Tobacco Documents Online

Speech by G.H. Long, CEO of RJR giving examples of "victimization" of smokers at the hands of public health authorities, claiming decisions are being made "based on emotionalism rather than careful consideration of the facts."

This 3-page "confidential" report discusses the filming of a 1971 big-screen movie called "Cold Turkey," a comedy that depicted the story of citizens of a small Midwestern American town who tried to quit smoking all at once on a dare from a tobacco company. In the movie, the company offers the town a $25 million prize if all its citizens can quit smoking for 30 days. The movie was set in the fictional town of "Eagle Rock" and was actually filmed in Greenfield, Iowa in 1969. Produced by Norman Lear, the movie featured a host of big actors like Dick Van Dyke, Bob Newhart, Edward Everett Horton, and Tom Poston among others. Interestingly, citizens of the town of Greenfield staged a mass quit-smoking campaign in conjunction with the movie. All of this greatly interested the real-life tobacco companies, who observed the whole situation closely.

According to this summary of the goings-on in Greenfield, Iowa the tobacco industry was interested in "(1) the effect the anti-smoking campaign had on the town's long run smoking behavior, (2) whether the smokers found substitutes for their abandoned cigarettes, (3) whether there were short range or long term problems associated with quitting, such as aggressiveness, overweight, alcoholism, etc."

This paper gives a brief tobacco-company's eye-view of the events surrounding the film and all it entailed. It contains colorful commentary like,

"Although the presentation [of the film] will be generally unfavorable towards the tobacco industry, there will be a few items of consolation: quitting cigarettes will be portrayed as (1) difficult and (2) followed by immediately unpleasant consequences, and (3) many of the anti-smoking kooks will be portrayed as kooks and carnival con-men."

As the tobacco industry kept watch on the town's efforts, it accumulated statistics about the quit smoking campaign. The writer of the paper boasts, "we are not in the favorable position of knowing more about a quit smoking campaign than the anti-smoking people." He or she also shows how the industry worked to obscure the results of the "experiment," saying, "Further, the town council, which is busy publicizing the community and its campaign, is now reliant on us for statistics. Needless to say, we intend to tell them almost nothing, and so far we've released only some figures which tend to belittle their success..."

This document is the text of a speech by Peter Sparber of the Tobacco Institute discussing the Institute's plans to take a more "aggressive posture" against public health efforts to control tobacco. Sparber discusses "mobilizing smokers" to go "head-to-head against the anti-smokers." He describes the purpose of the Center for Indoor Air Research (to provide science for the industry's scientific witnesses), and plans for a group (headed by a celebrity spokesman) that would portray public health advocates as extreme, anti-social and over-reacting to life's small annoyances: "The coalition would sponsor research demonstrating that over-reactions [to being forced to breathe secondhand smoke] are abnormal and anti-social." Of this new group, Sparber states, "We like this approach because it does not preach at all to smokers. In fact, it supports smokers by showing that a large, credible group sees the anti-smokers as the true social problem."

Sparber also states, "We will never be able to say that ETS is not harmful...The question is, when will we have solid, credible evidence that concerns about ETS are unfounded?"

Booklet written by an Australian physician, William T. Whitby, which completely denies any link between smoking and disease, and claims that "the smoking scare is false and that smoking is really quite harmless and often beneficial." Thousands of copies of the booklet were distributed in South Africa and some European countries. Whitby wrote American tobacco companies to get support for his booklet. Whitby headed a pro-smoking group in Australia.