Tobacco.org

• Clearing air on cigarette ads  

There seem to be two Dr. Alan Blums.

One is a tweedy academic — the family medicine professor and director of the Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society at the University of Alabama who has devoted his dead-serious career to the prevention of tobacco-induced illnesses.

The other is the self-described “Bart Simpson of the anti-smoking movement” — the alter ago who donned a fake pharmacist’s lab coat Wednesday to help set up “Your Cancer and Drug Store,” an exhibition on tobacco advertising that opens today in the Buffalo Museum of Science. . . .

The approach reflects a lesson learned in 1977 when Blum, then a Miami hospital intern and nascent anti-smoking crusader, lost a contentious radio talk show debate with a tobacco industry spokesman while the host, Larry King, blew smoke in Blum’s face.

Ever since, “I’ve tried to bring some humor and satire to a depressing issue that many people take very seriously,” Blum said. The strategy has included “house calls” to tobacco festivals and “anything else we could do to ridicule the brand names.”

Satirical references abound in “Your Cancer and Drug Store,” which was gleaned from a trove of tobacco advertising and promotional materials that Blum started collecting 15 years ago and now fills 2,500 boxes in his Alabama center.

He started by buying items distributed by cigarette companies that a Connecticut store owner had accumulated over two decades. “He must’ve thought it had collectible value, but it cost more to ship it [to Alabama] than I paid for it,” Blum said.

From the outset his goal was to mount an exhibition that underscored the everyday irony of seeing tobacco products on the shelves of pharmacies that dispense drugs prescribed to combat cancer, heart disease, hypertension and other diseases linked to smoking.

“I wanted to do an over-the-top, walk-through exhibit,” he said, citing the role that drugstores have played in keeping America smoking. “I’m not going after individual pharmacies as much as the chains that own them.” . . .

By touring “Your Cancer and Drug Store,” he said, “you are looking at origins of cancer just as much as you would by looking through a microscope.”

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I wanted to do an over-the-top, walk-through exhibit. I’m not going after individual pharmacies as much as the chains that own them.
Prof. Alan Blum, on his Buffalo, NY, ad exhibit that explores the role that drugstores have played in keeping America smoking.

Your Cancer and Drug Store: One-stop shopping: prescriptions, cigarettes, urgent care and chemo.
Alan Blum's mock-drug store: an exhibition on tobacco advertising that opens today in the Buffalo Museum of Science.

• Scholars' Right to Keep Unpublished Work Private Is at Issue in Lawsuit 

In a case with potentially major implications for scholars and publishers, a Stanford University professor who often serves as an expert witness against tobacco companies is fighting an effort by lawyers for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company to obtain the manuscript of his unpublished and unfinished book on that industry.

A Florida state court judge has already authorized the tobacco company's lawyers to issue a subpoena requiring Robert N. Proctor, a Stanford professor of the history of science, to make his book manuscript available to them so they can comb it for possible material to use in cross-examining him in a civil lawsuit pending there.

But the lawyers for the plaintiffs suing the tobacco company last week filed a motion asking the court to reconsider that decision and protect Mr. Proctor from being forced to grant access to the unpublished manuscript. Their motion calls Mr. Proctor their "single most important witness" in their case against the tobacco company, and argues that forcing him to share the manuscript would violate his privacy, his free-speech rights, his academic freedom, and his rights as an author.

Mr. Proctor, for his own part, refused to produce the manuscript at a recent deposition in the case and has retained a San Francisco law firm to fight the subpoena—as well as any other efforts to obtain his book—in California state courts.

In an interview Monday, he said of the book: "It's my private thoughts. They are not organized yet. They are not in finished form." . . .

The Florida court where the case is pending, the state's Seventh Judicial Circuit Court in Volusia County, possibly could entertain arguments for and against the subpoena at a hearing scheduled for Thursday. . . .

Robert M. O'Neil, director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression at the University of Virginia and a veteran scholar of issues related to academic freedom, said Monday that the legal fight over the manuscript "has profound implications" for academe. . . .

Mr. Proctor said Monday that lawyers for the tobacco company have sought for more than a year to obtain the manuscript to his planned book, tentatively titled "Golden Holocaust: A History of Global Tobacco." . . .

