Boca Raton Action Plan

The Boca Raton Action Plan was a comprehensive Philip Morris strategy starting circa 1988 for an elaborate, multi-faceted campaign to thwart public health authorities' efforts to reduce smoking and other threats facing the tobacco companies globally. The plan identified threats to PM's interests in countries around the world and mobilized significant financial and creative resources to confront these threats in a highly coordinated manner.

History
The Boca Raton Action Plan was instigated by Geoffrey C. Bible, then the President of Philip Morris International. In November, 1988 Bible convened a meeting of top executives, primarily from Philip Morris Corporate Affairs departments, in Boca Raton, Florida, to develop master plan for attacking the World Health Organization's (WHO) tobacco control programs. The Plan also called for "reorienting" the WHO's priorities towards areas that would exert less pressure on tobacco companies.

Bible wrote a December 1988 memorandum called the "Boca Raton Action Plan" which detailed the company's strategy to thwart WHO's tobacco control initiatives. According to the memo:

"This organization [WHO] has extraordinary influence on government and consumers and we must find a way to diffuse this and reorient their activities to their prescribed mandate. In addition, we need to think through how we could use our food companies, size, technology, and capability with governments by helping them with their food problems and give us a more balanced profile with the government than we now have against WHO’s powerful influence."

Philip Morris pursued a number of activities to "reorient" WHO, including using its subsidiary food companies and other non-tobacco entities, tobacco industry organizations, business groups and other supposedly independent surrogates. These organizations worked to influence WHO directly, as well as to pressure the WHO through the media, national governments and international organizations, including other United Nations agencies.

Related Sourewatch resources

 * Paul Dietrich
 * Philip Morris Corporate Affairs

External resources
For more detailed information on the Boca Raton Action Plan, see Tobacco Company Strategies to Undermine Tobacco Control Activities at the World Health Organization Report. July 2000. 258 pp. Bates No. 2078184652/4909