The 13th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health

Objective: To educate domestic and international tobacco control advocates who engage with elite economic and political decision-makers regarding how the U.S. tobacco industry influenced investment boards and legislative bodies to maintain investments in tobacco.

Methods: We retrieved and analyzed more than 1100 divestment-related documents obtained through lawsuits initiated by U.S. state Attorneys General, and electronically archived at the University of California, San Francisco's Legacy Tobacco Documents Library: http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu. We organized this material into case studies of strategies and of institutional and interpersonal networks used by the tobacco industry to influence U.S. investment decision-makers to maintain investments in tobacco industry securities.

Results: The tobacco industry attempted to influence investment decision-makers through institutional means, e.g., obscuring its commissioning of third party reports emphasizing the lucrativeness of tobacco investments; injecting industry arguments into both popular and investment professional media, and rewriting state investment laws. It also worked through the high level interpersonal networks of top corporate executives, including old school ties, fellow ethnic group members, philanthropic grantees, and political connections. While it is ‘taken for granted' that corporations utilize such methods, the tobacco industry documents provide a rare empirical window into the specifics of how this industry did so. The analysis of these cases may be useful in anticipating and countering future industry stratagems.