The Cigarette Papers - Hardcover

"A compendium and interpretation of several thousand pages of internal Brown and Williamson documents, congressional reports, and private papers. . . . "The Cigarette Papers should appeal to a wide audience, including physicians, public health workers, scientists, lawyers, policy makers, and the general public."--Mary Ann Pentz, "New England Journal of Medicine

In May 1994, a box containing 4,000 pages of internal tobacco industry documents arrived at the office of Professor Stanton Glantz at the University of California, San Francisco. The anonymous source of these "cigarette papers" was identified in the return address only as "Mr. Butts" - presumably a reference to the Doonesbury cartoon character. These documents provide a shocking inside account of the activities of one tobacco company over more than thirty years. Cigarette Papers shows that the tobacco industry's conduct has been more cynical and devious than even its harshest critics have suspected. For more than three decades, the industry has internally acknowledged that smoking is addictive and that use of tobacco products causes disease and death. Despite this acknowledgment, based on the industry's own internal and contract research, the industry has engaged in a variety of tactics to deny its own findings and to convince the public that there is still doubt about the harmful effects of tobacco or that the effects have been exaggerated. These campaigns of disinformation have been designed to maintain company profits, to block government regulation, and to defeat lawsuits filed by individuals with tobacco-caused illnesses. The Cigarette Papers quotes extensively from the documents themselves while analyzing what they reveal. The book gives us a sense of what the tobacco industry says when it thinks no one is listening. Written by experts with the scientific and legal knowledge to understand the meaning of the documents and explain their importance, Cigarette Papers will forever alter our perspective of tobacco industry tactics. It will have an enormous impact on public health debates about tobacco and will greatly influence legislation regarding its use.