Truth Tobacco Industry Documents

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The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Truth Tobacco Industry Documents (formerly known as Legacy Tobacco Documents Library) is a digital archive of tobacco industry documents, funded by Truth Initiative and created and maintained by the University of California, San Francisco. The Library is a part of the larger UCSF Industry Documents Library which also includes the Drug Industry Document Archive, the Food Industry Documents Archive and the Chemical Industry Documents Archive. TTID contains over 14 million documents produced by major tobacco companies and organizations, many of them internal strategic memoranda made public as a consequence of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. The documents deal with the tobacco industry's advertising, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and scientific research activities for the last century. Researchers, journalists, students, and activists interested in tobacco control issues and public health policies use the Library extensively to investigate tobacco industry strategies. [1] Research in this archive revealed the tobacco industry playbook and its parallels with techniques linked to climate change denial.

Contents

History

In 1994, the attorneys general of four states—Mississippi, Minnesota, Florida, and Texas—separately filed lawsuits against the tobacco industry in an effort to secure reimbursement for health care expenditures arising from tobacco-related illnesses. During the course of this litigation, 42 other states joined in similar legal actions. The library of the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) had started digitizing and hosting internal tobacco industry documents in 1995 as part of wider efforts to make public what the tobacco industry had done and helped drive the turning of public sentiment and litigation against the tobacco companies. [2]

In 1998, a Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) was signed by the attorneys general of 46 states and the nation's five major tobacco companies: Philip Morris, R. J. Reynolds, Lorillard, Brown & Williamson, and the American Tobacco Company. [2] [3] The MSA effectively settled the outstanding lawsuits by requiring yearly payments by the tobacco companies to the states and placing restrictions on the advertising and marketing of tobacco products. [4]

As part of the Master Settlement Agreement, the U.S. tobacco companies were ordered to release the internal documents produced for the case for public access in both a physical depository in Minnesota and on their own document websites. The international tobacco company, British American Tobacco, was not ordered to provide a document website but they were required to deposit documents into a depository in Guildford, England. The National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) provides oversight and enforcement of this operation. In 2006, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ruled in a separate case that the nation's top tobacco companies violated racketeering laws, misleading the public for years about the health hazards of smoking. These companies were convicted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO Act). Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds filed an appeal but Judge Kessler's ruling was upheld. As a result of this case and its appeals, the companies are now obliged to make available any documents produced for litigation on smoking and health until 2021. [5]

The MSA provisions also created and funded the American Legacy Foundation, subsequently renamed the Truth Initiative, an anti-smoking advocacy group, and in the early 2000s the foundation gave approximately $10 million of the settlement funds it managed to UCSF to formalize the collection it already hosted into the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library and to expand their efforts. [2] [6] In 2002, NAAG gave the UCSF Library a large number of document index records and images to further develop the Library. Documents are continually added to the MSA collections through the use of spidering (also known as "web crawling") applications that identify and download index records and document images directly from the tobacco companies' websites. [2]

Collections

The Library collects and maintains the internal documents of the tobacco companies and their trade organizations that were a party to the Master Settlement Agreement as well as documents from other litigation or companies not party to the settlement. Among the documents are more than 8,000 tobacco industry video and audio tapes including recordings of focus groups, internal corporate meetings, depositions of tobacco industry employees, government hearings, corporate communications, and commercials. Many of the acquired tapes are available for viewing or listening on the Internet Archive at the UCSF Tobacco Industry Videos Collection. [7]

MSA-mandated collections

Additional collections include...

