Jeffrey Wigand: The Whistle-Blower

First things first: Jeffrey Wigand doesn't like being called a whistle-blower.

Unfortunately, his name is nearly synonymous with the term. He's the one-time tobacco executive who made front-page news when he revealed that his former employer knew exactly how addictive and lethal cigarettes were. He delivered a damning deposition in a Mississippi courtroom that eventually led to the tobacco industry's $246 billion litigation settlement. His David-and-Goliath story was even made into a critically acclaimed movie, The Insider, starring Russell Crowe. Still, Wigand detests the label.

"The word whistle-blower suggests that you're a tattletale or that you're somehow disloyal," he says. "But I wasn't disloyal in the least bit. People were dying. I was loyal to a higher order of ethical responsibility."

He simply told the truth, he says, about what he saw and experienced as the head of research and development for Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. (B& W), the country's third-largest tobacco company -- how the company misled consumers about the highly addictive nature of nicotine, how it ignored research indicating that some of the additives used to improve flavor caused cancer, how it encoded and hid documents that could be used against the company in lawsuits brought by sick or dying smokers.

Wigand paid dearly for going public. Amid lawsuits, countersuits, and an exhaustive smear campaign orchestrated by the company, Wigand lost his family, his privacy, and his reputation. His wife divorced him, and their two daughters went to live with her. Eventually, he left Louisville, Kentucky and moved to Charleston, South Carolina, hoping to start over. He was on his own for the first time in years. "I had to heal," says Wigand, now 59. "I didn't want to come out of this experience bitter."

Six years after the 60 Minutes interview in which he told Mike Wallace that B& W was "a nicotine-delivery business," Wigand remains an outspoken insider and critic of big tobacco. But things are different now. He no longer requires around-the-clock bodyguards. He has reconciled with his children. And no, he doesn't sound bitter. That's because he has been vindicated "10 times over," he says, largely because of the movie. "It gave me a tremendous amount of credibility and a much larger platform."

If anything, Wigand is even more candid these days as an antitobacco advocate. There are no longer lawsuits and injunctions out to muffle him. Ever since The Insider came out in 1999, Wigand has been in demand. He speaks at dozens of schools a year, from elementary schools to business schools. He addresses local and national health organizations here and abroad. He urges physicians to chart their patients' smoking habits and lobbies Hollywood types to eliminate smoking in films. Some groups cover travel expenses only. Others pay his $10,000 speaker's fee, which funds a nonprofit he started called Smoke-Free Kids.

Because much of his audience is too young for the R-rated movie, Wigand developed a free educational video with the help of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta. Since last year, the CDC has sent out 30,000 copies of Secrets Through the Smoke. Wigand doesn't have a problem with adults who choose to smoke; they know the risks. But not children. They need to understand just how addictive and dangerous smoking -- or chewing tobacco or dip -- is and how savvy tobacco ads are at promoting the image of fun, fashionable, and healthy tobacco users. "The tobacco companies target underage kids," says Wigand, "because they know that if they hook them young, they hook them for life."

Today, Wigand is holding court in the library at the Randolph School, a private school in Huntsville, Alabama. Speaking to about 130 middle-school students, he is as animated, intense, and blunt as ever. "I figure that a third of you have already tried smoking, and a third of those are addicted," he says.

Wigand, who has a PhD in biochemistry, is a former teacher of the year in Kentucky. Unable to find a corporate job after his stint at B& W, he took a job at duPont Manual High School, in Louisville, where he taught science and Japanese for $30,000 a year -- one-tenth of his former salary. In Huntsville, he doesn't talk down to his young audience. He describes how the tobacco industry "obfuscates the truth" about its lethal products. "It's the only product that when used as intended, kills you," he says, a line he returns to throughout the day.

In his rapid-fire Bronx accent, he recites a litany of statistics. The number of people in the U.S. who die each year from smoking-related illnesses: 430,000. The percentage of adult smokers who started before they turned 18: 80% to 90%. The amount of money tobacco companies spend on advertising each year: more than $8 billion. The percentage of 6-year-olds surveyed who associated Joe Camel with smoking: 91%.