by Allan Brandt
117 Alison Langley, “World Health Meeting Approves Treaty to Discourage Smoking,” New York Times, May 22, 2003; and Ron Scherer, “World Cracks Down on Big Tobacco,” Christian Science Monitor, May 22, 2003.
118 British American Tobacco, 1999 Annual Review (2000).
119 Roger Scruton, “WHO, What and Why? Trans-National Government, Legitimacy and the World Health Organization,” 2000, Bates No. 2084588179/8238.
120 Kevin Maguire and Julian Borger, “Scruton in Media Plot to Push Sale of Cigarettes,” Guardian, January 1, 2002.
121 Maguire and Borger; Alexander Stille, “Advocating Tobacco, on the Payroll of Tobacco,” New York Times, March 23, 2002; and Sophie Scruton, “Memo to Quentin Browell, Japan Tobacco,” 2002, http://www.ash.org.uk/html/conduct/pdfs/scruton.pdf. On efforts of the tobacco industry to influence cultural and academic discussion of tobacco, see Philip Morris, “Chronology and Development of Project Cosmic,” 1988, Bates No. 2023919844/9846, http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/rbv88e00; and Robert N. Proctor, “Should Medical Historians Be Working for the Tobacco Industry?” Lancet 363, no. 9410 (2004): 1174-1175.
122 “Globalisation and Business Integrity,” British American Tobacco Web site, http://www.bat.com/oneweb/sites/uk__3mnfen.nsf/0/0c8b098b3046982a80256bf400019871?Open-Document
123 Ibid.
124 Derek Yach, “Injecting Greater Urgency into Global Tobacco Control,” Tobacco Control 14, no. 3 (2005): 145-148.
125 Murray and Lopez.
126 Howard Barnum, “The Economic Burden of the Global Trade in Tobacco,” Tobacco Control 3, no. 4 (1994): 358-361.
127 Judith Mackay, Michael Eriksen, and Omar Shafey, The Tobacco Atlas, 2nd ed. (Atlanta, GA: American Cancer Society, 2006).
128 Norman Daniels, Just Health Care (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
129 G. H. Brundtland, 1998. See also Yach and Bettcher, “The Globalization of Public Health, I & II.”
Epilogue
1 “The Threat of Biological Weapons,” New York Review of Books, April 13, 2000.
2 Trial Testimony of Lacy K. Ford, Ph.D., Jones v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., 2000; and Deposition of Lacy K. Ford, Ph.D., Engle v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., 1999.
3 Dan Zegart, Civil Warriors: The Legal Siege on the Tobacco Industry (New York: Delacorte, 2000).
4 Order, United States v. Philip Morris, et al., November 28, 2000, 116 F.Supp. 2d 131 (D.D.C. 2000).
5 Stasia Mosesso, “Up in Smoke: How the Proximate Cause Battle Extinguished the Tobacco War,” Notre Dame Law Review 76, no. 1 (2000): 257-340.
6 Litigation Against Tobacco Companies, Civil Division, U.S. Department of Justice, 1999-2006 (available from http://www.usdoj.gov/civil/cases/tobacco2).
7 Expert Statement of Theodore Wilson, United States v. Philip Morris, et al., 2002; and Expert Statement of Peter English, United States v. Philip Morris, et al., 2002.
8 Expert Statement of Kenneth Ludmerer, United States v. Philip Morris, et al., 2002, 3, 5.
9 Deposition of Kenneth Ludmerer, M.D., Engle v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., 1998.
10 Robert N. Proctor, “‘Everyone Knew But No One Had Proof ’: Tobacco Industry Use of Medical History Expertise in US Courts, 1990-2002,” Tobacco Control 15 (Suppl 4) (2006): iv117-iv125; Robert N. Proctor, “Should Medical Historians Be Working for the Tobacco Industry?” Lancet 363, no. 9410 (2004): 1174-1175; Louis M. Kyriakoudes, “Historians’ Testimony on ‘Common Knowledge’ of the Risks of Tobacco Use: A Review and Analysis of Experts Testifying on Behalf of Cigarette Manufacturers in Civil Litigation,” Tobacco Control 15 (Suppl 4) (2006): iv107-iv116; and Robert N. Proctor, “Tobacco and Health,” Expert Report, United States v. Philip Morris, et al., 2002.
