A Question of Intent : A Great American Battle With A Deadly Industry

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Summary: A Question of Intent: A Powerful Story
Review: A friend of mine is in the recovery room at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. He just had thoracic surgery. He stopped smoking years ago. I hope he stopped in time. The verdict on his surgery isn't in yet. But the verdict on smoking is in. Thanks to the FDA and the awesome investigative job they did to uncover the truth about tobacco. In David Kessler's book, "A Question of Intent" we get the gripping tale of the tobacco industry and their effort to hide the truth from the public. For decades the tobacco industry has escaped regulation even though their product was known to be dangerous and addictive.Even today, after Dr. Kessler and the team at the FDA have revealed mountains of evidence against the tobacco industry the Supreme Court has ruled against regulating tobacco. "A Question of Intent" is a powerful story about the uphill battle to protect the health of our children from a deadly addictive disease. It reads like a detective story, a thriller, a race against the premature death of 3,000 teenagers who start to smoke every day. Every parent should read it. Every educator. Every person who cares about the children of this country.

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Summary: Hidden Flaws in Kessler Book
Review: David Kessler has published an important story. His book, written with five ghost writers, is a good one, but it also contains hidden flaws.

As the author makes clear, the FDA's investigation helped change the way in which society views tobacco, a historic contribution. The agency's probe called the industry to account for its manipulation of nicotine to addict millions of smokers and its targeting of the illegal youth market.

Also important is what the book does not say. Kessler offers a partly fictionalized version of the forces that propelled him to take action against tobacco and omits fundamentally important episodes from the story. There are only a handful of individuals, including Kessler and this reviewer, who know these details, so few reviews of the book will note their absence.

Kessler tells of Deep Cough, the pioneering industry insider who played an essential role in Kessler's launching of the FDA's tobacco investigation. Yet he omits the salient fact that I introduced Deep Cough, whose code name I coined with a nod to Woodward and Bernstein, to the FDA after spending three years laboriously nurturing this terrified informant. Noting this fact would have changed Kessler's preferred storyline, which is that he and his agency got the investigation going on their own without any significant outside involvement. He gives the impression that Deep Cough more or less just showed up at the FDA's doorstep at someone else's suggestion.

As told accurately in the recently published Civil Warriors: The Legal Siege on the Tobacco Industry (also available at Amazon.com), whose author, Dan Zegart, quotes from internal FDA records, Deep Cough gave the FDA critical information about nicotine manipulation that the agency lacked. While Kessler admits as much, he glosses over the fact that without Deep Cough and the impetus provided by the competing investigation being conducted by the ABC News program "Day One" (on which I arranged to have Deep Cough appear in silhouette), the FDA could not have taken action to focus on tobacco. In fact, the only evidence of nicotine manipulation that the FDA had at the time Kessler announced that he would focus on tobacco was that provided by Deep Cough, myself and ABC's producers, with whom I was working.

While there are other examples, the most serious flaw in this book is the idea that David Kessler had decided, or was prepared, to focus on tobacco before I brought him Deep Cough and before the already ongoing Day One investigation forced him to take action because it was prepared to report his failure to take action against this nation's leading cause of preventable death. There is overwhelming documentary evidence in the FDA's own records that he and his agency were not prepared to act and had not yet done any investigating of their own.

It may be self-evident why Kessler omits such information. One surmises that he ignores these events, which would have added only a few more pages, because their inclusion would contradict his preferred story line. While this may shortchange history, the greater wrong is that this approach voids the role played by activism and the investigative media in creating major social change. In their absence, the FDA's investigation would not have gotten off the ground, if at all, before Newt Gingrich and company took control of Congress in January 1995 and killed the possibility of such action.

Like C. Everett Koop before him, Kessler changed the world in which the tobacco industry does business. This is clear, and he should be lauded for it. The surprising irony is that in telling his story, the man who lambastes the tobacco industry for covering up the truth selectively omits key information. Kessler would not have harmed his sterling public reputation by being more forthcoming.

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Summary: An Odyssey through the Science and Politics of Tobacco
Review: David Kessler's book, A Question of Intent, is a gripping account of how the FDA chose to investigate the tobacco industry, ultimately exposing the industry's calculated intent to cover up the deadly and addictive nature of its product. The dedication of Kessler and his team is ingenious and inspiring. Each chapter leads the reader through a maze of investigation and discovery. The narrative is so engaging that it makes the reader want to stand up and cheer as more and more incriminating data is uncovered throught the efforts of this tireless FDA team. This is an important book that should be read by anyone concerned with public policy, the health of our people, the regulation of tobacco and the need for role models who use their courageous intelligence to make our world a more decent place.

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Summary: A Matter of Conscience
Review: It took only the first page to draw me into the facinating and exciting true story drama that David Kessler paints in his outstanding book on the FDA's battle with the tobacco industry. Not since A Civil Action have I felt so motivated to urge other to read a story that is as heart breaking as it is true!Each chapter ends with a heightened anticipation for the next. Dr. Kessler's narration is clear -- in fact, it is so discriptive that the reader can literally visualize the events as he discribes them.

How fortunate we are as a country to have public servants such as Dr. Kessler and his staff. Dr. Kessler went to great pains, it seems to me, to credit those in his department who shared his passion and search for the truth. His discriptions of his colleagues (and they were colleages, everyone from the lawyers and physicians he worked with to the investigators)were interesting.It is simply a must read book for anyone, parents, those who love a good mystery, and people interested in public policy.

For anyone interested in knowing what true integrity is, this is the book for you!

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Summary: A Breath of Fresh Air
Review: Thank you, Dr. Kessler, for pursuing the tobacco dragon and for writing this book. It should be required reading for every medical and divinity school student.