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“We
are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead.
. . ”
Thomas
Jefferson |
TABLE
OF CONTENTS
|
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ttac
is taking our newsletter a step further—throughout the year,
we’ll be adding special editions of exchange
extra! — bringing state and local practice-supported
research to you.
WELCOME
FROM DEARELL
As a result of the Master Settlement Agreement and Minnesota lawsuit,
the tobacco industry is required to post previously secret documents
on the Internet. In the initial months and years following the settlements,
the tobacco control community was hot to learn the inside scoop
on what the industry knew, when they knew it, and what they covered
up.
The industry documents offer a vast sea of knowledge and tactics
the public health community can readily use for tobacco control.
But the number of documents and the difficulty in navigating them
can be a barrier to using them to inform the public about just how
badly the industry has manipulated the truth and controlled public
health policy.
With this first issue of exchange
extra! we are bringing the tobacco industry
documents to you. We want to help you get the facts you need to
use the documents to your advantage when planning program and policy
interventions.
We hope this issue of extra!
will help you find the quickest route to the truth—and make
the truth work for you.
Dearell Niemeyer, MPH
Director, Tobacco Technical Assistance Consortium
|
“In
all my years at Philip Morris,
I’ve never heard anyone talk about marketing to youth.
“
Geoffrey Bible, CEO of Philip Morris |
SMALL BOAT...BIG
OCEAN
With approximately 46 million pages of tobacco industry documents
currently available online, honing in on the facts you need may
feel more like you're drowning in a sea of documents.
While the documents reach back as far as the 1930s, the majority
date from the 1950s forward. Most of the documents come from American
and British tobacco companies, although there may be small collections
of documents from other countries as well. According to the Master
Settlement Agreement, tobacco companies must continue adding documents
until 2010.
Up until now, the people who use the documents most are researchers
who analyze the content of the documents in order to bring tobacco
industry tactics into the public spotlight. However we too can access
and use them to strengthen our efforts to reduce tobacco use.
So where do you look for the facts you need?
Back to Table of Contents
THE
LIFE VEST
Although the companies are required to maintain and update the
Web sites, don’t count on them to make it easy for you to
navigate the sites. The industry document collections are compilations
of archival/internal documents that may or may not have any value.
Furthermore, each site uses its own method of indexing, which can
be difficult to master, and anecdotal reports indicate that important
documents have even “disappeared” from the sites entirely.
A good alternative to searching industry sites is to use Web sites
specifically established to assist tobacco control advocates:
- http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/industrydocs/index.htm
- The CDC site has
an index to about 4 million documents and about 350,000 full-text
documents. It provides background information on the tobacco industry
documents, allows users to search the collections, and links users
to industry collections.
- http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/index.html
- The American Legacy Foundation
site, hosted by the University of
California at San Francisco Library, provides
an interactive tutorial for using the site, allows users to be
very specific in a document search and to use a common search
engine for the collections from seven tobacco industry sources.
It offers a choice of viewing and storage options, and is updated
monthly.
- http://tobaccodocuments.org
– This site allows users to search and display over 4 million
tobacco industry documents, hosts specialized research collections
(youth and marketing, product design, etc.), allows users to save
searches, and provides profiles (lists of names, organizations,
legal cases) that are useful in defining a search. Tobacco
Documents Online is managed by Michael Tacelosky
of the Smokescreen Corporation in Washington, D.C. One of the
strengths of this resource is that you can search the text of
many of the documents by keyword.
Back to Table of Contents
NAVIGATING
THE CHANNEL
If you don’t have much time to devote to a search of the documents,
the best choice may be to go first to collections of the documents
that have been hand-picked by researchers.
Experienced researchers suggest the following
to speed your search for information:
- Go straight to important documents
The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library offers a section called “Popular
Documents,” which makes it easy to find an area of particular
interest. This page is updated frequently. The direct link to
the page is: http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/popular_documents.html
- Let
the researchers lead you to the most useful documents
http://www.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco/docsbiblio.html. - The
University of California at San Francisco online library provides
a bibliography of 100 articles published between 1995 and June
2003. These articles are based on research and analysis of the
tobacco documents. Click Priority Focus for
articles from this bibliography that feature youth and young adults.
Back to Table of Contents
SAILING
FOR HOME
The best way to put the documents
to work in a local or state setting is to use the documents in planning
interventions.
“It is more likely than not that the tobacco industry has
done research on the people who will be targeted in the intervention.
While tobacco industry research cannot replace public health research,
we can now use the Internet to find out (for free) what the tobacco
industry knows. For example, the industry has done extensive research
on outreach to minorities and youth and young adults—how they
go through life transitions and the developmental tasks of young
adulthood, how and why they smoke, how to solidify their smoking
habits. In this and other areas such as public policy, we can actually
take their knowledge and strategies, and use them to counter the
tobacco industry,” advises Pam Ling, MD, MPH, of the University
of California at San Francisco (UCSF).
