Looking inside the tobacco industry: revealing insights from the Guildford Depository

Decades after the health risks of smoking became known, a key turning point in tobacco control efforts came in the 1990s when internal documents of the tobacco industry began to be made public for the first time. Initially disclosed by company insiders uncomfortable with industry activities (Glantz et al. 1996), millions of pages of documents were then released following landmark American litigation (Glantz & Balbach 2000). What these collections contained surprised even the most hardened tobacco control advocates. The documents revealed ‘decades of deceit’ (Ciresi, Walburn & Sutton 1999), including the tobacco industry's awareness and manipulation of nicotine addiction, overt targeting of young people and women, involvement in smuggling and extensive and often covert efforts to undermine tobacco control across the globe (Glantz et al. 1996; Muggli & Hurt 2003). Research on internal documents is slowly being undertaken to piece together a detailed understanding of these and other tobacco industry activities, vital to attempts to counteract the tobacco industry and the further spread of the tobacco epidemic (Glantz 2000). Two major document depositories holding such revelations were created as a result of litigation against the tobacco industry by the State of Minnesota and Blue Cross and Blue Shield to recover health-care costs incurred because of tobacco-related diseases. Under the resultant Minnesota Consent Agreement (MCA), six companies and two industry organizations were required to make publicly available, for 10 years from 1998, millions of pages of documents reviewed as part of the discovery process during the litigation. The larger of these depositories, containing approximately 40 million pages of the US tobacco company documents, is operated independently of the tobacco industry by the Minnesota Historical Society in the United States. The smaller, but many would argue more important collection, contains the documents of British American Tobacco (BAT), housed in a depository in Guildford, UK and run by the company itself. The subsequent multi-state Master Settlement Agreement (MSA), reached with the 46 US states whose health-care reimbursement cases were still outstanding, additionally required the companies to post their documents on public websites and maintain them until 30 June 2010. Moreover, any documents filed in discovery in any new US law suits must be added to company websites until this date. As a British company, BAT was granted greater latitude under the MCA, reflecting jurisdictional concerns. At the same time, BAT was not party to the MSA and thus the Guildford collection is not available via the internet. None the less, under the terms of the MCA, BAT was obliged to provide public access to the Guildford depository collection of approximately 8 million pages of documents. The company reaffirmed its commitment to do so in testimony by BAT Chairman Martin Broughton to the UK Parliamentary Select Committee on Health in 2000 (UK House of Commons 2000). Despite the above commitments, since its delayed opening in February 1999 access to the Guildford Depository has been far from straightforward. Under the best of circumstances, analysing an archive of 8 million pages is a major undertaking. Attempting to do so under the conditions offered by BAT has made this task highly problematic. Foremost has been the unavailability of this collection so far on the internet, like other document collections. A limited subset of documents from the Guildford Depository is available on various websites, such as Tobacco Documents Online and the University of California, San Francisco, but this currently represents only around 3–5% of the total collection. Hence visitors must access the BAT collection on-site, inconvenient for UK residents and prohibitive for those living outside the country, notably researchers from the developing world. Visits to the depository must be booked on a weekly basis in advance, and at times delays of up to 5 months have been experienced to obtain a booking. Once inside the depository, visitors can use a crude database to search the collection of approximately 43 000 files, with each file consisting of up to several hundred pages. As the database is indexed only at the file level, it is impossible to identify the subject of individual documents except by searching manually page by page. All the while, visitors are subjected to intensive video surveillance, with three video cameras trained upon the small reading room. Research is hindered further by delays of up to 1 year for photocopy requests to be processed by BAT. These delays are apparently for BAT's lawyers to check the documents for privileged or trade secret material, yet evidence BAT presented to the Health Select Committee implied that a thorough legal check had already been performed (UK House of Commons Select Committee 2000). These barriers to accessing such a major public health research resource contrasts with conditions of access to the Minnesota Depository, which has longer opening hours, no restrictions on visitors and rapid provision of photocopies. One can only assume that these limitations on public access, noted by the Health Select Committee (UK House of Commons 2000), reflect BAT's reluctance to allow public access to documents that reveal the extent of its corporate misbehaviour. The collection is unique, first, because of the remarkably global nature of BAT itself. Indeed, the raison d’être of the company, formed in 1902 by a merger of American and British cigarette manufacturers, was an agreement to withdraw from each other's domestic markets, and together carve up the world's remaining markets (Cox 2000). Today, this ambition has largely been achieved, with BAT selling 900 billion cigarettes in 180 countries annually, 70% in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. It is now the second largest transnational tobacco company, behind Phillip Morris, with around 16% of the world market. Any effort to address the unfolding global pandemic of tobacco-related diseases