OBJECTIVE To learn how the tobacco industry reacted to businesses' voluntarily enacting policies to discourage tobacco use and minimise exposure of employees and patrons to secondhand smoke. DATA SOURCES Internal tobacco industry documents discovered among those posted on the internet. Approximately 24 million documents have been posted as of this writing. Information in this article was cull...

BACKGROUND In 1990, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) sparked a year long boycott of Philip Morris's Marlboro cigarettes and Miller beer. The boycott protested the company's support of Senator Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina), a leading opponent of AIDS funding and civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people. ACT-UP demanded that Philip Morris sever its ties w...

STUDY OBJECTIVE Using tobacco industry internal documents to investigate the use of tobacco industry consulting scientists to discredit scientific knowledge of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS). DESIGN Basic and advanced searches were performed on the Philip Morris, Tobacco Institute, R J Reynolds, Brown and Williamson, Lorillard, and the Council for Tobacco Research document web sites, with ...

The release of previously secret internal tobacco industry documents has given the public health community unprecedented insight into the industry's motives, strategies, tactics, and data. The documents provide information that is not available from any other source and describe the history of industry activities over the past 50 years. The documents show that the tobacco industry has been enga...

Tobacco is a heavily pesticide-dependent crop. Because pesticides involve human safety and health issues, they are regulated nationally and internationally; however, little is known about how tobacco companies respond to regulatory pressures regarding pesticides. In this study we analyzed internal tobacco industry documents to describe industry activities aimed at influencing pesticide regulati...

BACKGROUND To demonstrate the tobacco industry rationale behind the "Spanish model" on non-smokers' protection in hospitality venues and the impact it had on some European and Latin American countries between 2006 and 2011. METHODS Tobacco industry documents research triangulated against news and media reports. RESULTS As an alternative to the successful implementation of 100% smoke-free po...

The implementation of tobacco control measures is a political choice. Although tobacco control will improve the wellbeing of the populations that governments serve, the industry spares no attempt to deter, dilute, or delay effective measures for tobacco control, be it taxation or prominent pictorial health warnings. There is troubling evidence that the tobacco industry is exerting undue influen...

To examine the relationship between smoking and Alzheimer's disease (AD) after controlling for study design, quality, secular trend, and tobacco industry affiliation of the authors, electronic databases were searched; 43 individual studies met the inclusion criteria. For evidence of tobacco industry affiliation, http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu was searched. One fourth (11/43) of individual studi...

BACKGROUND Although China ratified the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control [FCTC] in 2005, the partial ban on tobacco advertising does not cover the internet. Weibo is one of the most important social media channels in China, using a format similar to its global counterpart, Twitter. The Weibo homepage is a platform to present products, brands and corporate culture. There is great poten...

OBJECTIVES To describe the tobacco industry's relationships with and influence on homeless and mentally ill smokers and organisations providing services to them. METHODS Analysis of internal tobacco industry documents and journal articles. RESULTS The tobacco industry has marketed cigarettes to the homeless and seriously mentally ill, part of its "downscale" market, and has developed relati...