Tobacco's Smoking Gun Documents

This article is part of the Tobacco portal on Sourcewatch funded from 2006 - 2009 by the American Legacy Foundation.

Smoking Gun Tobacco Documents

There are now 14 million tobacco industry documents available on-line through the San Francisco University tobacco document archive [1] and these are indexed reasonably well, enough for a diligent researcher to be able to follow a path through the maze and identify most of the scientists, academics and lobbyists who were generously paid to help maintain the tobacco industry fictions used to block political legislation around the world.

When faced with the inevitable exposure of their activities, the tobacco industry established teams led by lawyers who travelled the world culling the files. The systematically tried to get rid of documents showing conspiracies, and any which implicated their executives and staff. The companies called this [euphemistically] their Document Retention Programs. If documents weren't destroyed ... naturally ... they were retained in the files.

There is clear evidence of this culling in the fact that very large numbers of what were multipage documents, exist now only as fax cover-sheets -- since these were often the only page of the document that could be identified through their indexing systems (during legal discovery processes).

However, with so many documents to read and cull, it was inevitably that some of the more interesting and revealing documents would escape scrutiny and actually be retained in the files rather than be conveyed to the furnace. These documents are of special interest, because they leave no doubt as to the way the executives of big and powerful corporations act to subvert science and corrupt politics and the media to maintain their profits. They stand alone as evidence.

However it is important to emphasise that a real understanding of how these tobacco corporations collaborated on a global scale -- both with their competitors, and with other industries having similar poisoning and polluting problems -- can only be gained from following trails through numerous documents and understanding the patterns of behaviour that emerge.

Smoking-Gun documents

The information in these Smoking-Gun documents has sometimes been refined, corrected and condensed in the interests of clarity. But you can cross-check our changes against the original at any time. We have made changes in order to: correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar and/or edit clumsy language [many writers were not natural English speakers], interpret and include semi-legible handnotes and editing amendments, and spell-out full names from surnames, nicknames or initials. expand and explain the widespread use of jargon and acronyms, and sometimes to simply clarify turgid prose. We have also provided additional explanatory material -- clearly identified as such -- to put the correspondence in its wider context.

Index of Smoking Gun Tobacco Documents

• 1982 James L Charles (SGDoc 1982) This document by Philip Morris Director of Research to his superior reveals the real state of knowledge about cigarettes and lung-cancer at this time.
   
  

• 1988 Feb 17 WhiteCoats (SGDoc 1988) Sharon Boyse, the Smoking Issues Manager at British American Tobacco records and distributes her note on a meeting set up by Philip Morris to explain to the British tobacco companies their plans for the WhiteCoats program.
   
  

• 1991 Mar TI Smoking Issues (SGDoc 1991) The monthly report of the Public smoking Issues division of the Tobacco Institute (Martha Rinker, Sharon Ransome, Kay Thomas) makes many admissions of their clandestine and corrupt scientific activities.

• 1998 GEP (SGDoc 1998) This document spells out the reason behind the creation of the Good Epidemiological Practices (GEP) which attempted to subvert standards for Epidemiology as a science, in order to make it difficult for the regulators to limit the sale and use of cigarettes.