Big Tobacco’s biggest secret
Victor DeNoble has traveled the land the past 15 years accompanied by a frozen monkey brain, a frozen human brain, a true-life tale of corporate espionage, a stand-up comedian’s timing and a million reasons not to smoke.
But no preaching.
“I’m not here to tell people what to do,” DeNoble told about 200 students at Chavez High School on Tuesday afternoon.
The message, though, was easily discernible. And, coming as it did from a former behavioral scientist for Philip Morris, it was profound.
It’s a message the 60-year-old DeNoble is bringing to Stockton for the first time this week, with additional visits scheduled for today at Plaza Robles and New Vision high schools, and at Venture Academy on Thursday.
Thirty years ago, DeNoble was assigned by Philip Morris to develop a safe substitute for nicotine, a chemical that makes tobacco addictive but also causes the heart to race, sometimes dangerously. His research with countless rats and a drug-addicted capuchin monkey named Sarah led to his discovery of the long-term changes to the brain that smoking causes.
Eventually, DeNoble developed a nicotine-free cigarette, but Philip Morris wasn’t interested because it feared the new product would kill its other brands. Executives with the company also sought to silence DeNoble from publicizing his research about tobacco’s brain-changing properties, but eventually he tipped off the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
DeNoble testified before Congress in 1994, revealing the lies of the tobacco industry. Cigarette companies have paid out more than $700 billion in legal damages.
Ever since, DeNoble has been speaking to students for Kaiser Permanente’s “Don’t Buy the Lie” program. Students attending the program this week have the opportunity to win $1,000 in an anti-smoking billboard design competition. The winners’ creations will appear on billboards in the Stockton area.
DeNoble arrives at his school visits bearing organs – the monkey Sarah’s brain and the brain of a 63-year-old man who was dying of cancer in the early 1980s.
“After you’re dead, can I have your brain?” DeNoble recalled asking the man.
The Chavez students roared.
The man asked DeNoble, “What are you going to do with my brain?”
DeNoble replied, “Well, I’m going to take it out of your head, I’m going to cut it in half, I want to look in the middle, I want to see if your brains cells are changed by the nicotine.”
The man soon died and DeNoble got his brain as well as invaluable research material. DeNoble showed the brain to the Chavez students, holding it in hands covered by blue surgical gloves and jogging around the school’s auditorium as some students stood and craned their necks and others squealed in low-grade horror.
“He was funny and entertaining, funny but still informative,” said Alicia Moore, 18, a senior in Chavez’s health sciences academy who wants to become a nurse.
Moore said she never knew before DeNoble’s visit that smoking causes chemical changes in the brain. She admitted that once when she was younger, she took a few puffs.
“I have tried a cigarette,” she said. “When I was in elementary school, I stole my mom’s one time when she wasn’t looking. It wasn’t a good experience. I didn’t like it.”
By Roger Phillips, Recordnet