11 Patricia Cohen, “History for Hire in Industry Lawsuits,” New York Times, June 14, 2003.
12 Deposition of Kenneth Ludmerer, M.D., Engle v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., 1998, 9.
13 Peter Kaplan, “U.S. Trial Raises History of Smoking-Cancer Link,” Reuters News Service, September 27, 2004.
14 United States v. Philip Morris, et al., No. 04-5252 (D.C. Cir. 2005).
15 Trial Testimony of Michael Fiore, United States v. Philip Morris, et al., 2005.
16 Eric Lichtblau, “Lawyers Fought U.S. Move to Curb Tobacco Penalty,” New York Times, June 16, 2005.
17 Eric Lichtblau, “Political Leanings Were Always Factor in Tobacco Suit,” New York Times, June 19, 2005.
18 M. C. Fiore, P. A. Keller, and T. B. Baker, “The Justice Department’s Case Against the Tobacco Companies,” New England Journal of Medicine 353, no. 10 (2005): 972-975.
19 Henry A. Waxman, Letter to DOJ Inspector General Glenn A. Fine, June 8, 2005 (available from http://democrats.reform.house.gov/Documents/20050609182600-65485.pdf ); Brian Blackstone and Vanessa O’Connell, “Judge in Federal Tobacco Case Urges Sides to Settle,” Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2005; and Michael Janofsky and David Johnston, “Award Limit in Tobacco Case Sets Off a Strenuous Protest,” New York Times, June 9, 2005.
20 Motion to Intervene by the Tobacco-Free Kids Action Fund, American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights, and National African American Tobacco Prevention Network, United States v. Philip Morris, et al., No. 99-2496 (Gk) (D.C. Cir. 2005); filed June 29, 2005.
21 Gladys Kessler, United States v. Philip Morris, et al., No. 99-2496 (Gk) (D.C. Cir. 2005); Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, Special Reports: Department of Justice Civil Lawsuit (2006), available from http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/reports/doj.
22 United States v. Philip Morris, et al. U.S. Dist LEXIS 57757 (D.C. Cir. 2006): 1500-1501 (available from http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/opinions/district-court-2006.html). Vanessa O’Connell, “From the Ashes of Defeat—a Recent Court Ruling Forces Cigarette Makers to Revamp Marketing of Their Products,” Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2006; and Philip Shenon, “U.S. Judge Sets New Limits on Marketing of Cigarettes,” New York Times, August 18, 2006.
23 In a recent ruling, Federal District Court Judge Jack B. Weinstein certified a national class action in a civil RICO litigation contending that consumers were defrauded by industry claims for “light cigarettes.” According to Weinstein, there was “substantial evidence” that the tobacco companies knew that these cigarettes were at least as dangerous as regular products. The suit asks for $200 billion for perhaps as many as 60 million “light” cigarette smokers. Schwab v. Philip Morris USA, Inc., No. 04-CV-1945 (JBW), U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 73211, September 25, 2006 (available from http://www.tobacco-on-trial.com/files/20060925schwabmemo.pdf ).
24 Allan M. Brandt, “From Analysis to Advocacy: Crossing Boundaries as a Historian of Health Policy,” in Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings, eds. Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004): 460-484. See also Rosemary A. Stevens, Charles E. Rosenberg, and Lawton R. Burns, eds. History and Health Policy in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006).
NOTE ON SOURCES
There is a remarkable array of source material to support the investigation of cigarette use in history. A number of writers have made substantial contributions on which I relied heavily in this book. Most significantly, Richard Kluger’s Ashes to Ashes (Knopf, 1996) remains an indispensable source for anyone interested in the history of tobacco in the twentieth century. The book, filled with telling detail, is based on hundreds of interviews with prominent tobacco industry figures and public health advocates. Kluger generously donated his research files to Yale University, where they can be utilized by other researchers. Notes from his many interviews are available online. In addition to Kluger’s, there are several other important books that critically informed my own work. These include Richard Tennant’s The American Cigarette Industry (Yale University Press, 1950); the important work of Nannie E. Tilley on the rise of the tobacco industry, The Bright Tobacco Industry, 1860-1929 (University of North Caroli
na Press, 1948); and the highly readable, brief They Satisfy, by business historian Richard Sobel (Anchor Books, 1978). I have also found Jordan Goodman’s Tobacco and History (Routledge, 1993) as well as his recent, two-volume encyclopedia, Tobacco in History and Culture (Thomson Gale, 2005) to be extremely useful.