therefore requires the insights into the company's activities hidden away within the Guildford Depository. Another key feature of this collection is its candid nature. Given differences in the legal systems and cultures of the United States and United Kingdom, BAT does not seem to have anticipated the prospect of eventual disclosure of corporate documents. Also, it is believed that the company attempted to bury lawyers under mountains of paper (Ciresi et al. 1999). Consequently, the Guildford Depository is an especially rich resource, with information being recorded in the company's documents that one would not find among those of its US counterparts. As a result of its far greater accessibility, scholarly analyses of the Minnesota collection are well advanced (Bero 2003; Muggli & Hurt 2003). In contrast, relatively little analysis of the Guildford collection has yet been completed. Nevertheless, as a result of work undertaken by investigative journalists, lawyers, tobacco control advocates and public health researchers some serious revelations about BAT's conduct have begun to emerge. Foremost has been the issue of cigarette smuggling. Revelations about the company's involvement in cigarette smuggling have been published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (2001; Beelman et al. 2000a, b), and have led to an ongoing investigation by the UK Department of Trade and Industry (Maguire 2000). Another key finding from Guildford documents has been the extent to which the industry has engaged in efforts to undermine tobacco control worldwide. In 2000 the World Health Organization (WHO) published a detailed report on the industry's efforts to infiltrate and undermine the organization (WHO Committee of Experts 2000). As well as paying consultants to publish articles in prominent newspapers disparaging WHO, industry-paid staff was placed within the organization. As an extension of these efforts, documents have revealed how the industry has sought to influence the legislative process in specific countries and regions. Neuman, Bitton & Glantz (2002), for example, describe how the tobacco industry undertook a protracted and successful lobbying campaign against European Community Directive 98/43/EC on tobacco advertising. As well as thwarting tobacco control efforts, the Guildford documents reveal the strategies BAT has undertaken to push the pandemic (Ong & Glantz 2000; Gilmore & McKee 2004a, b). For prospective researchers who wish to undertake analysis of the Guildford Depository, the need for patience and persistence is clear. It is also essential to be aware of the limitations of document research. Initial expectations about the documents often reflected a misconceived search for a key document that will reveal all, like a ‘magic bullet’ that would incriminate the entire industry. In practice, effective usage of the corporate documents requires thorough analysis of large numbers of documents alongside secondary source material. Hence, tobacco industry document research is not for everyone. The work is often a slow and time-consuming process of chasing paper trails, hugely complicated by inadequate metadata and frequent uncertainties about the provenance of individual documents and the implementation of proposed actions (MacKenzie, Collin & Lee 2003). This is helped to some degree in that each page is uniquely identified with what is known as a Bates number, which can be used to relocate specific information again. None the less, working with the Guildford Depository is like trying to assemble a huge jigsaw puzzle with many pieces missing, many pieces from other puzzles in the box, and no picture to guide one's efforts. One must be cautious about contextualizing documents, especially those relating to operations carried out in different countries. Collaboration with local researchers is a huge advantage in this respect. Also, tobacco documents are highly varied in their content and form, and call for varied disciplinary expertise. For example, chemists can interpret scientific results of endless experiments carried out by the industry on ingredient manipulation. Business studies expertise is needed to contextualize the management practices and strategic thinking of the company. Historians can piece together the relationship between science and policy. Political scientists can unpick webs of influence linking across individuals and institutions. In many ways, the Guildford Depository highlights the essentially multi-disciplinary nature of tobacco control research. Despite these challenges, it is clear from revelations so far that Guildford represents a uniquely valuable resource for the public health research community. It offers an unprecedented opportunity to gain insights critical to reducing the predicted 10 million deaths from tobacco-related diseases by 2030. Such understandings are essential if the public health community is to create more effective interventions including legislation, cessation programmes and health promotion messages. So far a relatively small number of documents have been secured from the Guildford Depository. Systematic research focused on industry activities in specific countries and regions, notably the developing world, has been seriously hampered by the difficult conditions of access. Funding for such research has also been very limited so far and is urgently needed. Academic journals may need to show flexibility in recognizing the unique context within which such research occurs, publishing longer articles with numerous references. All the while the clock is ticking towards the closure of the depository in 2008. It is thus a critical race against time for the public health community. The public health community must secure this vital resource and manage it independently of the tobacco industry (Collin et al. 2004). This work was supported by funding from the National Cancer Institute, US National Institutes of Health, grant number 1 R01 CA91021-01. The authors have received grants from the US National Cancer Institutes/National Institutes of Health and Rockefeller Foundation to analyse documents of the Guildford Depository.