Tobacco Documents Online

This 1988 Philip Morris (PM)document discusses the company's strategy for combating the secondhand smoke ("environmental tobacco smoke," or ETS) issue in the European Economic Community. It comments on the type of consultants PM felt it needed in various European countries, for example, France ("...a Gray Robertson type, preferably with a medical background [who would] also be able to put any discussion of smoking in the general context of other French public health issues, i.e., traffic accidents, alcoholism, AIDS, nuclear power, etc."), Italy ("...Most needed in Italy right now is someone credible...this exercise would be all the more useful if the [Italian] consultant could "campaign" on a ticket that points the blame in another direction, for example diesel fumes...", Greece ("...we should line up someone...[who ideally] should be able to raise serious doubts on the primary issue as well.") The paper also reveals the difficulty PM had in getting ventilation companies to do its bidding and start pushing ventilation as a solution to the secondhand smoke problem (a strategy which took the focus off of restricting indoor smoking):

"The fundamental reasoning behind the IAQ [Indoor Air Quality] plan was to push this [ventilation] technology in the hope that a self-sustaining commercial niche could be created... The burden of pushing the "IAQ" issue would then fall to the [ventilation] companies involved, who would have a commercial reason for doing so. For some reason, all this has not happened. ...Therefore, we should address this problem before all others...One possibility is to subsidize the creation of ACVA [Air Conditioning and Ventilation Associates, a PM consultant] licensees... potential ventilation companies have to be identified and then supported (with technical and marketing expertise) until they can stand alone..."

PM also discusses the type of scientists who should be avoided for recruitment for their consultancy program (and reveals the company's need to remain clandestinely involved in promoting their point of view on secondhand smoke): "Of least use are those consultants who have already been identified with the tobacco industry..."

PM also recognized the delicate issues of credibility involved in getting a reputable external laboratories to work with them:

"At all times PM should take maximum care to safeguard the credibility and good name of these laboratories. If we in any way damage the reputation of one, the rest will go nowhere near us....We should [not] leak the fact that laboratory X is doing a study for us. Projects should be presented to the laboratories as doing something which will enhance their prestige as well as their business, not something which they might regret doing..."

PM acknowledged the increasing difficulty of showing that exposure to secondhand smoke carries "zero risk":

"As the sophistication of measuring, methodologies and epidemiology advance, finding 'zero risk' is getting more and more difficult."

PM also considered shifting the focus of the "right to smoke-free air" health argument to outdoor air quality and funding studies to "show the risks incurred by urban outdoor workers such as cab and bus drivers, street vendors, policemen, news agents and kiosk operators, etc." PM admits, however, that if it overtly funded such studies, the results would have little credibility, saying "Of course, a credible, non-tobacco 'source' for such studies would have to be found or created."

This 1988 Philip Morris document, marked "Personal and Confidential" describes PM's "ETS Project" [Environmental tobacco smoke project] for the European Economic Community (EEC), Eastern Europe, Middle East and Asia (EEMA). The author is David H. Remes, an attorney with the tobacco industry law firm of Covington and Burling, which carried out PM's International ETS Consultant Program (also known as the "Whitecoat Project"). Remes describes the objective of PM's ETS Program clearly:

"The objective of the PM EEC/EEMA ETS Project is to prevent the imposition of smoking restrictions in the EEC/EEMA regions based on the asserted health hazards of ETS to nonsmokers."

Remes describes the difficulties involved in the project:

"As long as anti-smoking forces can maintain a suspicion of risk [of the health effects of ETS], regulatory authorities and the general public are likely to choose to err on the side of caution and support smoking restrictions."

That regulatory authorities would err on the side of caution in public health issues regarding smoking was apparently undesirable to PM.

Remes lays out another problem facing PM, specifically that no one except members of the tobacco industry believes that tobacco smoke is harmless, and that therefore they will have to develop information that says ETS is harmless:

"The argument against smoking restrictions based on the existence of 'controversy' on the ETS health issue also is unlikely to prove persuasive because it is so reminiscent of the industry's argument on the primary [smoking and] health issue, which virtually no-one outside of the industry accepts. Thus, the industry will have to establish affirmatively that ETS presents no significant health risk to non-smokers."

Remes further describes a mission of the project: "to provide the scientific ammunition with which to meet threatened smoking restrictions in that market."