Know Your Opposition - Search the Tobacco Industry Documents

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Know Your Opposition - Search the Tobacco Industry Documents

To ensure the success of your initiative, you will need to be familiar with your opponents and their strategies. Your main opponent will be the tobacco industry, who continues to actively oppose clean indoor air policies. Industry opposition falls into the following categories:

Attacking the science of secondhand smoke
Promoting ventilation as a solution
Claiming that smoke-free policies will have a negative economic impact on the hospitality industry
Promoting state and federal preemption laws
Using front groups and co-opting legitimate organizations to hide their attacks
Source (Hobart, R. Clean indoor air ordinances. Atlanta, GA: ttac, August 2002. Available at: http://www.ttac.org/assistance/pdfs/CIA-Ordinances_110402.pdf )

Read more about What to Expect from tobacco industry opposition to clean indoor air policies.

Learn more about tobacco industry strategies:

To get started, take advantage of the wealth of resources already compiled from research of industry documents. Build on this knowledge to:

Examine the evidence culled from select Hot Documents posted on the Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation (ANR) website.
To expose industry front groups, search ANR’s Tobacco Industry Tracking Database or Tobacco Scam’s list of Tobacco Allies and Front Groups.
Find out what the industry says in their own words in Trust Us, a collection of quotes from corporate documents prepared by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
Review more research to find out what tobacco control researchers have unearthed about ethics.
Search valuable, handpicked documents from Document Collections.

Do your own research:

After you have a firm grasp on how the tobacco industry attacks clean indoor air campaigns, learn how they might operate in your community by searching the internal documents directly. Go to one of the document collections, such as Legacy Tobacco Documents Library or Tobacco Documents Online. Try using some of the following terms to guide your search:

Name of your state, county or city (e.g. Colorado or Montgomery County)
Names of other local communities in your area
Name of groups or organizations you think have ties to the industry (e.g., National Smokers Alliance or its acronym, NSA)
Terms such as ETS, passive, sidestream, secondhand, or EPA
Bill or proposition numbers (e.g., Prop 10)

Additional information about searching industry documents can by found in the ttac exchange extra! - August 2003 issue.