Borelli, Thomas J.
PM believed that Dr. Alex Malaspina, President of ILSI in 1989, could be helpful to PM. Malaspina started a division of ILSI called Health and Environmental Sciences, and sought membership/sponsorship for this group from chemical, petrochemical and pharmaceutical companies to join. Malaspina also sought membership from PM in this group (2021595961).
This brief email from Tom Borelli (Manager of Corporate Scientific Affairs for Philip Morris) relates PM's efforts to influence a scientific meeting about secondhand smoke, and the subsequent scorn the company received.
Borelli arranged for PM to have a presence at a 1989 toxicology forum session on secondhand smoke. Borelli writes about the meeting afterwards,
"My contact at ILSI [International Life Sciences Institute, presumptive organizer of the forum] told me that the person from NCI [National Cancer Institute, a federal government cancer research organization] was not pleased with the TOX forum ETS session. That illustrates what a good job we did."
Borelli tells of the anger the NCI attendee had at PM's attendance:
"Unfortunately, the NCI representative did not stop there but went on to say that if the tox forum allows PM to become a member, the NCI will remove itself from the advisory committee. It was also mentioned that if I want a career in the science/health issues, I should consider who I work for."
Borelli discusses how to continue PM's ability to influence this group. He proposed funnelling sponsorship money through PM subsidiaries as a way to force the group to continue working with PM:
"Thus if everything remains the same the tox forum is a one shot deal and I get blacklisted. I think it is time to move with the PM CO. Inc strategy for sponsorship of outside groups (remember the proposal I wrote). Of course that would raise the stakes of forcing these groups to accept PM and I guess they could choose to keep us out. But then they go broke. The only other option is to funnel money through KGF but then we loose [sic] control of the issues..."