Tobacco industry documents can
also play a vital role in policy efforts.
Use the documents to uncover names of people with connections to
the tobacco industry—those who are fronting for them from
the hospitality industry, restaurant associations, licensed beverage
agencies—in opposing clean indoor air policies. Even copies
of checks and correspondence can be obtained and made public.
To see how these documents can assist policy efforts, Kirsten Neilsen,
librarian at UCSF recommends a Montana web site, http://protectmontanakids.org/home/.
Working from a few key tobacco industry documents, site developers
constructed a timeline of tobacco control efforts in Montana and
demonstrated how the tobacco industry was interfering in local politics.
Visit the timeline directly here: http://protectmontanakids.org/solutions/smoke/secondhand_history/
“No town is too small for
the industry to target.”
Anne Landman, research specialist for American Lung Association
of Colorado and Smokefree Net, relates another story from the local
level. She was able to find internal Philip Morris emails discussing
who would be responsible for organizing opposition to a smokefree
law proposed in Montrose, Colorado, population 11,000. John Poundstone,
MD, MPH went to the Smokefree.doc-alert Web site to obtain evidence
from industry documents that convinced the city council of Lexington,
KY to vote for a smokefree ordinance.
Back to Table of Contents
WHAT
ttac CAN DO
ttac
is committed to equipping the tobacco control community with the
information and tools necessary to effectively reduce tobacco use.
Specifically, ttac
can:
- Provide links to researchers by keeping a dialogue going between
researchers and people in tobacco control at the state or local
level
- Provide quicker access to information by going directly to researchers
with issues from the field.
- Assist in researching topics
- Provide a news summary of recently published research on the
tobacco documents
- Provide a page of good documents for each hot topic in tobacco
control
- Reference relevant documents and links for each topic of exchange
and exchange
extra!
- Assist in developing effective communication strategies and
messaging around information uncovered
Back to Table of Contents
SAMPLE
SEARCH
Want to do some detective work on industry marketing to young adults?
Start small, be creative, look for cues, and then expand your search.
Let’s look at one aspect of marketing to 18 to 24 year olds—bar
promotions. The Legacy
Tobacco Documents Library is a good place for a targeted search
because you are not searching the full text of the documents—rather
the index of the documents with a search of fields such as the authors
and titles of the documents.
Begin your search:
- Step 1. Start small by limiting the search to Philip Morris
Documents
- Step 2. Choose Simple Search
- Step 3. Enter “clubs” to look for documents on clubs
The search results in over 3,000 documents—too many to look
through. But a quick glance at the search results reveals that many
of the documents are not using the word “clubs” in a
context related to bar promotions. In addition, many documents retrieved
have no reference to clubs in the title. We now have to be creative
to find a way to define the search.
Scroll down the search results to find reference to music and clubs.
Look for one genre of music to really narrow the search.
- Go back and choose Advanced Search to limit the search to a
specific field
- Enter one genre of music—“hip hop,” and select
the Title field
The search results in 11 documents—including a 1992 Philip
Morris report exploring characteristics of the young adult male
smoker (http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/dwk72e00),
a Christian Science Monitor article about the use of music as marketing
tool (http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/gub71c00),
and a series of concert promotions.
Using this narrow search as a start retrieves relevant documents
and uncovers more ideas for additional searching. The 1992 report
reveals a common abbreviation for “young adult male smokers”—“YAMS.”
The concert advertisements provide multiple terms for music such
as funk, soul, jazz, R&B, concerts, nightclubs, etc., and pinpoints
specific brands—Salem, Camel, and Benson & Hedges.
Armed with these terms, you are now ready to hunt for more documents
in the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library. When you are ready for
a large-scale hunt, you can use what you have learned for a full-text
search at a site like Tobacco
Documents Online. For additional tips on searching the documents,
check out Tutorials/Guides/Tips.
Back to Table of Contents
RESOURCE SPOTLIGHT
The Legacy
Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL) houses over 6 million documents
from seven industry collections. The documents cover projects central
to the tobacco industry such as marketing, research and development,
cigarette analysis and design, as well as industry efforts to establish
business in developing countries.
The LTDL provides a number of benefits to those searching the tobacco
industry documents:
- Permanent home: The MSA provision assures access to documents
on the industry sites only through 2010. Documents will be permanently
housed on the LTDL web site.
- Common search engine: The sophisticated search interface allows
users to search one or more of the seven separate document collections
at a time. Users can search a number of fields, including date,
but the search is not full-text.
