By Edward J. Boyer (1999)

Young blacks have found their thing. It’s menthol in general and KOOL in particular.

   —1974 Philip Morris marketing plan

 One of the smartest guys I knew in the blue-collar, predominantly black neighborhood where I grew up in Detroit was a voracious reader and an all-city basketball player.

He read so much and was knowledgeable on so many subjects that guys in the neighborhood began calling him Clever. We were all intellectually curious and outstanding students, and during summer vacations, we would sit late into the evening on someone’s porch, holding forth on subjects ranging from Mao’s Long March in China to Napoleon’s campaign in Russia.

I vividly remember our discussions of Napoleon’s troops, caught in the throes of a killer Russian winter, building huge bonfires. So many troops would circle the blaze, desperately seeking relief from the lethal cold, that those in the innermost circle would be pushed into the flames and burned alive.

Several of us from my neighborhood enrolled at the same university. After about three days on campus, I saw Clever sitting in disgust in the student union.

He told me he was quitting school. When I asked why, he told me that he had just walked out of a bizarre lecture in a psych class. He said the professor (actually he used a more derogatory term) was talking about behavior modification, and how chronic aggression could be curbed by removing a person’s prefrontal lobes.

‘‘That sounded like something out of Frankenstein,’’ Clever said. ‘‘And that guy was talking about it as though it was some kind of great scientific advance. I mean he was talking about cutting away part of people’s brains. I don’t need any part of this.’’

We all knew that Clever had been experimenting with heroin for some time, and it wasn’t long before he descended into full-blown addiction. He rarely called himself a junkie or addict. He preferred the term dope fiend, and he called his addiction a jones. He would talk about how society was full of dope fiends. The only difference was that some dope was legal and some was not.

To make his case, he would point to how slick billboards selling alcohol and cigarettes could be found on almost any corner in black neighborhoods. Yes, we would all concede, but we had never heard of anyone stealing his mother’s television or pulling an armed robbery to get money to buy cigarettes or beer.

Heroin, the drug, didn’t make people commit crime, Clever would counter. The fact that heroin was illegal made it so expensive that dope fiends couldn’t support their jones without resorting to crime, he would say. If heroin were legal, he said, its cost might be somewhere between a pack of cigarettes and a fifth of scotch.

Cigarettes and alcohol kill a lot more people than heroin, Clever would argue. ‘‘But they don’t dump their bodies in the alley,’’ he would say, smiling as he reflected on the difference. ‘‘Cigarettes are a lot more addictive than heroin.’’ He pronounced it ‘‘HAIR-RON’’ as junkies had taken to calling the drug in the 1960s.

Clever insisted that he had cleaned up several times, staying off heroin for extended periods before returning to his jones. But, he said, he had been chain-smoking KOOLs since he was a teenager and had never been able to quit cigarettes.

I can’t say that I ever fully embraced Clever’s rationalizations for his addiction. I’m not sure he embraced them himself. He was a guy who loved to engage others in a kind of friendly intellectual combat, and his arguments could make you think more seriously about your position.

‘‘Do we really want to tout cigarette smoke as a drug?’’ a Philip Morris researcher asked in a confidential 1969 memo. ‘‘It is, of course.’’

He died all too early in the late 1960s–before the public outcry against cigarettes gained the momentum it has today. He had kicked heroin with the help of the even more addictive methadone. He then turned to alcohol and destroyed his liver. His self-destructive streak simply needed a vehicle.

We did not know it, but back when Clever was holding forth on how addictive cigarettes are, confidential tobacco company documents were privately acknowledging the validity of his comments.

‘‘Do we really want to tout cigarette smoke as a drug?’’ a Philip Morris researcher asked in a confidential 1969 memo. ‘‘It is, of course.’’

Leading medical experts have made us all aware of the dangers inherent in smoking, and Philip Morris has finally come around. On a new Web site launched this week, the giant tobacco company has acknowledged that evidence is overwhelming that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and other diseases.

Analysts say Philip Morris, the world’s biggest cigarette maker, is trying to rebuild and polish its image with the Web site and an accompanying $100 million ad campaign.

Cigarette makers have been swamped by lawsuits seeking damages for illnesses linked to smoking. The firms are now moving away from their earlier positions of denying everything. Philip Morris now says on the new Web site that smoking is addictive.

‘‘There is an overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and other serious diseases,’’ Philip Morris says.

The company goes on to say: ‘‘There is no safe cigarette.’’

Clever’s sentiments exactly. ◼︎