Clephas, Vincent R.; Maxwell, Hamish; Pittman, D.; Sapolsky, Harvey M.; Scott, S. Stanley; Zahn, Leonard S.
This document is a transcript of a Philip Morris (PM) Corporate Affairs World Conference from 1984. It contains key speeches by people who were formatively involved in PM corporate affairs. It describes PM's attitudes and tactics for fighting public health. For example, it describes how PM pressed its food and beer subsidiaries into service to provide a "grassroots" response against legislative proposals to regulate tobacco. It also contains other telling comments, like:
"We're now facing a global anti-smoking campaign...Here and abroad, passive smoking is a particularly dangerous issue because it supports restrictions on smoking where smokers spend nearly half of their waking hours--in the workplace. " [2025421661]
and
"We're increasingly sophisticated at reaching minority constituencies. Our pace-setting support for the [blank..presumed "minorities"] softens our controversial edges with influential friends." [2025421664]
The document also shows PM's battle-mentality against the will of U.S. citizens. Citing the company's first loss on a ballot initiative in the U.S. (in San Francisco,1983) a speaker says,
"Well we've learned from that. We've sharpened our weapons and the next time around, we did, in fact, preclude similar legislation in other cities in this nation and we'll do even better in the future...That's what we've got to do, over and over, year in and year out in city after city, state after state, country-- sharpen our tools, do battle..."
Perhaps most telling is the bizarre attitude expressed by Harvey Sapolsky, a professor of Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a featured speaker at the conference. Sapolsky complains that society discriminates against smokers because people are no longer allowed to smoke while taking the bar exam, while waiting in hospital emergency rooms, or while serving on a jury. Sapolsky laments,
"A friend of mine a few years back [took] the Federal Bar Exam. And I assume it's a tense experience. I haven't taken it, but I presume that smokers who have taken that wouldn't mind lighting up every once in a while. But she wasn't permitted to do that. She was marched out every hour for a cigarette break out in the hall by a marshal and had to stand there and waste her time on her exam while the non-smokers were allowed to continue. I think that's unfair--discriminatory.
I've also seen clips in the newspapers that there are now jury rooms, I think the state is Oregon, where there's no smoking around. Perhaps it's more widespread than that. That's terrible. It's unfair to the people on trial as well as the people who are on the juries. And that's discrimination...
I accompanied someone to an emergency room and I was in the waiting room. And they don't allow smoking in the waiting room. That's discriminatory. People are waiting there for their loved ones, maybe a terrible accident and they're not allowed to show any signs of being human and smoking at that time. They're supposed to go out in the rain or something like that, [and] that's unfair. And something ought to be done about that..."
In his speech, Leonard Zahn (a public relations consultant to the industry) says the conclusion that nicotine is addictive is "the second-most serious problem...facing the industry today," and claims that the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) "are doing that to cover up for their failure to deal with their assignment--drug abuse."
This document reveals the antipathy and disrespect that the Philip Morris tobacco company held for public health authorities, describes the tactics PM used to fight these authorities, and gives us a look into the belief systems of key people who influenced the tobacco industry to engage in such a furious, behind-the-scenes battle against public health.