British American Tobacco
This collection was originally maintained in a separate digital archive known as the British American Tobacco Documents Archive (BATDA). [8] In July 2008, the BAT documents were added to the Library in an effort to provide researchers, as well as the general public, with unhindered access to the entire body of internal tobacco industry documents. The British American Tobacco (BAT) collection contains close to 7 million pages of internal corporate documents related to British American Tobacco Company (BATCo) and its parent, BAT Industries PLC.
U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Company
The U.S. Smokeless Tobacco collection contains internal corporate documents from the U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Company, the largest manufacturer of moist snuff smokeless tobacco products in the U.S. and producer of the well-known brands, Skoal and Copenhagen.
UCSF Brown & Williamson
Thousands of pages of Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation documents were donated unsolicited to the UCSF Tobacco Control Archives in 1994. These documents consist primarily of scientific studies on the addictive nature of nicotine and other health effects of tobacco smoke. Brown & Williamson sought to permanently remove the disputed material from the Library with a suit filed in San Francisco Superior Court. The University of California argued that all of the documents were in the public domain and should be available to scholars and other interested parties. In May 1995, the Superior Court ruled that these documents should be made available for public review. Brown & Williamson appealed that decision, but the California Supreme Court rejected the company's appeal allowing UCSF to release the documents.
Mangini ("Joe Camel") Documents
This collection consists of internal documents from the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, produced as part of the discovery process in the 1994 civil case Mangini v. R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. A majority of the documents span the period 1970s–1990s, when R. J. Reynolds Tobacco developed the Joe Camel advertising campaign.
Pollay Advertising Collection
A collection of over 8,500 examples of cigarette print advertising compiled and given to the Library by Richard W. Pollay, Professor Emeritus at Sauder Business School, University of British Columbia.
Liggett & Myers
This collection contains approximately 400,000 pages of Liggett & Myers (L&M) internal documents. In 1997, Liggett & Myers, the smallest of the five major tobacco companies, became the first to settle lawsuits in 22 states and to help state prosecutors litigate against the nation's biggest cigarette manufacturers by providing evidence of industry strategies and tactics. Because of their early compliance with prosecutors, L&M was not included in the Master Settlement Agreement stipulation for creation of company document websites, meaning these documents exist nowhere else in electronic format.
Tobacco Depositions and Trial Testimony Archive (DATTA)
DATTA contains transcripts from tobacco-related litigation, collected from a variety of sources by the Center for Tobacco Use Prevention and Research in Okemos, Michigan.
Canadian Tobacco Trials
The Canadian Tobacco Trials collection consists of court records (transcripts, depositions, exhibits) from four major national Canadian trials: the 1989 Tobacco Products Control Act (TPCA) Trial, the 1997 Tobacco Act Trial, and the Blais-LeTourneau trials concluding in 2015.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tobacco industry</span> Persons and companies that produce tobacco-related products

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brown & Williamson</span> American tobacco company

Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation was a U.S. tobacco company and a subsidiary of multinational British American Tobacco that produced several popular cigarette brands. It became infamous as the focus of investigations for chemically enhancing the addictiveness of cigarettes. Its former vice-president of research and development, Jeffrey Wigand, was the whistleblower in an investigation conducted by CBS news program 60 Minutes, an event that was dramatized in the film The Insider (1999). Wigand claimed that B&W had introduced chemicals such as ammonia into cigarettes to increase nicotine delivery and increase addictiveness.

Liggett Group, formerly known as Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company, is the fourth largest tobacco company in the United States. As of 2014, Liggett Group was the fourth largest American tobacco company by gross revenue, though it was considerably smaller than the top three. Its headquarters are located in Durham, North Carolina, though its manufacturing facility is 30 miles to the west in Mebane, North Carolina. The company is a subsidiary of holding company Vector Group.

The Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) was entered on November 23, 1998, originally between the four largest United States tobacco companies and the attorneys general of 46 states. The states settled their Medicaid lawsuits against the tobacco industry for recovery of their tobacco-related health-care costs. In exchange, the companies agreed to curtail or cease certain tobacco marketing practices, as well as to pay, in perpetuity, various annual payments to the states to compensate them for some of the medical costs of caring for persons with smoking-related illnesses. The money also funds a new anti-smoking advocacy group, called the Truth Initiative, that is responsible for such campaigns as Truth and maintains a public archive of documents resulting from the cases.

Truth is an American public-relations campaign aimed at reducing teen smoking in the United States. It is conducted by the Truth Initiative and funded primarily by money obtained from the tobacco industry under the terms of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement reached between 46 U.S. states and the four largest companies in the tobacco industry.

"Winston tastes good like a cigarette should" is an advertising slogan that appeared in newspaper, magazine, radio, and television advertisements for Winston cigarettes, manufactured by R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. Reynolds used the slogan from Winston's introduction in 1954 until 1972. It is one of the best-known American tobacco advertising campaigns. In 1999, Advertising Age included the "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should" jingle in its list of the 10 best radio and television jingles in the United States during the 20th century.

Project SCUM was a plan proposed in 1995 by R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (RJR) to sell cigarettes to members of the "alternative lifestyle" areas of San Francisco, in particular the large number of gay people in the Castro and homeless people in the Tenderloin. The acronym "SCUM" officially stood for "subculture urban marketing". Perhaps recognizing the offensive nature of its label, the marketing plan was later renamed Project Sourdough.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Legacy Tobacco Documents Library Multimedia Collection</span> Library collection in San Francisco

The Multimedia Collection in the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library at the University of California, San Francisco contains more than 7,500 tobacco industry video and audio tapes including recordings of focus groups, internal corporate meetings, depositions of tobacco industry employees, Congressional hearings, corporate communications, and commercials. Funded by a grant from the California Tobacco Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP), UCSF Library staff collects multimedia materials housed at the Minnesota Tobacco Documents Depository, Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Guildford depository in the UK.

