This Brown & Williamson manual from 1979 entitled, Tobacco: Issues, Answers, Actions, is a primer for employees on how to answer nagging questions like "How can you deny the overwhelming statistical evidence that smoking causes disease?" and "Does it bother your conscience to sell cigarettes?" It also instructs tobacco industry employees on how to particpate in the industry's pro-tobacco "grass roots" lobbying structure, Tobacco Action Network or TAN.
The industry argues in court that everyone has long been fully aware of the link between smoking and health, and yet in the section of the Question & Answer manual pertaining to smoking and health, employees were instructed to say over and over that the case against smoking isn't proven, that it has been based on flawed statistics and unreliable data, and to point out that a statistical link also exists between lung cancer and use of electric razors.
But the most telling line in the document, the one that cavalierly points out the tobacco industry's decades of purposeful deceipt of the American people, is this quote from William Kloepfer, Jr., director of public relations at the Tobacco Institute (the tobacco industry's public relations and lobbying association):
"Our objective is to bring a seemingly closed subject back to the level of controversy in the public's mind."