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Can Tobacco Industry Research Help ‘Social’ Smokers Quit? 

The tobacco industry knows exactly what makes social smokers tick. Now, researchers want to use that once-secret information to help them quit.

Focusing on the effects of secondhand smoke, not on personal health, might be a better tactic with social smokers, who tend to deny that they are at-risk or even smokers, but do care about others.

The landmark state litigation against the tobacco industry — known as the Master Settlement Agreement — forced tobacco companies to open confidential industry documents to the public; so far, they have released 10 million documents spanning more than 80 years.

Researchers at the University of California at San Francisco mined this mother lode of information, focusing on social smokers. Their study appears in the August issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

“Tobacco companies probably spent hundreds of millions of dollars for this research,” said co-author Stanton Glantz, Ph.D., at the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research. “They indentified this group as a large, stable part of the tobacco market way before public health did.”

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