FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Monday, December 11, 1995

The public may yet get to hear what a former tobacco official was prepared to reveal before CBS-TV's "60 Minutes" backed out of airing his statement.

A court has been asked to remove the seal from far more extensive testimony given under oath by the same official about his company's perjury, suppression of evidence, and the use of cancerous chemicals in tobacco.

"There's a good chance the judge will open most of this transcript to public view," says law profession John Banzhaf, who filed the request. "Courts should not be parties to keeping secret information which could save lives!"

Banzhaf optimistically noted that the same judge refused a tobacco industry motion for an order preventing the former official from testifying; that several major news sources are supporting the request that the testimony be made public; and that even Judge Lance Ito bowed to public and media pressure in opening many portions of previously secret testimony in the O.J. Simpson trial.

According to the transcript of the censored "60 Minutes" broadcast, former Brown and Williamson [B&W] executive Jeffrey Wigand told Mike Wallace that B&W knowingly used as an additive a chemical that causes cancer in lab animals at "a hundredfold the safety level." "I wanted it out [to the public] immediately, and I was told it would affect sales, and I was to mind my own business."

Wigand also reportedly alleged that B&W lawyers altered documents in an attempt to delete any references to the company's efforts at making a safer cigarette, and B&W chief executive Thomas Sandefur said: "If we pursue a safer cigarette, it would put us at extreme exposure with every other product. I don't want to hear about it anymore."

The motion filed today by Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), a national antismoking organization, argues that the public interest in learning about this information far outweighs any possible trade secrets it may contain.

ASH's prior legal actions helped to force disclosure of other information damaging to the tobacco industry, including information about how secondhand tobacco smoke causes tens of thousands of heart attacks each year.

ASH - ACTION ON SMOKING AND HEALTH 2013 H Street, NW / Washington, DC 20006 / (202) 659-4310