Secrets Through the Smoke Video Trailer

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Video Trailer Transcript

President Clinton: Cigarettes and smokeless tobacco are harmful, highly addictive, and aggressively marketed to our young people. The evidence is overwhelming and the threat is immediate.

Dr. Koop (Surgeon General 1989): If, for the first time, somebody brought to the American shores tobacco containing nicotine, and we had a package insert that told us everything that we know about it, the government would take steps to ban it today — and if they didn’t, there would be a revolution in the country.

Dr. Wigand: It is a meticulously engineered, scientifically understood product that when used as intended kills you.

[Video montage of newspaper headlines and tobacco-related scenes — excerpts read by various voices]

... Dr. Jeffrey Wigand.

... the executive who told tobacco secrets.

... to present the Breath of Life Award to Dr. Jeffrey Wigand.

... the man called research.

... the highest ranking executive ever to speak out against the tobacco business.

... tobacco industry whistle blower tells the truth about cigarettes.

Female student: The generation is tired of being lied to about tobacco, tired of replacing the one thousand customers tobacco kills every day, tired of being a target. Today tobacco becomes our target.

Male adult: What did I lose? I lost a family.

Male adult: I am not going to be like it’s not going to happen to me. It’s exactly what is going to happen to me.

Male adult: The real thing we were doing here was presenting a voice from inside the industry.

Female announcer: Tobacco industry insider Jeffery Wigand reveals what it was like making a decision that could have cost him his life.

Male: He had two death threats.

Female announcer: Was there a bullet found in your mail box?

Dr. Wigand: Most certainly.

[End of video montage]

Dr. Wigand: I am here today to try to help answer some of your questions dealing with tobacco, smoking and health, how tobacco works, to try to give you an understanding of what the truth is about how the industry works inside versus what it says outside.

Voice over: What would you do? What would you do? What would you do?

Jeffrey Wigand. Jeffery Wigand.

Male student: Dr. Wigand, what are the ingredients in cigarettes and why don’t more people know about them?

Dr. Wigand: Whether it is a natural cigarette or a chemically-engineered cigarette, it generates combustion products, tar, black stuff. That black stuff, whether it is in an engineered cigarette or a natural cigarette still contains four to eight thousand chemical compounds. Most of those chemical compounds you cannot legally bury in your garbage pits.

Female student: What? In a cigarette?

Male student: So what is the deal with second-hand smoke? Is it really dangerous?

Female student: Do tobacco companies do their own research and, if they do, are the results reliable?

Male student: Do you think this industry intentionally tries to undermine science that shows tobacco use to be dangerous?

[Interview clip from the 1950s]

Announcer: Have any cancer-causing agents been identified in cigarettes?

Tobacco company representative: No, none whatever, either in cigarettes or in any products of smoking.

Male Announcer: We have lots more to do — lots more in terms of getting more youth involved, lots more to do to get more people involved in tobacco control and activism. We have much more to do to keep the truth out there. Shining the light on the truth will keep this industry where it belongs.

Dr. Wigand: If we don’t stop tobacco use on a worldwide basis, estimates are by the year 2010, 10 million people will be dying from tobacco-related diseases, more so than AIDS, suicides, car accidents, fires — all of them combined together do not equal the death toll taken by the most preventable form of disease we have, tobacco use.

Rosie O’Donnell (Entertainer): There is an amazing movie out right now called The Insider. It is directed by Michael Mann, starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe, and it is about the real-life story of a man named Jeffrey Wigand. It is, in my opinion, the best movie I’ve seen in the last ten years. It is a socially relevant and poignant film and it changed the course of America.

Female announcer: Dr. Jeffrey Wigand does not like to be called a hero, but clearly the history books will define him as such and tell his inspiring story of courage, the story of how one man sacrificed a great deal, paid a high price to expose corporate deception in the tobacco industry, all in an effort to protect the public health and try and save lives.

Robert Kennedy (1957): All of you share with us a distressing lack of knowledge about how to convince people, particularly young people, not only that cigarettes may kill them, but that they should do something about it.

I am going to be very big with the cigarette companies at the end of this speech.

[End of video tape.]

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This page last reviewed September 09, 2003

United States Department of Health and Human Services
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion
Office on Smoking and Health