Stanton Arnold Glantz is an American professor, author, and tobacco control activist. Glantz is a faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine, where he is a Professor of Medicine (retired) in the Division of Cardiology, the American Legacy Foundation Distinguished Professor of Tobacco Control, and former director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. Glantz's research focused on the health effects of tobacco smoking.

The Tobacco Institute, Inc. was a United States tobacco industry trade group, founded in 1958 by the American tobacco industry. It was dissolved in 1998 as part of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">A Frank Statement</span> Tobacco advertisement

A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers was a historic first advertisement in a campaign run by major American tobacco companies on January 4, 1954, to create doubt by disputing recent scientific studies linking smoking cigarettes to lung cancer and other dangerous health effects.

<i>Cipollone v. Liggett Group, Inc.</i> 1992 United States Supreme Court case

Cipollone v. Liggett Group, Inc., 505 U.S. 504 (1992), was a United States Supreme Court case. In a split opinion, the Court held that the Surgeon General's warning did not preclude lawsuits by smokers against tobacco companies on the basis of several claims. The case examined whether tobacco companies could be liable for not warning the consumer "adequately" of the dangers of cigarettes as well as ultimately held the stance that smoking was in fact a free choice. The ruling also questioned the Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965 to determine whether the warning labels on the cigarette products by law had to be less or more alarming than the warning issued.

The Drug Industry Documents Archive (DIDA) is a digital archive of pharmaceutical industry documents created and maintained by the University of California, San Francisco, Library and Center for Knowledge Management. DIDA is a part of the larger UCSF Industry Documents Library which includes the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents. The archive contains documents about pharmaceutical industry clinical trials, publication of study results, pricing, marketing, relations with physicians and drug company involvement in continuing medical education.

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<i>Tritent International Corp. v. Kentucky</i>

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The Tobacco MSA with Hawaii is the particular version of the Tobacco MSA that was signed by Hawaii, was enabled by means of legislation of Hawaii, and has been interpreted since then in Hawaii state courts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">UCSF Library</span>

The UCSF Library is the library of the University of California, San Francisco. It is one of the world's foremost libraries in the health sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Truth Initiative</span> Nonprofit tobacco control organization

Truth Initiative is a nonprofit tobacco control organization "dedicated to achieving a culture where all youth and young adults reject tobacco". It was established in March 1999 as a result of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement between the attorneys general of 46 states, the District of Columbia and five United States territories, and the tobacco industry. Truth Initiative is best known for its youth smoking prevention campaign. Its other primary aims include conducting tobacco control research and policy studies, organizing community and youth engagement programs and developing digital cessation and prevention products, including through revenue-generating models. The organization changed its name from the American Legacy Foundation to Truth Initiative on September 8, 2015, to align its name with that of its Truth campaign. As of 2016, the organization had more than $957 million in assets and a staff of 133 based primarily in its Washington, D.C., office.

United States v. Philip Morris USA, Inc. was a case in which the United States District Court for the District of Columbia held several major tobacco companies liable for violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act by engaging in numerous acts of fraud to further a conspiracy to deceive the American public about nicotine addiction and the health effects of cigarettes and environmental tobacco smoke.

References

  1. ↑ For examples of how this collection of documents has been utilized, see the UCSF Tobacco Industry Documents Bibliography, which cites publications and scholarly articles based on research and analysis of tobacco industry documents.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Hurt, RD; Ebbert, JO; Muggli, ME; Lockhart, NJ; Robertson, CR (May 2009). "Open doorway to truth: legacy of the Minnesota tobacco trial". Mayo Clinic Proceedings. 84 (5): 446–56. doi:10.1016/S0025-6196(11)60563-6. PMC   2676127 . PMID   19411441.
  3. ↑ "Legacy Tobacco Documents Library".
  4. ↑ "Master Settlement Agreement". State of California - Department of Justice - Office of the Attorney General. February 4, 2011.
  5. ↑ For more background on the RICO case, please access the Public Health Law Center at - http://publichealthlawcenter.org/topics/tobacco-control/tobacco-control-litigation/united-states-v-philip-morris-doj-lawsuit
  6. ↑ "Press release: American legacy foundation's $15 million gift creates permanent home for tobacco industry documents at UCSF". University of California - San Francisco. January 2001. Archived from the original on April 9, 2005.
  7. ↑ "UCSF Tobacco Archives". archive.org. Retrieved 2021-08-16.
  8. ↑ "British American Tobacco Documents Archive: Home". bat.library.ucsf.edu.
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