Tobacco Documents Online

This 11 page document from the Philip Morris collection reveals the tobacco industry's detailed strategies to fight public health smoking restrictions. Strategies include

"Promote ventilation as the best solution to all indoor air quality problems, including smoking....Oppose all legislative, regulatory, judicial and voluntary efforts to discriminate unfairly against smokers. Attempt to reverse all existing restrictions...Strategy 5: Reduce superficial public debate of ETS....Promote the need for ventilation standards through news media, advertising, direct mail, videos, print materials, and coalitions.

The industry is also aware that businesses are unlikely to support and promote ventilation systems as an answer to smoking bans unless "they perceive a financial interest in doing so."

The industry is also aware that their "freedom of choice" argument cannot be effectively used in arguments about secondhand smoke because it also applies to people who want freedom to enter places without being forced to inhale secondhand smoke (and this is why they have to shift the debate away from "freedom of choice"):

"The argument of 'freedom of choice' with regard to workplace smoking is becoming increasingly difficult to sell because those who are opposed to smoking have used the same argument effectively. The concept of "indoor air quality" (with an emphasis on science) has much more credibility and will draw in a wider audience.

The Tobacco Institue operated a secret "Scientific Witness" program in which they recruited medical, scientific and ventilation professionals to publish papers and testify before public bodies on their behalf to help "maintain the controversy" on secondhand smoke. In this 1989 speech, Charles Powers, Senior Vice President of the Tobacco Institute (TI), explains to the TI Executive Committee why the Institute's secret "Scientific Witness" program was so important to the industry, and why they needed increase its funding: "Two weeks ago, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article that will add fuel to the already hot battle over smoking restrictions...This article is the third piece of ETS [environmental tobacco smoke] research to appear in the scientific literature in the last three months...I can assure you there will be more...The tobacco industry in this country is not prepared to respond to a steady onslaught of articles in the scientific literature that condemns ETS as a health hazard that can be dealt with only by smoking bans. We are not prepared because...scientists will not buck for love what the Washington Post just last week called the 'scientific concensus' about ETS as a health hazard. It takes money."

Powers explains that spokespeople the Institute had already enlisted to criticize existing ETS literature lacked the necessary academic standing to be taken seriously by scientists:

"Last year...we succeeded in identifying five additional independent consultants who have become invaluable in our state legislative witness program and in working with the media...But they do not have peer standing in the academic community to be taken seriously in scientific circles. For this project...we need people with an academic and research background. Right now we have no one."

Powers explains that credible research academics are needed to "package and sell" the research tobacco companies have generated internally, because the Institute "can't do it and be taken seriously":

"...Thanks in large part to the research programs in your companies, we have the base of information we need to attack these biased research articles on E-T-S. Unfortunately, we have no one to package that information and to sell it. The Institute can't do it and be taken seriously. We need people who have earned reputations as serious researchers...who can review and critique articles, publish and act as peer reviewers."

Powers explains the difficulty and expense in recruiting credible scientists:

"...For every one scientist who makes the final cut, as many as nine don't...Many simply don't want to work for this industry. And others don't pass important legal and product liability tests...History tells us that it costs on average about $40,000 to identify and bring up to speed a single expert before that individual is available to work with us. Once the individual is identified, it takes about six weeks. If we don't make that effort, no one else will."

There is no explanation of what the "legal and product liability tests" are.