Jeffrey Wigand: The Whistle-Blower

"What do you do with the knowledge I've shared with you?" he asks. He mentions that students in Florida and elsewhere have started antismoking programs that have helped reduce the number of underage smokers. "Can kids in Alabama do this?" he asks.

"Yes," the students reply in unison.

For two days, he tirelessly repeats that message in various classes and at an evening lecture open to the public. He argues that the tobacco settlement was a step in the right direction but didn't go far enough. The agreement didn't limit tobacco ads. It didn't earmark settlement money for tobacco education and control. Alabama, he explains, spends more money taking care of sick smokers than it generates through cigarette taxes. "Is that good business?" he asks. "No, it's not."

He urges students and parents to get involved, to ask their legislators to use the settlement funds responsibly (ideally, a sizeable percentage would go toward tobacco control), to educate less fortunate students in Huntsville, and to "denormalize" tobacco and lobby for regulation. "If someone were to introduce this product today, it would be regulated," he says. "But because tobacco has been a part of our economic fabric for more than 200 years, it's not."

Speaking out still has its rewards, he says. For instance, the week before, he saved two lives. He was a visiting lecturer at Auburn University's school of management. At the end of one presentation, a young woman handed Wigand a pack of cigarettes and declared, "I'm quitting." Later, another student stopped him on the elevator to tell him the same thing.

Says Achilles Armenakis, the ethics professor at Auburn who invited Wigand and watched him talk to students practically nonstop from 8 in the morning until 8 at night: "I know for a fact that he saved more than that."

Maybe it's the ever-increasing popularity of Russell Crowe or the renewed interest in corporate ethics. For whatever reason, Wigand receives dozens of emails a day responding to his story, like these:

Thank you for your efforts because I do believe they make a difference when speaking to our young people. Your words did not help me because by the time I heard what you had to say, I was hopelessly ADDICTED. At 55 yrs, I am still a smoker.

---

I don't know how any of us can truly put into words our gratitude for what you have done.

If our country had more dedicated professionals such as yourself, we would not have the corporate immorality that has been exhibited by the tobacco companies and now Enron.

Not surprisingly, Wigand also hears from fellow and would-be whistle-blowers. Some thank him for inspiring them to speak out. Others seek advice. They're unsure about coming forward. "I tell them, 'Whether or not you do is your choice," he says. "You have to do what your moral compass tells you to do. But understand that the bigger nut you take on, the tougher the resistance.' "

Ultimately, his advice comes back to his story: "I never expected death threats against me and my family. I never expected to find a bullet in my mailbox. I never expected a 500-page dossier that was part of a campaign to ruin me. But guess what? We were successful."

On the subject of Enron's Sherron Watkins, he is adamant that she doesn't deserve the praise that the media has lavished on her. She wrote an excellent memo outlining her concerns, he says, but it was an internal memo to then-CEO Kenneth Lay. She didn't go far enough for Wigand. She didn't go to the media or, more important, to the SEC. "She turned around, sat back down, and shut up," he says. "I don't think what she did was right."

At times, the only thing gray about Wigand is his beard. "Either you're part of the problem, or you're part of the solution," he says. "If you think you're moral and your company is immoral, you're by definition amoral."

However, his own decision to speak out was anything but straightforward. Following a 25-year career in health care at companies like Pfizer and Union Carbide, Wigand had been recruited by a headhunter to join B& W in 1989 to develop a safer cigarette. A year later, the program was scrapped. Over the next two years, he learned how the company engineered its products to make them more appealing and more addictive and used additives that it knew posed serious health risks -- all the while denying that. He had never seen such corporate duplicity. Exasperated and disillusioned, he too wrote a sharply worded memo to his boss, then-CEO Thomas E. Sandefur. And in March 1993, citing "a difficulty in communication," Sandefur fired Wigand.