{Big Tobacco} Spies on Critics

Photo: Tobacco CEOs before Congress in 1994 swearing that "Nicotine is not addictive."
 

In May 1998, U.S. tobacco corporations agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by the state of Minnesota to recover the costs of treating tobacco-related illnesses.

As part of the settlement, the corporations, including Philip Morris (now Altria and Philip Morris International) and RJR Nabisco (now Reynolds American Tobacco), were forced to turn over millions of internal documents dating roughly from the 1950s to the 1990s, which were made available to the public under the terms of the settlement.

The industry documents, posted on the internet, provide hard evidence of what the tobacco corporations knew, when they knew about the dangers of their products and the addictiveness of nicotine, and how they targeted young people with advertising and promotion.

These documents also show how threatened the corporate giants felt at facing a well-organized grassroots campaign and boycott. For a sampling of what some of those internal documents reveal click here.