Tobacco industry documents: What they are, what they tell us, and how to search them. A practical manual.

'''[http://www.who.int/tobacco/communications/TI_manual_content.pdf Tobacco industry documents: What they are, what they tell us, and how to search them. A practical manual]''' by Norbert Hirschhorn, on behalf of the World Health Organization's Tobacco Free initiative.

Summary of published paper

In 1998, six million once-secret documents from seven cigarette manufacturers doing business in the US became available to the public as a result of legal action. The documents were from seven cigarette manufacturers and two affiliated organizations: Philip Morris Incorporated, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation, British American Tobacco Industries, Lorillard Tobacco Company, the American Tobacco Company, the Liggett Group, the Tobacco Institute and the Council for Tobacco Research. The documents that include letters, fax, memos, etc written by company scientist, consultants, lawyers, top executives, other employees and outside organizations amounted to over 35 million pages. The information provided in these documents, as well as the reports that have been prepared describing their content, provide a wealth of information about some of the plans and processes of the tobacco companies in their attempt to delay or obstruct tobacco control measures and policies. Only a fraction of the documents’ content has been explored, and additional knowledge about the tobacco companies’ activities at the regional, national and local levels could assist policy-makers, government employees and nongovernmental organizations in the development of tobacco control strategies as the world moves towards the implementation of the World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC). This is the second of two manuals created to help help journalists, public health professionals and advocates, researchers, government officials and the public to search these documents and thereby expand their use outside academia.

Related resources

 * Legacy Tobacco Documents Library