Christopher Buckley: Thank You for Smoking

Now for Buerger's disease. This was trickier. Nick thought for a few minutes before calling Bill Albright at USA Today. He didn't like getting into disease specifics and he didn't particularly want his name attached to quotes containing the word "amputation."

"Well," he began, more in sadness than in anger, "why not blame us for Buerger's disease? We're taking the rap for everything these days. I read somewhere a week ago that cigarettes are widening the ozone hole, so why not Buerger's? What's next? Dolphins? The way things are going, we'll be reading next week that dolphins, arguably the most majestic of the smaller pelagic mammals, are choking on filters that people on cruise ships toss overboard."

Actually, Nick had not read that cigarettes were widening the ozone hole, but since Bill was a friend, he felt that he could in good conscience lie to him. He heard the soft clacking of the keyboard at the other end. Bill was taking it down. They were each playing their assigned roles.

"Nick," Bill said, "this report was in The New England Journal of Medicine."

"For which I have the highest respect. But can I just ask one question?" "Yeah."

"Where are the data?"

"What do you mean, where are the data? It's The New England Journal of Medicine. It's all data, for Chrissake." "This was a double-blind study?" ". Sure."

Fatal hesitation. Attack! "And how big was the control group?"

"Come on, Nick."

"Was this a prospective study?"

"You want to be in the story, or not?"

"Of course."

"You want me to go with 'Where's the data?' "

" 'Where are the data.' Please, I don't mind your making me out to be a soulless, corporate lickspittle, but at least don't make me sound like an ignorant, soulless, corporate lickspittle."

"So your comment is The New England Journal of Medicine doesn't know what it's talking about?"

"My comment is. " What was the comment? Nick looked up at the Luckies doctor for inspiration. "Buerger's disease has only recently been diagnosed. It has a complex, indeed, extremely complex pathology. One of the more complex pathologies in the field of circulatory medicine." He hoped. "With all respect, I think further study is warranted before science goes looking, noose in hand, to lynch the usual subjects."

From the other end came the soft clack of Bill's keyboard. "Can I ask you something?" Bill was frisky today. Usually he just wrote it down and put it in and moved on to the next story.

"What?" Nick said suspiciously.

"It sounds like you actually believe this stuff."

"It pays the mortgage," Nick said. He had offered this rationalization so many times now that it was starting to take on the ring of a Nuremberg defense: / vas only paying ze mortgage.

"He just called, Nick. He wants to see you. Now."

Tempted as he was to make his other calls, there was the matter of the mortgage, and also, somewhere underneath Jeannette's landfill of papers, the tuition bill for Joey's next semester at Saint Euthanasius— $11,742 a year. How did they arrive at such sums? What was the forty-two dollars for? What did they teach twelve-year-olds that it cost $11,742? Subatomic physics?

Nick walked pensively down the corridor to BR's office. It was lined with posters of opera and symphony and museum exhibitions that the Academy had underwritten. In JJ's day there had been glorious color posters of drying tobacco plants, the sun shining luminously through the bright leaf.

Sondra, BR's secretary, looked up at him unsmilingly and nodded him in. Also into health. No ashtray on her desk.

It was a large, woody, masculine corner suite, richly paneled in Circassian walnut that reminded Nick of the inside of a cigar humidor. So far, BR had not ripped out all of JJ's lovely wood and replaced it with brushed steel.

Budd Rohrabacher raised his eyebrows in greeting. He was leaning back in his big chair reading Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, standard reading matter around the Academy. BR was forty-nine years old, but exuded the energy of a younger man. His eyes, light green, intense and joyless and looking at life as a spreadsheet, might strike some as belonging to an older man who had been fundamentally disappointed early on and who had therefore decided to make life unpleasant for those around him. He was rumored to play squash at five a.m. every morning, not an encouraging habit in a boss, who would therefore arrive at the office at six-thirty, all pumped up and aerobicated and ready to eat the day, and any less-than-1000-percent-committed staffers along with it. Nick suspected he wore shirts one size too small to make his upper body bulge more, though it was true that twice a week he lunched on V-8 juice while lifting weights at a health club. He was tall, six-four, and he had a tendency to throw his height around in little, subde ways, like holding the door open for you while waving you through under the archway formed by his arm. It gratified Nick to notice, when he did this to him once at the end of a day, a whiff of B.O. It is always consoling to discover humiliating bodily imperfections in those who dominate our lives. He had begun his tobacco career working in the grubby, rough-and-tumble — and not always strictly legit — arena of cigarette vending machines. He was known to have an inferiority thing about it, so staffers tended to avoid references to vending machines, unless it was unavoidable. Since taking over the Academy, BR had flexed a number of executive muscles and made some impressive gains for the industry. He had worked closely with the U.S. trade representative to make Asian countries allow U.S. cigarette manufacturers to advertise during children's morning TV programming. (In Japan alone, teenage smoking of U.S. cigarettes was up almost 20 percent.) He had fought off two congressional print-advertising bans here at home, gotten three southern state legislatures to declare "Tobacco Pride" weeks, and had brilliantly maneuvered the Los Angeles City Council into including a provision in their smoking ban ordinance that permitted smoking in the bar section of restaurants, a coup for which he had been lavishly congratulated by the chairman of the board of the Academy of Tobacco Studies, the legendary Doak Boykin. BR had what Napoleon's favorite generals had — luck. Since coming aboard, three of the people who had been suing the tobacco industry because they'd gotten cancer from smoking had died from smoking in their beds, causing their heirs and assigns to drop the suits; out of sheer embarrassment, as one lawyer at Smoot, Hawking had put it.

"Hey, Nick," BR said. Nick was tempted to say "Hey" back. "How were the lungs?"

"Clean," Nick said.

"Get any face time?"

Nick replied that he had jumped in front of every TV camera in sight in order to emphasize the industry's concern for responsible advertising, health, and underage smoking, but that he doubted that his face would be prominently featured, if at all, in the newscasts. Face time for tobacco smokesmen was a disappearing electronic commodity, more dismal handwriting on the wall. Not so long ago, TV producers would routinely send a camera crew over to the Academy to get an official industry rebuttal, only a five- or ten-second bite casting the usual aspersions on the integrity of the medical research that showed that American cigarette companies were doing the work of four Hiroshima bombs a year. But recently there had been fewer and fewer of these dutiful little opposing-viewpoint cabooses. More likely, the reporter would just close with "Needless to say, the tobacco industry disputes the NIH's report and claims that there is no— and I quote—'scientific evidence that heavy smoking by pregnant mothers is harmful to unborn fetuses.' "