Tobacco On Trial

Under DOJ attorney Frank Marine’s Redirect, the explosive Mr. LeBow went out with a comparative whimper yesterday.

Then Dr. Carolyn Levy took the stand. Dr. Levy held a wide variety of positions at Philip Morris until her retirement in 2002, including in the areas of nicotine research, brand development, marketing, consumer research and business planning. In the 90s she was Sr. VP for Marketing and Sales Information and in 1998, she was appointed Sr. VP of Youth Smoking Prevention by Philip Morris USA CEO Mike Szymanczyk. When she was in Business Planning, she testified, she got “a pretty good 30,000-foot understanding” of Philip Morris’ business.

Dr. Levy is about 50 years old and somewhat bird-like, with short-cropped curly dark hair. She wore a high-collared, long lavender frock over a black tee or light sweater. She spoke with a strong, soft voice.

DOJ attorney Leo Wise asked her about Philip Morris’ work on nicotine analogs, animal behavior studies on the self-administration of nicotine, and youth smoking issues. As “everything-nice” as Mr. LeBow was “puppy-dog-tails,” she seemed equally adept as he at parsing out the language of questions, document sentences and references.

For example, she corrected the answer to this line of questioining in her Written Direct Testimony,

“Q: You also had data that showed that two-thirds of all adolescents who smoke become established smokers when they are 15-17? . . . But Philip Morris chose not to address, through its advertising, this segment of adolescents, correct? “

Her corrected testimony reads:

“We addressed smoking among 15 to 17-year-olds through our youth smoking prevention program funding. “

In court, she even struck out her own previously-corrected answer to this question in her Written Direct Testimony:

“You were aware, when you were Senior Vice President of YSP [Youth Smoking Prevention], that one-third of all experimentation with cigarettes occurs from ages 15-17, correct?”

Her amended answer is now:

“Yes, if ‘experimentation’ means ‘first tried a cigarette.” I knew this from the 1994 Surgeon General’s Report , table 8 in chapter 3. As a note, I would like to add that the studies referred to in table 8 included some respondents who had already turned 18.”

A document which Ms. Levy wrote to Dr. Dunn titled, “A Proposed Study of Nicotine Withdrawal in Rats,” reads:

We do not predict that nicotine will act like morphine and caffeine because we do not believe that rats chronically injected with nicotine undergo withdrawal when the nicotine injections are stopped. We realize, of course, that it is dangerous to set out to prove the null hypothesis. However, because both morphine and caffeine withdrawal have been so easy to produce in the laboratory, any difficulty in producing nicotine withdrawal can only be interpreted as support for our position.

Mr. Wise asked her about the “dangerous” word. She said she was younger then, and “closer to the lab. That’s the language of a statistics teacher talking.” “Dangerous” actually meant difficult, ie, she said, “it is easier to refute a null hypothesis than support it.” That seemingly unambiguous “support for our position,” she said, did not have anything to do with Philip Morris’ position on addiction, but rather simply referred, in context, to the setting up of the null hypothesis that no withdrawal would be found.

Dr. Levy was presented with a 1977 memo from Philip Morris Director of Research Dr. Tom Osdene to Dr. William Dunn, who led Philip Morris’ Behavioral Research Group, on, apparently, her proposed withdrawal study.

“I have given Carolyn approval to proceed with this study. If she is able to demonstrate, as she anticipates, no withdrawal effects of nicotine, we will want to pursue this avenue with some vigor. If, however, the results with nicotine are similar to those gotten with morphine and caffeine, we will want to bury it.”

Ms. Levy said in her WDT that a buried study “could not have happened, given the procedures for preserving laboratory research that were in place.” She said on the stand that she had no idea what was in Dr. Osdene’s mind when he wrote the memo. She said she was “infuriated” when she found out about this document, and that she had seen her lab notebook “just the other day,” and knows it still exists.

A subtly emotional moment occurred as she was asked about her resignation from Philip Morris. Mr. Webb had already alerted Judge Kessler that she had diabetes, and may need to take a sudden break, especially in the afternoon. In 2001, she met with Mike Szymanczyk. “I told him my health was on a downhill run and I needed to quit working.” She smiled as she said this.

Mr. Webb then asked, in his business-like, rapid-fire delivery, “You gave him a year’s notice?” She said yes. “And you left, you’re gone, and you never came back?” “That’s correct,” she said, and you could see she was about to choke up, but controlled it as Mr. Webb continued his questioning.

Her testimony continues Wednesday.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 9th, 2005 at 6:26 am and is filed under Notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.