There are several scholars whose work has significantly shaped the field over recent decades, and I have repeatedly relied on their findings and their insights. In particular, economist Kenneth Warner has made critical contributions over several decades to understanding the relationship between public policies to reduce smoking and their efficacy. Epidemiologists Richard Peto and Jonathan Samet have done groundbreaking work that follows in the tradition of Doll and Hill, illuminating the morbidity and mortality associated with smoking in the United States and around the world. Anyone seeking to understand the evolution of the contemporary tobacco pandemic and strategies for its control should consult their voluminous and critically important work.
A number of recent books are especially helpful in grounding an understanding of tobacco politics and regulation. A. Lee Fritschler’s Smoking and Politics (1969; 4th ed. Prentice Hall, 1989) is a classic assessment of the obstacles to regulation. More recently, there have been a number of especially valuable accounts of tobacco litigation: these include Michael Orey’s Assuming the Risk (Little, Brown, 1999), Peter Pringle’s Cornered: Big Tobacco at the Bar of Justice (Henry Holt, 1998), and Dan Zegart’s Civil Warriors (Delacorte, 2000). Michael Pertschuk, a leading figure in the efforts to regulate tobacco use, has written Smoke in Their Eyes: Lessons in Movement Leadership from the Tobacco Wars (Vanderbilt University Press, 2001), a particularly useful insider’s assessment of the disputes associated with tobacco legislation at the end of the century.
Former FDA Commissioner David Kessler’s account of his efforts to bring tobacco under his agency’s regulatory aegis is brilliantly narrated in his A Question of Intent (Public Affairs, 2001). I have also found Robert Rabin and Stephen Sugarman’s two edited volumes, Smoking Policy (Oxford University Press, 1993) and Regulating Tobacco (Oxford University Press, 2001) to be especially valuable.
Several books written in the 1990s are based substantially on the emergence of previously secret tobacco documents into the public realm. Stanton Glantz and colleagues produced the Cigarette Papers (University of California Press, 1996), a critically important review of the Brown & Williamson documents recovered by Merrell Williams. Glantz is responsible for a remarkable body of advocacy-oriented research that I have utilized in this book. And New York Times reporter Philip Hilts’s Smokescreen (Addison-Wesley, 1996) expertly narrates the Williams saga and evaluates the significance of these materials.
In addition to Hilts’s pathbreaking journalism, I have relied heavily on the critical work of a number of other journalists. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of a small band of journalists who brilliantly covered the tobacco story, especially over the last three decades. These include Morton Mintz of the Washington Post, whose coverage of the Cipollone trial was crucial to getting the full story of industry activity into the public media; Milo Geyelin and Alix Freedman at the Wall Street Journal; Jonathan Schwartz and Glenn Frankel at the Washington Post; Barry Meier and Michael Janofsky at the New York Times; and Myron Levin at the Los Angeles Times. This remarkable group of reporters has produced the kind of civic journalism that is critical to the democratic process. Broadcast journalists like Walt Bogdanich and Lowell Bergman also made crucial contributions to public knowledge.
In the course of my historical investigations on the history of tobacco, I have utilized a number important archival collections, including those of Harvard University (William Cochran); the Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School (McKeen Cattell); the University of Maine (C. C. Little); Washington University, St. Louis (Evarts Graham); the Wisconsin Historical Society (Bruce Barton, John W. Hill, Robert Lasch, M. V. O’Shea); the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions (Lewis Robbins); the University of Pennsylvania (Luther Terry); the University of Washington, Seattle (Warren Magnuson); the Library of Congress (Edward Bernays, Harvey W. Wiley); Yale University (Chester Bliss, Lester Savage); Duke University (the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History); the Smithsonian (N. W. Ayer Collection, the Warshaw Collection of Business Americana); the National Library of Medicine (Stanhope Bayne-Jones); and the National Archives (the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee).