In a deposition filed in connection with the Florida case, he describes himself as one of only two professors of history in the nation who regularly testify against the tobacco industry, and alleged that "the tobacco industry has spent years trying to harass, intimidate, and use multiple legal means to prevent me from testifying in litigation." He said that his book "will contain previously unpublished information regarding tobacco-industry practices,"

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Golden Holocaust: A History of Global Tobacco
Tentative title of Robert N. Proctor's work-in-progress. RJR is battling in a Florida court for a sneak preview.

• Audio slideshow: Created by Mad Men 

Cigarette vending machines should be banned and shops in England, Wales and Northern Ireland should keep stocks out of sight, MPs say. Similar plans are being discussed in Scotland.

But there was a time when there were very few restrictions on tobacco promotion. Larry Viner, of the Advertising Archives, takes a look at the ingenious, and not so truthful, ways the ad agencies tried to sell cigarettes in the past.

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• Price Waterhouse and Big Tobacco 

There's a big scary new study out today from the health insurance lobby and PricewaterhouseCoopers purporting to show that the Senate Finance Committee's reform bill -- funded by new excise taxes on "Cadillac" health plans -- would cause future health insurance premiums to spiral out of control.

Before this genie gets too far out of the bottle, just consider the track record of such industry-funded excise tax "research" by Price Waterhouse.

In the early 1990s, Price Waterhouse did similar handiwork on behalf of Big Tobacco, serving up allegedly hard data to bolster arguments that a new excise tax on tobacco (a proposed mechanism to fund Clintoncare) would destroy hundreds of thousands of good American jobs.

Dire predictions. But a subsequent review of Price Waterhouse's methods by an independent team at Arthur Andersen, revealed that Price Waterhouse's "grossly exaggerated" and "one-sided analyses" were so "flawed" as to produce "patently unreliable results." . . .

“These and other serious flaws in the Price Waterhouse Report and the Tobacco Institute Estimates build upon one-another in a cumulative fashion to present grossly exaggerated and misleading estimates.”

“The cumulative effect of PW’s methods… is to produce patently unreliable results.”

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• The Truth About American Legacy 

The American Legacy Foundation is a rare example of a public charity being born with a silver spoon. Even before it began operating in 1999, the foundation was bequeathed more than $1 billion from the settlement of a massive lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of 46 states against the country's major tobacco companies. . . .

For the first few years, it seemed a great success. The foundation rolled out hard-hitting and ubiquitous advertising, known as "the truth" campaign. . . .

Then the magic stopped working so well. Since 2003, teen smoking rates have hovered around 22 percent, even as adult smoking has continued to dwindle (to under 20 percent now). After the final really big tobacco payment of $307.9 million came that year (under the Master Settlement), "the truth" campaign continued on a much smaller scale.

But despite spending less on those ads, awarding fewer grants for anti-smoking programs and seeing all the tobacco company contributions end last year, the foundation itself grew wealthier. As expenditures for its primary missions fell, two budget items kept growing: investment fees and salary costs, especially for top executives. . . .

While most nonprofits invest to protect their funds, the Legacy Foundation has pursued an aggressive investment strategy that includes hedge funds, foreign stocks (sometimes accompanied by currency exchange losses), interest rate swaps, two office buildings in downtown Washington and other investments.

Some observers say Legacy is trying too hard to perpetuate itself and the cause would be better served if it spent more of its endowment, which stood at $1.156 billion at the end of fiscal 2008.

The American Legacy Foundation says President Cheryl Healton's salary of $570,000 in 2008 (plus benefits) is about the same as the median for others in large philanthropic endeavors. . . .

(For a more complete rundown of the foundation's annual budget and spending, see the pie charts on these pages.) . . .

The foundation is phasing out its grant program for small innovative programs, for anti-smoking programs in rural areas and among minority groups, and for research. It has spent about $150 million on these grants during its existence.

As for media strategies: Despite embracing social media such as Facebook and YouTube, the ubiquity of the foundation's ads has faded. None has gone viral on the Web. The foundation has attracted fewer than 200 Facebook fans.

Meanwhile, tobacco companies lay out about $41 million a day for advertising.

