Tobacco Documents Online

In this 1983 marketing speech, Philip Morris (PM) President Hamish Maxwell cites the importance of PM's efforts to maintain the presence of smoking in the movies to help preserve the social acceptability of tobacco use. Maxwell states:

"RECENTLY, ANTI-SMOKING GROUPS HAVE ALSO HAD SOME EARLY SUCCESSES AT ERODING THE SOCIAL ACCEPTABILITY OF SMOKING. SMOKING IS BEING POSITIONED AS AN UNFASHIONABLE, AS WELL AS UNHEALTHY, CUSTOM. WE MUST USE EVERY CREATIVE MEANS AT OUR DISPOSAL TO REVERSE THIS DESTRUCTIVE TREND. I DO FEEL HEARTENED AT THE INCREASING NUMBER OF OCCASIONS WHEN I GO TO A MOVIE AND SEE A PACK OF CIGARETTES IN THE HANDS OF THE LEADING LADY. THIS IS IN SHARP CONTRAST TO THE STATE OF AFFAIRS JUST A FEW YEARS AGO WHEN CIGARETTES RARELY SHOWED UP ON CAMERA. WE MUST CONTINUE TO EXPLOIT NEW OPPORTUNITIES TO GET CIGARETTES ON SCREEN AND INTO THE HANDS OF SMOKERS. THE PMI CORPORATE AFFAIRS DEPARTMENT IS HELPING..."

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.

This presentation by the German cigarette industry begins by saying it "...would become a deadly threat to the long-term survival of our industry if passive smoking could be proven to be a real health hazard." It discusses the effectiveness of the ties the German industry forged with "eminent" independent scientists and describes how these affiliations gave the industry "credit and trust in its responsibility and sincerity" in German society and politics. It describes how the German cigarette industry then used these ties to undermine the Health Ministry's effort to pass a law protecting non-smokers from secondhand smoke (in 1983), and how the industry succeeded in changing the originally-proposed law into a "programme of mere recommendations with no binding effects." The presentation describes how these efforts further helped the German cigarette industry marginalize health advocacy groups in Germany:

"Industry's tactic to isolate them [public health advocates] from the serious scientific community and to uncover their quasi-religion fanaticism proved to be successful."

The presentation describes the German cigarette industry's initiation of a public relations campaign to preserve a "positive consumption climate" in inns and restaurants, and a campaign to preserve the social acceptability of smoking by running a "smokers welcome" campaign on taxi cabs. A final tactic described is that of putting on a entertaining public forum in a "wine restaurant" which "experts" were brought in to discuss the social benfits if smoking. Some 80 "high ranking" public personalities were invited to the event, including the State Ministers of Finance and Economics. The paper links this activity back to the original INFOTAB project, the organization of global tobacco manufacturers who came together to fight the problem of declining social acceptability worldwide.