WASHINGTON — Dr. David Kessler sat in the Supreme Court chamber and wanted to shout at the justices: Facing a vital public health case — a chance to curb addictive nicotine — they just did not get it, recalls the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner.

        His agency had uncovered proof tobacco companies manipulated nicotine to hook smokers and targeted minors to take up the habit.

        Yet the justices wondered aloud why the FDA should regulate tobacco by prohibiting marketing to teen-agers, and asked whether regulating adrenaline-pumping horror movies would be next.

        “"The evidence, that's what's different,' I wanted to shout,” Dr. Kessler recalls. “Why didn't they understand that?”

        To the Supreme Court, “it was as if our investigation had never happened.”

        Almost a year after the high court ruled that Congress never gave the FDA authority to regulate tobac co, Dr. Kessler has written a book chronicling the five-year investigation that uncovered some of industry's deepest secrets.

        It's a detective story, showing how a group of bureaucrats quietly crisscrossed the country piecing together evidence — even discovering specially bred high-nicotine tobacco se creted from Brazil into U.S. cigarettes — that forever changed how society views tobacco.

        The book, A Question of Intent: A Great American Battle with a Deadly Industry, makes clear that the story is not over. Although the FDA's investigation helped spur state lawsuits that cost cigarette makers billions of dollars, millions of Americans remain hooked.

        “I had underestimated the enormous power of the industry,” Dr. Kessler said in an interview, explaining why he wrote the book. “I don't think people know the extent to which their tentacles really reached.”

        While Dr. Kessler still insists tobacco cannot be banned — that would throw too many people into withdrawal — he now advocates dismantling the industry. He envisions a special corporation to sell cigarettes without advertising or making any profit, thus removing the incentive to hook new smokers.

        “It has become apparent that nothing else will work,” he writes. “Ultimately, cigarettes should be sold in brown paper wrappers, with only a brand name and a warning label.”

        Tobacco companies had not seen Dr. Kessler's book, which is being published this week. But industry leader Philip Morris, which once bitterly fought the FDA's regulations, says today, "Tough and sensible FDA regulation of the industry is needed and should focus on such things as preventing kids from smoking.”

        Dr. Kessler, now Yale University's dean of medicine, did not come to the FDA in 1990 even considering battling tobacco. Arriving admittedly naive, the bespectacled pediatrician led the nation's biggest consumer-protection agency through a series of crises, including drug tampering, food frauds, and how to speed approval of AIDS drugs.

        So at first, he said an employee's suggestion to take on tobacco was “crazy.” But anti-smoking groups were pressuring the FDA. Then an agency lawyer noted, “Cigarette manufacturers can take the nicotine out, but they leave it in. That goes to the question of intent.”

        The answer seemed plain: Deliberately control or manipulate nicotine, and it is a drug the FDA could regulate. The investigation was on.

        A former Secret Service agent and an Army criminal investigator schmoozed skittish informants with code-names like “Deep Cough” into sharing industry secrets.

        Lawyers pored over internal industry documents that stated, “We are then in the business of selling nicotine, an addictive drug.”

        They culled evidence from newspapers, lawsuits, and dusty U.S. Customs records that showed when that secret high-nicotine tobacco entered the country.

        Dr. Kessler, who left the agency in 1997, recalls when he knew President Clinton would back the FDA's effort. In a White House meeting, Mr. Clinton read some of those internal documents. Dr. Kessler quotes him as exclaiming, “I want to kill them. I just read all those documents, and I want to kill them.”

        The Clinton administration sued the industry in 1999, accusing it of putting profits before health by concealing data that showed nicotine is addictive and smoking causes disease. Government lawyers also contended the industry targeted its advertising toward children as potential new smokers.

        A federal judge ruled in September that the government could not invoke two federal laws to recover Medicare payments and other costs of treating ill smokers. However, the judge said the government still could try to force the industry to pay billions of dollars for allegedly concealing the dangers of smoking.

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