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• Rolling Stone Finds A Smoking Gun: Betsy McCaughey Lied About Healthcare Reform For Tobacco Lobby  

McCaughey's lies were later debunked in a 1995 post-mortem in The Atlantic, and The New Republic recanted the piece in 2006. But what has not been reported until now is that McCaughey's writing was influenced by Phillip Morris, the world's largest tobacco company, as part of a secret campaign to scuttle Clinton's health care reform. (The measure would have been funded by a huge increase in tobacco taxes.) In an internal company memo from March 1994, the tobacco giant detailed its strategy to derail Hillarycare through an alliance with conservative think tanks, front groups and media outlets. Integral to the company's strategy, the memo observed, was an effort to "work on the development of favorable pieces" with "friendly contacts in the media." The memo, prepared by a Phillip Morris executive, mentions only one author by name:

"Worked off-the-record with Manhattan [Editor's note: At the time, McCaughey was a fellow at the Manhattan Institute] and writer Betsy McCaughey as part of the input to the three-part expose in The New Republic on what the Clinton plan means to you. The first part detailed specifics of the plan."

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• Jaques Chirac may have cigarette habit erased 

Officially, Mr Chirac, 76, delayed the release of Mémoires – the much-awaited tome recounting his life from birth until 1995 – so he could re-read it one last time.

But Le Parisien claimed there were concerns the picture would break laws banning the "direct or indirect" promotion of tobacco and may have to be airbrushed.

The cover photo, featuring Mr Chirac in deep thought and thick glasses, was taken in 1976, some 12 years before he kicked the habit.

Mr Chirac is the latest in a string of celebrities to have their tobacco habit airbrushed out of photos or posters. . . .

Mr Chirac's publisher, Nil, denied any "censorship or self-censorship", insisting the release had been delayed as Mr Chirac was abroad on a visit to Africa, and the fuss was "absurd".

The newspaper Le Figaro remained dubious, saying it understood that a politician might no longer want to be associated with this "accursed object", but that it was "questionable to want to erase from the past anything that doesn't correspond to our contemporary values".

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• George Weissman, Leader at Philip Morris and in Arts, Dies at 90  

George Weissman, who helped transform Philip Morris from a midlevel tobacco company to a diversified conglomerate known for contributions to the arts, and who then led Lincoln Center for nearly a decade, died on July 24 in Greenwich, Conn. He was 90.

The cause was complications of a recent fall at his home in Rye, N.Y., his son Paul said.

Mr. Weissman began his corporate ascent in the movie and public relations businesses, and one of his early tasks as a young marketing executive at Philip Morris -- which became part of the Altria group in 2003 -- was to help develop the very effective masculine mythology of Marlboro cigarettes. . . .

Mr. Weissman also pushed Philip Morris to become a major donor to arts groups, particularly experimental undertakings like the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He said in an interview with The New York Times in 1990 that the arts initiative began with a traveling exhibition of modern art in 1965.

"We wanted to demonstrate to our own employees that we were an open-minded company seeking creativity in all aspects of our business," Mr. Weissman said. "And we were determined to do this by sponsoring things that made a difference, that were really dangerous." . . .

When Mr. Weissman became chairman and chief executive of Philip Morris in 1978, he told Fortune magazine that he saw himself as the quintessential Marlboro man.

"I'm no cowboy and I don't ride horseback," he said, "but I like to think I have the freedom the Marlboro man exemplifies. He's the man who doesn't punch a clock. He's not computerized. He's a free spirit." . . .

Under his leadership, Philip Morris employed blacks in prominent executive positions, resulting in boycotts in some places in the South. . . .

Mr. Weissman joined other business leaders in signing petitions against the Vietnam War. When the Nixon administration's "enemies list" . . .

Mr. Weissman told Forbes in 1980 that he felt Philip Morris had a "Masada complex,"

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I'm no cowboy and I don't ride horseback, but I like to think I have the freedom the Marlboro man exemplifies. He's the man who doesn't punch a clock. He's not computerized. He's a free spirit.
George Weissman, who helped transform Philip Morris from a midlevel tobacco company to a diversified conglomerate known for contributions to the arts, and who then led Lincoln Center for nearly a decade.

We wanted to demonstrate to our own employees that we were an open-minded company seeking creativity in all aspects of our business. And we were determined to do this by sponsoring things that made a difference, that were really dangerous.
Former Philip Morris exec George Weissman, on the company's extensive arts donations.

• Ala. doctor could bring attention to moribund post 

he U.S. Surgeon General has been described as "the nation's doctor," a "national nanny" and the person who puts warning labels on cigarette packs. But lately, the position has been mostly called something else: invisible.

