to keep the tobacco in cigarettes moist.

Wigand met secretly with Dr. David Kessler of the FDA and explained to him how nicotine was chemically altered to make it stronger. His deposition for the attorneys general Medicaid cases was the single most important evidence that would emerge from within the industry.

Wigand was freed from tobacco industry lawsuits when the June 20, agreement was reached. He has maintained that his primary goal has been to get to the truth and to share with the American public evidence about the tobacco industry's past lies.