When Tobacco Execs Finally Admitted That Smoking Kills

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FDecades after top tobacco executives discovered the health risks of smoking, they finally acknowledged those dangers under oath for the first time.

On this day in 1998, the CEOs of America’s major tobacco companies appeared before the Commerce Committee of the United States House of Representatives. Officials asked business leaders whether nicotine is addictive and whether smoking causes health problems like lung cancer. Many answered yes to these questions, including Steven Goldstone, president and CEO of RJR Nabisco.

At the time, the tobacco industry was desperate to shore up its reputation. Four years earlier, tobacco company executives appeared before Congress and said they did not believe cigarettes were addictive, that the evidence of associated health problems was inconclusive, and that they did not advertise to children. Less than a month after the testimony, leaked documents revealed that the tobacco industry knew for decades that its products could cause premature death and acknowledged that they were addictive.

These revelations contributed to dozens of lawsuits seeking to recover billions of dollars in health costs associated with smoking. Later in 1998, the country’s four largest tobacco companies reached an agreement with 52 state and territory attorneys general. They agreed to several conditions, including stopping marketing to young people, paying states to fund tobacco prevention programs and sharing secret industry documents. This led to other agreements with more than 45 tobacco companies, and today manufacturers are required to make annual payments to affected states in perpetuity.

Read more: “To a cigarette manufacturer, your life is worth about $10,000”

The agreement had a major impact on Americans’ smoking habits: between 1998 and 2019, cigarette consumption in the United States fell by more than 50 percent. During this period, regular smoking among high school students fell from a near peak of 36.4 percent in 1997 to 6 percent in 2019.

These societal changes were long overdue. Researchers in the United States and Europe began suspecting a link between smoking and lung cancer as early as the 1920s, and decades of study led to a crucial report published in 1964 by Surgeon General Luther Terry. This report stated that smoking was responsible for a 70 percent increase in death rates among smokers compared to non-smokers, and it estimated that average smokers were nine to ten times more likely to develop lung cancer – heavy smokers had at least a 20 times higher risk.

The report “hit the country like a bomb. It made headlines and headlines on every radio and television station in the United States and on many other stations abroad,” Terry said two decades later. But the public remained generally uncertain about the finality of these findings, thanks in part to tobacco industry conspiracy.

Its CEOs had met in December 1953 to plan their response to ever-mounting evidence of the harm of their products. They landed on an industry-sponsored research group, and “more than five decades of strategic and explicit collusion would ensue,” according to historian Allan Brandt.

This organization, known first as the Tobacco Industry Research Committee and then the Tobacco Research Council, worked tirelessly to discredit evidence that its products harmed people, deflect bad press, and market new products it claimed were safer.

While per capita cigarette consumption began to decline in the decade following the 1964 report, it was not until the political momentum of the late 1990s that the industry faced real accountability.

More recently, people have drawn parallels between the actions of the tobacco and fossil fuel industries – denying harm and funding self-serving research – and suggested that fossil fuel industry executives might have designed these strategies in the first place. But growing legal pressure against oil companies across the country and around the world appears to mean the tide is turning, as it did with tobacco.

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Main image: Vectorbum / Shutterstock

• Molly Glick

  Published on January 29, 2026

  Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.