This book is heavily based on the tobacco archives that emerged as a result of litigation since the 1980s. Without the brilliant work of a series of plaintiffs’ attorneys, the history of the cigarette would largely remain in the locked vaults of the tobacco industry. Now, literally millions of letters, memoranda, and research reports are all available online and downloadable. Taken together, the tobacco archives are in many ways the single most impressive example of the power of the Internet and how it might shape historical research in the future. At the same time, however, this record of the tobacco industry represents the most unusual of all archives. There is no industry that is so fundamentally open to scrutiny. I strongly invite my readers to even briefly experiment using these materials. One quickly finds that there is hardly any aspect of modern American life that is not part of these collections, starting from law and politics, to media, to constitutional rights, to PR; it is literally a few clicks to an unprecedented body of archival materials. Certainly, these tobacco archives could easily support intensive research on many questions only tangentially related to the cigarette. The Web sites involved have excellent information about conducting searches and strategies for effective use. Among the main Web sites are: Tobacco Documents Online (http://www.tobaccodocuments.org), which was set up by Michael Tacelovsky in 1999, and the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu), which was established at the University of California, San Francisco, in 1994. Both of these Web sites are grant supported, primarily by the National Cancer Institute and the American Legacy Foundation, respectively.
In addition, a number of individuals, expert in the use of the archives, have created links to documents of particular importance. I have relied in a number of instances on the exceptional research of Anne Landman, who has identified and annotated a large number of important industry documents. In addition to the online archives of tobacco industry documents, there are extensive online resources to support cigarette-related research. In particular, there is a remarkable depository of tobacco news as a result of the critical efforts of Gene Borio, who began an electronic bulletin board in 1995, extensively culling tobacco news from around the world. This site is now Tobacco. org, which is maintained by Borio and colleague Michael Tacelovsky. Researchers are much in their debt.
As I worked on this book, the combination of discovery in tobacco litigation and the Internet revolution radically reconfigured both the sources and the process of investigation. Unlike some historical inquiries where one hunts a spare trail of extant sources, the history of tobacco is replete with literally millions of documents and thousands of important publications from federal reports, research science, and the public media. The character of these materials, coupled with their sheer volume, raises critical questions about the nature of historical scholarship in the twenty-first century.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Over the many years that I worked on this book, I repeatedly found that within the worlds of the academy, medicine, and public health, there is a deep reservoir of generosity, collegiality, and critical engagement. I consider myself exceptionally fortunate to have been able to draw upon the expertise of my colleagues and to have made so many new friends in the course of writing this book. The process of work on this project was unusual in the quality of the many personal relationships that grew out of the research, the ideas, and the important policy questions that have arisen. There is no way to repay the many debts that I have incurred, but I certainly hope my friends and colleagues underst
and the depth of my gratitude, and my sense of humility in the face of their extensive contributions to this work.
A number of my students provided excellent research support at various stages of the project. These gifted and enthusiastic students not only found sources and materials, they provided important ideas and critiques. I am enormously grateful to: Conevery Bolton Valencius, Nicholas King, Jeremy Greene, Lara Freidenfelds, Stuart Stricklandč David Greenes, Carolyn Frank, Scott Podolsky, David Jones, Deborah Levine, and Gary Negbaur. At an early stage of the project, Christian Warren not only provided excellent research support, but helped me conceptualize central themes and debates.
My colleagues and friends at the University of North Carolina have provided support and guidance long after my brief tenure there. These include Gail Henderson, Myron Cohen, Sue Estroff, Don Madison, Larry Churchill (now at Vanderbilt), and especially William Leuchtenburg, whose work has profoundly shaped my own. Historian Robert Proctor of Stanford University, a fellow student of the cigarette, has been a constant sounding board; he is a model for me of the possibilities of collegiality, academic courage, and social advocacy. To my great benefit, he meticulously read and critiqued the complete manuscript.
My colleagues in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard listened patiently over the years, and several read fragments—and more—on demand. In particular, I have greatly benefited from the many generous interventions of Peter Galison, Charles Rosenberg, Barbara Rosenkrantz, Peter Buck, and Mario Biagioli. Sophie Wadsworth brought a generous and kind poet’s eye to my often awkward prose. And Jude Lajoie excelled in providing administrative backing. My colleague and friend at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Robert Selman, consistently provided both good counsel and moral support. Matthew Miller of the Harvard School of Public Health read the entire manuscript, providing crucial input about the nature of causal inference, and great personal support throughout. And both Robert Aronowitz and David Barnes, now at the University of Pennsylvania, each provided expert advice and loyal support as I worked through essential questions in the book.