- Search help: Interactive tutorials and search guides help explain
site searches.
- Popular Documents feature: Selected collections of some of Legacy’s
most useful and popular documents.
- Choice of viewing and storage options: Each document has a permanent
URL and can be book marked. Documents can be viewed in a variety
of image formats. In addition, searchers can collect findings
in a “digital bookbag” which can be downloaded, emailed,
or used with Endnote software.
- Monthly updates: LTDL is updated monthly with new documents
from industry sites.
- Links: Extensive information on the history of tobacco, the
tobacco industry and tobacco control activities that provide a
helpful background to document research.
The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library site is hosted by the UCSF
Library and Center for Knowledge with funding from the American
Legacy Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the California
Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program.
Back to Table of Contents
PRIORITY FOCUS
To find out more about what researchers have learned in the documents
about tobacco and young people, take a look at these research articles
available from the UCSF bibliography: http://www.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco/docsbiblio.html
Cummings KM, Morley C, Horan J, Steger J, Leavell N-R. 2002. Marketing
to America’s youth: evidence from corporate documents. Tob
Control 11:i5-i17.
http://tc.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/11/suppl_1/i5
Katz S, Lavack A. 2002. Tobacco related bar promotions: insights
from tobacco industry documents. Tob Control 11:i92-i101
http://tc.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/11/suppl_1/i92
Ling P, Glantz S. 2002. Why and how the tobacco industry sells
cigarettes to young adults: evidence from industry documents. Am
J. Public Health 92:908-16.
http://www.ajph.org/cgi/content/abstract/92/6/908
Ling PM, Glantz SA. Young Adults and Smoking Cessation: Lessons
from the Tobacco Industry. Journal of General Internal Medicine.
Submitted.
Ling PM, Glantz SA. 2002. Nicotine addiction, young adults, and
smoke free bars. Drug and Alcohol Review. 21(2):101-104.
http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/link.asp?id=0thpqh2wy8ffmvba
Ling PM, Glantz SA. 2002.It is time to abandon youth access tobacco
programs. Tob Control. 11(1): 3-6.
http://tc.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/11/1/3
Ling PM, Glantz SA. 2002. Using tobacco industry marketing research
to design more effective tobacco control campaigns. JAMA. 287(22):
2983-2989.
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/287/22/2983
Sepe E, Ling PM, Glantz SA. 2002. Smooth Moves: Tobacco bar and
nightclub promotions that target young adults. Am J Public Health
92(3): 414-419.
http://www.ajph.org/cgi/content/abstract/92/3/414
Back to Table of Contents
RESOURCES AND LINKS
COLLECTIONS
AND INDEXES
- CDC Tobacco Industry Documents
http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/industrydocs/index.htm
The CDC site has an index to about 4 million documents and about
350,000 full-text documents. It provides background information
on the tobacco industry documents, allows users to search the
collections, and links users to important collections.
- Legacy Tobacco Documents Library
http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu
The American Legacy Foundation site, hosted by the UCSF Library,
provides a common search engine to search over 6 million documents
from the collections of seven tobacco industry sources. The Legacy
site will be the permanent online home for the tobacco industry
documents after 2010.
- Tobacco Documents Online (TDO)
http://tobaccodocuments.org
TDO allows users to search and display over 4 million tobacco
industry documents and hosts specialized research collections
in topics such as youth and marketing, product design, etc.
INDUSTRY DOCUMENT
WEB SITES
HAND-PICKED
DOCUMENTS
- doc-alert: Daily Document
http://smokefree.net/doc-alert/
Subscribe to this daily e-mail newsletter that highlights juicy
tobacco industry documents. Users can search doc-alert’s
archive of over 750 articles.
- TDO Research Collections
http://tobaccodocuments.org/collections.php
Users can search mini-collections of documents compiled and indexed
by researchers who are analyzing the documents themselves. The
Research Collections include issues such as youth and marketing,
state and local strategies of the tobacco industry, cigarette
design and ingredients, and pricing and excise taxes.
TUTORIALS/GUIDES/TIPS
- Searching Tobacco Industry Web
sites
http://www.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco/searching.html
This guide developed by the UCSF Tobacco Control Archives is based
upon industry help guides, searching techniques used by librarians,
and direct experience searching the sites.
- The Tobacco Industry Documents:
An Introductory Handbook and Resource Guide for Researchers
http://repositories.cdlib.org/tc/surveys/DocHbook2003
From the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, this
comprehensive guide published in July 2003 is . . . “designed
to assist those with little or no experience of this kind of document
work who will be glad to know that some determination mixed with
a little creative thinking are the major prerequisites for conducting
successful searches.”
