Join the Washington DC Sunday Night Film Club this Sunday, Feb 5th at 5:30 for Addiction Incorporated at the Landmark E Street Cinema . Look for Eric wearing a black jacket and blue jeans in the theatre lobby about 15 minutes before the film. As always, after the film we will descend on a local establishment for dinner/drinks/discussion.
In 1994, scientist Victor DeNoble became the first whistleblower to reveal the tobacco industry’s efforts to manufacture “a maximally addictive” product. Tasked in the 1980s by a major tobacco company to invent a safer form of nicotine-one that would decrease the danger of heart failure while remaining just as addictive (so smokers could live, and smoke, longer)-DeNoble succeeded. But, in doing so, he inadvertently created something the tobacco companies had been avoiding for years-indisputable scientific evidence that nicotine was addictive. Their reaction was swift: his position was terminated, his lab was closed, and both his research and the “safer cigarette” were buried in the vaults and kept from the public…until he broke his confidentiality agreement and became the ultimate whistleblower. If you think you know everything there is to know about cigarettes and nicotine, Addiction Incorporated will startle you with its vital, previously undisclosed information. Straight from the mouths of the key players behind the scenes (including Steven C. Parrish, the former Senior VP and General Counsel for External Affairs at Philip Morris, and Jeffrey Wigand, the subject of the Academy Award-nominated film The Insider), this film reveals exactly how the tobacco industry achieved behemoth power through scientific secrecy…and what their next move may be.