The UCSF Industry Documents Library (IDL) is a digital archive of internal tobacco, drug, food, chemical and fossil fuel corporate documents, acquired largely through litigation, which illustrate industry efforts to influence policies and regulations meant to protect public health. Created and maintained by the UCSF Library, the mission of the UCSF Industry Documents Library is to "identify, collect, curate, preserve, and make freely accessible internal documents created by industries and their partners which have an impact on public health, for the benefit and use of researchers, clinicians, educators, students, policymakers, media, and the general public at UCSF and internationally". [1]
The IDL includes the following archives:
The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a public research university in San Francisco, California. It is part of the University of California system and it is dedicated entirely to health science. It is a major center of medical and biological research and teaching.
Brown & Williamson (B&W) was an American tobacco company and subsidiary of 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. Wigand claimed that B&W had introduced chemicals such as ammonia into cigarettes to increase nicotine delivery and increase addictiveness.
David Aaron Kessler is an American pediatrician, lawyer, author, and administrator. He was the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from November 8, 1990, to February 28, 1997.
Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM) was an NGO based in Washington D.C., United States and South Africa which stated that it "seeks to educate people about the scourge of Malaria and the political economy of malaria control". The organization generally "promotes market based solutions and economic freedom as the best ways to ensure improved welfare and longer life expectancy in poor countries", according to their financial statement. Founded in 2000 during the Stockholm Negotiations on Persistent Organic Pollutants, AFM's original focus was the promotion of a public health exemption for the insecticide DDT for malaria control. According to their website, last updated in 2011, their mission was to "make malaria control more transparent, responsive and effective by holding public institutions accountable for funding and implementing effective, integrated and country-driven malaria control policies."
Roger Bate is a British educated economist who has held a variety of positions in free market oriented organizations. His work focuses on solving the problem of counterfeit and substandard medicines, particularly those in the developing world. He also works on US and international aid policy, performance of aid organisations, and health policy in developing countries, particularly with regard to malaria control and the use of DDT. He consulted for the tobacco industry in the mid-'90s, though the extent of this work is disputed. He is currently a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs, and he was on the board of directors of Africa Fighting Malaria.
National Empowerment Television (NET), also known as America's Voice, was a cable TV network designed to rapidly mobilize conservative followers for grassroots lobbying. It was created by Paul Weyrich, a key strategist for the paleoconservative movement. At its peak, it claimed to reach more than 11 million homes.
A menthol cigarette is a cigarette flavored with the compound menthol.
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, the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, and Guildford depository in the UK.
Stanton Arnold Glantz is an American professor, author, and leading tobacco control activist. Glantz is Professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiology, the American Legacy Foundation Distinguished Professor of Tobacco Control, and director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine. Glantz's research focuses on the health effects of tobacco smoking.
The Weinberg Group is a Washington, DC-based food and drug regulatory consulting group. Founded in 1983, the firm assists pharmaceutical and biotech companies with the "development and implementation of successful and innovative regulatory strategies" and also helps these companies to "remediate, maintain and improve their regulatory compliance." The Weinberg Group sent a memo to DuPont in 2003 recommending that the company “reshape the debate by identifying the likely known health benefits of PFOA exposure.”
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.
Steven C. Parrish is a C-Suite executive consultant, American lawyer, Chair Safe Horizon, and community volunteer. Until 2008, he was an executive for Altria Group Inc. where he was a Senior Vice President for Corporate Affairs.
Regulation of tobacco by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration began in 2009 with the passage of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act by the United States Congress. With this statute, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was given the ability to regulate tobacco products.
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.
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 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 better align with 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.
The UCSF Truth Tobacco Industry Documents 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. Research in this archive revealed the tobacco industry playbook and its parallels with techniques linked to climate change denial.
INFOTAB was based in Brussels as the cigarette industry's international lobby organisation. It developed through four main stages.
Good Epidemiological Practices or Good Epidemiology Practices (GEP) was a set of guidelines produced by the U.S. Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA) in 1991 to improve epidemiologic research practices. It was then adopted by the tobacco industry around 1993 as part of its "sound science" program to counter criticisms of the industry on health and environmental issues such as secondhand smoke. It failed to make much impact on the US and European regulators, but may have had more influence in its later manifestations in Asia and particularly China.
Michael G. Porter is an Australian academic economist who taught at the Australian National University (Canberra) and Monash University (Melbourne) while also running a consultancy business for major corporations. In 1979, he set up a think-tank at Monash University, the Centre of Policy Studies which advocated extreme free-market/no regulation views.
The tobacco industry playbook, tobacco strategy or simply disinformation playbook describes a strategy devised by the tobacco industry in the 1950s to protect revenues in the face of mounting evidence of links between tobacco smoke and serious illnesses, primarily cancer. Much of the playbook is known from industry documents made public by whistleblowers or as a result of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. These documents are now curated by the UCSF Truth Tobacco Industry Documents project and are a primary source for much commentary on both the tobacco playbook and its similarities to the tactics used by other industries, notably the fossil fuel industry. It is possible that the playbook may even have originated with the oil industry.