SAMPLE
OF DOCUMENT BASED CAMPAIGNS AND WEB SITES
- The Cigarette Papers Online “Wall
of History”
http://tobaccowall.ucsf.edu/
An online version of the "The Cigarette Papers" exhibit
at UCSF, includes a timeline of historically significant events
and spotlights crucially important documents in the history of
tobacco control.
- Legacy Truth Campaign
http://thetruth.com/
The ads from this nationwide youth anti-tobacco campaign are often
based on findings from the internal documents.
- Minnesota: Target Market
http://www.tmvoice.com
Minnesota’s youth advocacy campaign took their name from
tobacco industry documents that referred to teens as their “target
market.” Check out the “Document Vault” for
dirt on the industry.
- Project Scum
http://www.projectscum.org
This Legacy campaign highlights one document that shows how a
major tobacco company planned on boosting sales of their cigarettes
in the mid-90s by targeting gays and homeless people. They called
their plan “Project Sub Culture Urban Marketing,”
or “Project SCUM.”
- Smoke Free Movies
http://www.smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu
This UCSF campaign aims to sharply reduce the U.S. film industry's
usefulness to Big Tobacco's domestic and global marketing. The
web site uncovers documentation of “product placement”
deals even after industry representatives publicly said that they
were not paying off Hollywood to get smoking into the movies.
- Tobacco Scam: How Big Tobacco Uses
and Abuses the Restaurant Industry
http://www.tobaccoscam.ucsf.edu/
This Stan Glantz campaign aims to publicize how the tobacco industry
has used the hospitality industry to curtail clean indoor air
legislation. The web site references industry documents throughout.
SAMPLE REPORTS
AND ARTICLES
- Action on Smoking and Health (ASH)
UK Chronologies
http://www.ash.org.uk/html/conduct/html/chronologies.html
A compilation of over a thousand insights into industry activity
taken from documents and grouped under seven common topics: advertising,
cigarette design, nicotine and addiction, marketing to children,
emerging markets, passive smoking, and smoking and health.
- Discoveries and disclosures in
the corporate documents
http://tc.bmjjournals.com/content/vol11/suppl_1/
This 2002 supplement of Tobacco Control features articles based
on the tobacco industry research. Covers topics related to marketing
and cigarette design.
- Illegal Pathways to Illegal Profits:
The Big Cigarette Companies and International Smuggling
http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/campaign/global/framework/docs/Smuggling.pdf
This Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids (TFK) report presents the
hard facts regarding the involvement of the major tobacco companies
in international cigarette smuggling, including quotes from internal
company documents.
- Tobacco Control Policy Making in
the United States
http://repositories.cdlib.org/ctcre/tcpmus/
The Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education has prepared
this series of reports on tobacco industry political activity
and tobacco control policy-making at the state level.
- Tobacco Documents Online: Timelines
http://tobaccodocuments.org/timelines.php
TDO has compiled a selection of documents into “timelines”
to show industry tactics. The timelines include broad topics (such
as youth issues, industry funded research) and specific activities
(such as preemption activities in New York in the 1990s)
- Trust Us: We’re the Tobacco
Industry
http://www.ash.org.uk/html/conduct/html/trustus.html
The TFK and ASH UK compiled this collection of over 200 tobacco
company quotes organized by specific topics that shows that the
companies have not changed and cannot be trusted.
Back to Table of Contents
| NEXT
MONTH IN ttac exchange
Countering
Industry Sponsorship
The tobacco industry has long made sponsorship their business.
And with continued restrictions on advertising there’s
no sign that they are letting up. Check out next month’s
ttac
exchange
for concrete strategies your organization can use in
fighting the lure of the industry dollar. |
Look for the latest
in cessation in the November issue of extra!
Registration is now
open for the 2003 National Conference on Tobacco or Health
December 10-12, 2003, in Boston!
Go to: www.tobaccocontrolconference.org
SPECIAL THANKS TO:
Stanton Glantz
Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education
UC San Francisco
glantz@medicine.ucsf.edu
Anne Landman
American Lung Association of Colorado
Tobacco Document Research Annex
afoxland@starband.net
Pam Ling, MD, MPH
University of California San Francisco
Department of Medicine, General Internal Medicine
pling@medicine.ucsf.edu
Kirsten J. Neilsen
Tobacco Control Digital Library
Library & Center for Knowledge Management
University of California, San Francisco
kirsten.neilsen@library.ucsf.edu
Ella Watson-Stryker
American Legacy Foundation
ewstryker@americanlegacy.org
Back to Table of Contents
extra!
Staff
Aliki P. Weakland, MPH, MSW - Editor in Chief
Madeline H. Barrow, MEd - Writer/Researcher
Samantha Helfert, MLS - Information Specialist
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