`Superman' of the antismoking lobby

'That man should be given a cloak and a shirt with a large `S' on it," was the recommendation of an approving fellow-campaigner among 2,500 lung-cancer specialists gathered in Dublin this week. The man receiving the Superman citation was Clifford E. Douglas, bane of the US tobacco industry for almost a decade.

His good looks and neatly clipped speech suggested he could even play himself in any Hollywood movie, but one suspects that in real life he would forgo a film career and won't be happy until the very last cigarette has been stubbed out.

A litigator by trade, he is president of Tobacco Control Law and Policy Consulting in Michigan. Over the last nine years he has had a bewildering number of roles, all part of his full-time fight against tobacco.

He was a co-counsel in the landmark lawsuit against the tobacco industry in Mississippi, the first of many cases brought by state attorneys-general seeking reimbursement for the state- subsidised medical costs of smoking.

He is helping to represent millions of Americans in a series of unprecedented class action suits against cigarette manufacturers. He also serves as special counsel on tobacco issues to US Representative Martin Meehan of Massachusetts, chairman of the congressional task force on tobacco and health.

While working for Mr Meehan in 1994, he compiled a report for the US Attorney General, Janet Reno, which contained the first conclusive account of how the tobacco industry had broken federal laws by fraud, perjury and conspiracy.

In many ways it was the be- ginning of the end, even if the end has yet to be reached. The Justice Department opened several investigations into the industry's conduct; Douglas uncovered thousands of pages of internal Philip Morris nicotine research documents.

This led to California Representative Henry Waxman reading many of them for a national TV audience from the floor of the House of Representatives. It was at this point that President Clinton supported the Food and Drug Administration's proposal to regulate tobacco; at the same time, he had been considering the tobacco industry's proposals for weaker voluntary options.

In 1996 the New York Times described Douglas in his book Smokescreen as one of the "seven heroes" of the US tobacco control movement. The more reserved Wall Street Journal said he was "a pivotal behind-the-scenes player" in the tobacco control movement, which probably goes nearer to describing him accurately.

Despite seeking and achieving public accountability, he adopts a low public profile, according to Carolyn Aldige, president of the Cancer Research Foundation of America.

"What he has contributed is nothing short of phenomenal. He changed the dialogue of tobacco control," she adds, a view endorsed by the journal Legal Times which suggested that "perhaps more than anyone outside of government, Douglas has changed the terrain on which the nation's tobacco wars are being waged".

Douglas was honoured in Congress in 1989 for helping to obtain passage of the airline smoking ban. He was also involved in the American Cancer Society's campaign to raise tobacco taxes and with other public health organisations attempting to curb smoking.

Throughout, he studied the tobacco industry's use of nicotine and cultivated a network of former tobacco industry scientists who unobtrusively helped him. While in Dublin on Monday - with the meticulous attention to detail of an eminent forensic scientist - he outlined the techniques of nicotine manipulation to most of the world's leading lung cancer specialists.

With his growing expertise, he persuaded ABC News in 1992 to embark on a year-long examination of the industry's nicotine tactics. He participated in the investigation himself. "The results of Mr Douglas's invisible manoeuvring exploded into public view," the Wall Street Journal said when ABC outlined in February 1994 how nicotine was manipulated to cause and sustain addiction.

The next day the FDA announced it would, for the first time, consider regulating tobacco as a drug. Its own far-reaching report concluded cigarettes were "drug-delivery devices".

New rules on controlling access to tobacco and restricting advertising followed. The US changed from being among those with the most liberal attitude to smoking in the developed world to being among the more strict, certainly more so than in Ireland and most of the EU.

Douglas has published several reports on the political power of the tobacco industry, one of which appeared as a leading art icle in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The medical profession had now adopted him as one of their own.

If confirmation of that was necessary, it came this week when the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer, which hosted the Dublin conference, gave him an award for "exceptional leadership in the fight against lung diseases through the prevention of smoking and other tobacco uses".