Once the government's leading voice on health issues, the surgeon general faded into relative obscurity in recent years. When asked to name a surgeon general, many people can only recall Dr. C. Everett Koop — the famous Reagan appointee with the look and bearing of a biblical prophet.

Some thought that would change under the Obama administration . . .

The job of surgeon general was created in 1870 to oversee the reorganization of a government network of hospitals for sailors, which was in shambles. The first surgeon general adopted a military model, creating a cadre of uniformed government physicians that could be sent anywhere they were needed.

Those uniformed doctors became medical heroes. They figured out that malnutrition was causing the pellagra illness that plagued the American South. They confined a dangerous plague outbreak in San Francisco. They coordinated care for millions of Americans sickened by the deadly Spanish flu.

Meanwhile, the surgeon general's power grew, with oversight of such agencies as the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as they came into being. For decades, surgeons general were chosen from within the ranks of federal public health agencies.

Perhaps the surgeon general to have the biggest impact was Dr. Luther Terry, who in 1964 released a report that was seen as the government's official confirmation that smoking causes lung cancer. It influenced millions to stop smoking.

"It was one of the most important public health reports or public health pronouncements in medical history," said Dr. Otis Brawley, the American Cancer Society's chief medical officer.

However, by the mid-1960s, some political leaders had grown discontented with the surgeon general's troops, believing they had dragged their feet in implementing Great Society programs like Medicare. A government reorganization in 1968 stripped the post of administrative powers, and since then the surgeon general mainly has been a health educator and spokesman, reporting to an assistant secretary of health and human services. . . .

"She'll bring a front-line perspective you rarely hear in policy discussions," he said.

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• O'NEILL: Learning to quit smoking  

"I constantly struggle with it [smoking]. Have I fallen off the wagon sometimes? Yes."

-- President Obama, June 23, 2009

I started smoking when I was 16, pilfering cigarettes from my mother's purse or swiping unfiltered Pall Malls whenever my dad left his opened pack untended. Then I got a job that summer and began buying my own -- Newports with menthol and filters, a brand preferred by all the young tobacco initiates I had begun to share my habit with. . . .

What began as a desire for acceptance and admission to adulthood became the mark of a pariah, bearing the stamp of loserdom, as smokers huddled near the entrances to our workplaces. We'd take quick drags on our illicit smokes while colleagues exited and entered the buildings with looks of disdain or beleaguered tolerance for our pathetic need.

The arc of American tobacco addiction began during World War I . . .

Those ads helped persuade my mom to start smoking before she conceived me when she was 16, by which time she was already a nicotine addict. Even doctors joined in the campaign to get women to smoke . . .

The tobacco bill passed last month bans most flavorings, though a political compromise exempted the one -- menthol -- that helped hook me. But overall, giving the federal government new powers to regulate tobacco is a good thing, likely to save lives. . . .

My mother quit a few months ago. It was "easy" for her too. She has lung cancer.

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• Pub plans to make tobacco history 

A 17th century pub near where Sir Walter Raleigh is rumoured to have first smoked a pipe of tobacco is to run a stop-smoking course.

The Long Arms in South Wraxall near Bradford-on-Avon, in Wiltshire, is just two fields away from South Wraxall Manor, where legend has it tobacco was smoked for the first time in England.

Landlady Jacqui Price, who has run the pub with her husband Bob for the past four years, is signing up to the sessions along with head chef Dan Hinds. The scheme will be run for customers in the autumn.

Sir Walter is said to have been the first to bring tobacco to Britain from the New World in the late 16th century, and a maid at South Wraxall Manor reputedly doused him in water after thinking he was on fire as he puffed away on his pipe.

But The Long Arms has been badly hit by the nationwide smoking ban, introduced in England in July 2007, and is now also suffering as a result of the credit crunch.

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• LETTER: Tobacco regulation  

Let me applaud the stand on the tobacco issue taken in this congressional vote by Sens. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., and Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and Reps. Adam Putnam, R-Bartow, and Ginny Brown-Waite, R-Brooksville. . . .

As a young man who grew up in the tobacco fields, as a family practitioner who for 25 years depended on tobacco farmers for income for years and did not recognize the deleterious effects of tobacco, I am proud of my what representatives did.

