Tobacco Firms Concealed Research, Califano Says : Health: Carter Administration official says he would have declared cigarettes addictive had findings on nicotine been known.

WASHINGTON — The secretary of health, education and welfare during the Jimmy Carter Administration told Congress on Tuesday that--had he and other federal officials known more about secret tobacco industry research into the properties of nicotine--they would have declared cigarettes addictive and moved to regulate them.

“Unfortunately (we) were all victims of the concealment and disinformation campaign of the tobacco companies,” said Joseph A. Califano Jr., who once smoked as many as four packs a day but has since become an anti-tobacco crusader who calls tobacco “history’s No. 1 serial killer.”

Testifying before the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health and the environment, which has been conducting an extensive investigation of the tobacco industry, Califano described an intense debate in 1978 and 1979 over the government’s role in regulating tobacco.

He said that Dr. William Pollin, then director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, urged Carter’s surgeon general, Dr. Julius Richmond, to pronounce cigarettes addictive. But Richmond resisted, citing a lack of sufficient scientific evidence, Califano said.

“Since we knew that the tobacco interests would attack any report we issued, we believed it was imperative that we be on unimpeachable ground in all we said,” Califano said. “I therefore agreed with Dr. Richmond and we decided not to declare that cigarettes were addictive.”

The outcome of the dispute would have been different, “had we been privy to (industry) research,” added Califano, who now heads the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University in New York.

But Walker Merryman, vice president of the Tobacco Institute, noting that anti-smoking fervor was far more subdued during the 1960s and 1970s when Califano served in government than it is today, said “it would have been almost impossible for him to do anything more,” regardless of the information he had.

“While today, his actions might not seem terribly radical, they were extreme for that period of time,” Merryman said. “He’s behaving as though, up until a couple of weeks ago, the entire world thought that smoking was safe.”

In recent weeks, the growing debate over smoking has focused on whether nicotine is indeed addictive, as numerous medical experts have maintained, and whether the tobacco industry has been manipulating levels of nicotine in cigarettes to keep smokers hooked on its products.

Last month, chief executives from the nation’s seven leading U.S. tobacco companies denied under oath in testimony before Congress that they had been deliberately increasing nicotine levels in cigarettes and insisted that the substance is not addictive.

But decades-old documents from at least one company, Brown & Williamson, which were recently leaked to the press and to anti-smoking members of Congress, indicated that executives there believed as early as 1964--when the first landmark surgeon general’s smoking report was released--that nicotine is addictive. Moreover, other company papers show that the firm had been working on developing a safer cigarette, although it never marketed one.

Subcommittee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) has scheduled a hearing for Friday and has asked Brown & Williamson Chairman Thomas E. Sandefur Jr. to appear. It was not clear whether Sandefur will attend.

Earlier this week, Griffin B. Bell, attorney general during the Carter Administration who now represents Brown & Williamson, obtained subpoenas seeking access to documents held by Waxman before advising his client whether to appear. Waxman, who had refused earlier requests to give up the documents, has turned the matter over to the committee’s counsel.