The 13th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health

Objective: to examine how multinational tobacco companies carried out global programs to develop non-health based argument, and the methods they used to clandestinely infuse these arguments into popular culture.

Methods: We studied tobacco industry documents available on-line at the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, Legacy Full-Text Demonstration site, British American Tobacco Document Archive, plus books, newspaper and magazine articles, interviews and previously-published research articles. We also attempted to interview some of the academics who assisted the industry, but most refused to be interviewed.

Results: Arguments against tobacco control efforts seem to come from many sources, but rarely from the tobacco industry itself. Instead, non-health-based, pro-tobacco arguments tend to emanate from individuals and groups of experts who appear to possess clear moral and informational authority (academic philosophers, sociologists, economists, psychologists, anthropologists, historians and other experts). We determined that the activities of many of these experts have been coordinated by the tobacco industry itself, in several discrete and sophisticated programs designed to disseminate non-health based arguments to the pubic in an effort to slow the declining social acceptability of smoking.