In 1952, I was hired by the tobacco companies to do research on tobacco. Working with and under the direction of renowned doctors in toxicology and physics, we found in four experiments that nicotine had a strong relationship to the causes of many health problems. Not knowing at the time that my pay came from the Tobacco Institute, I soon found that we would not be allowed to publish our results.

[If] those people addicted to tobacco live a few years longer, they will see the death rate from lung cancer decrease. For nonsmokers who regularly breathe nicotine-containing smoke, their quality of life will begin improving almost immediately.

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• WAXMAN BEATS BIG TOBACCO.  

This weekend I read Waxman's forthcoming legislative memoir (a burgeoning and exciting genre), written with the assistance of Atlantic reporter Joshua Green, The Waxman Report: How Congress Really Works. It's a very useful primer on congress and the long battles Waxman has led on behalf of a variety of key progressive causes. You also learn, strangely enough, that Waxman was one of the first members of congress to undertake the now common practice of donating to his colleagues' campaign funds in an effort to keep around representatives he saw as effective and curry favor. For all Waxman's idealism, you can't say he isn't savvy.

Waxman began his attempts to regulate tobacco in the early 1980s, with oversight hearings featuring Captain Kangaroo, and continued his work through then-Representative Dick Durbin's controversial 1987 amendment to ban smoking on airplane flights shorter than two hours, Waxman's own groundbreaking 1994 hearings where tobacco executives lied under oath, Newt Gingrich's torpedoing of a 1998 tobacco regulation compromise, and finally President Bush's threat to veto this bill last July that left it hanging...until today.

It says something about Waxman's tenacity and how political change comes about in the face of entrenched interests that it has taken nearly thirty years to achieve federal regulation

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• Big Tobacco: A history of its decline 

* Tobacco industry once known for big spending on campaigns, effective lobbyists

* As public opinion has turned on Big Tobacco, courts and Congress has too

* Despite moves against industry, "tobacco wars are anything but over," author says . . .

"My own view is that in many ways, the tobacco industry invented the kind of special-interest lobbying that has become so characteristic of the late 20th- and earlier 21st-century American politics," said Allan Brandt, dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

The industry was known for its giant spending on political campaigns and effective lobbyists. The industry's representatives often had experience in politics or close ties to major power players.

"Today obviously, that lobby is much less powerful and successful than it was a generation ago," said Brandt, author of "The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America." . . .

And just last month, in what Brandt considers "one of the most significant racketeering and fraud litigations" the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler's ruling in a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, case, which found the tobacco industry guilty of engaging in a decades-long conspiracy to defraud the American public about the health risks of tobacco.

"Given the character of Kessler's findings -- and now the fact that her findings have been upheld by the appeals court -- this is really in a way a road map to tobacco regulation," Brandt said.

Stanton Glantz, a longtime anti-tobacco advocate and director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, said the RICO ruling is what the public health community should use in its fight against the tobacco industry.

"I think it really can undermine the power of the industry politically by going to politicians and saying, 'These guys are crooks. They are crooks according to the D.C. Court of Appeals. Not just me,' " Glantz said.

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• Philippines a haven for cigarette smugglers 

(First of two parts) . . .

Fisherman Lino Bocalan became legend in the 1950s to 1960s after he chanced upon an alternative and more lucrative profession: cigarette smuggling. . . .

Before long, Bocalan built a fortune and a name in an industry that grew in Tanza, aided in part by the presence of Sangley Point, a former American base where blue-seal cigarettes were sold and taken out from its commissary. He eventually traded directly with Borneo, cut the southern connection, and became a millionaire.

Decades later, the Tanza cottage industry has evolved into a lucrative national, and even a global, industry. The southern backdoor, where traders of smuggled cigarettes used to taunt law enforcers, has become an outmoded entry point. Smugglers have become more brazen, preferring direct payoffs to willing takers. . . .

There are only five major players in this highly protected industry. Lucio Tan’s Fortune Tobacco and Philip Morris Philippines Manufacturing Inc. corner over 90 percent of the local market. The smaller players include Mighty Corp., La Suerte Cigar & Cigarette Factory, and Associated Anglo-American Tobacco Corp. . . .

International organizations and groups working to stop the tobacco black market and curb cigarette smoking are sounding alarm bells because the illegal trade is believed to finance criminal syndicates that engage in drugs, trafficking, terrorism, and money laundering.

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