Stanton A. Glantz might want to suggest a new warning label: “Warning: A FedEx box of top-secret tobacco industry documents may be hazardous to your career.”
Since receiving a carton of such documents two years ago, the professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco has been sued by a tobacco giant, attacked in national ads by smokers’ groups, turned away by dozens of publishers, and had his grant singled out for elimination by Congress.
The identity of the box’s sender remains unknown. The only return address was “Mr. Butts,” the name of the fast-talking cigarette character in the “Doonesbury” comic strip.
Mr. Glantz, a well-known researcher and outspoken critic of the tobacco business -- a sort of anti-Mr. Butts -- had been handed a wealth of industry knowledge on the health effects of tobacco. There were more than 4,000 pages of internal documents from the Brown & Williamson Company, the third-largest tobacco company in the United States and the maker of Kool, Lucky Strike, and Pall Mall cigarettes. The significance of the documents, Mr. Glantz says, was that they backed claims that the tobacco industry had known beyond doubt that smoking is addictive and that tobacco products cause disease and death.
In his book, The Cigarette Papers (University of California Press), Mr. Glantz and four co-authors -- John Slade, Lisa A. Bero, Peter Hanauer, and Deborah E. Barnes -- analyze those documents in a way that sheds new light on the tobacco industry.
“The thing that shocked me was that it was all there,” Mr. Glantz says. “It’s a little bit like knowing your wife is sleeping with someone else versus walking in and catching them. Anybody who follows the tobacco issue, and who’s thought about it, just assumed that the tobacco companies knew all this stuff -- that the tobacco companies had a better understanding of nicotine addiction than anybody else, that they knew smoking caused cancer and heart disease -- because they had to. I mean, they’re not stupid. But to see it all spelled out in their own words was just amazing.”
The Cigarette Papers provides numerous examples that the authors say point to discrepancies between the public and private statements of tobacco-company officials. The book recounts, for example, the tobacco industry’s effort to understand better the effects of nicotine even as its public-relations departments worked to keep people smoking and the government at bay. Addison Yeaman, vice-president and general counsel of Brown & Williamson, wrote in an internal document in 1963: “Nicotine is addictive. We are, then, in the business of selling nicotine, an addictive drug effective in the release of stress mechanisms.”
Yet in Congressional testimony almost 30 years later, Thomas Sandefur, chairman and chief executive officer of B&W, said, “I do not believe that nicotine is addictive.”
Joseph Helewicz, vice-president of public affairs for Brown and Williamson, says the documents in The Cigarette Papers are selectively edited and taken out of context. “Stan’s got his agenda, and the documents won’t mean anything until they’re straightened out in court, and that’s eventually how this is all going to be resolved.”
In many cases, Mr. Helewicz says, the documents represent opinions of individuals and don’t represent company policy. “They were stolen documents,” he adds. “They were privileged documents.”
Shortly after receiving the papers, Mr. Glantz began assembling a group of people to take a look at them. Several of the book’s co-authors were researchers who examine health effects of smoking. Dr. Slade is an associate professor of clinical medicine at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. Ms. Bero is an assistant professor of clinical pharmacy and health policy at the University of California’s San Francisco campus, and Ms. Barnes is a research associate at the university’s Institute for Health Policy Studies. Mr. Hanauer is a lawyer in Berkeley, Cal.
Although Mr. Glantz says he knew he would end up facing Brown & Williamson in court, his team was initially encouraged by what seemed to be a prevailing wind of change: Less than a month before Mr. Glantz received the documents, a U.S. District Court judge quashed the company’s subpoenas demanding that members of Congress disclose the source of internal tobacco-industry documents in their possession.
Word soon spread of Mr. Glantz’s windfall, and he was inundated by requests to see and copy the documents. But he notes that he has a “very small office.”
“I mean a very small office, and I had this big box of stuff sitting there -- people were tripping over it.”
So when the decision was made to move the contents of what Mr. Glantz had come to call the “Butts box” -- all five cubic feet of it -- to a library archive on the San Francisco campus, it was a simple matter of convenience. As it turned out, it was also a shrewd legal tactic.
By the time Brown & Williamson’s lawyers descended upon the campus in January of last year, word of the Cigarette Papers, as they were called (in a tip of the hat to the Pentagon Papers) was so widespread that journalists, researchers, and lawyers were lining up at the library. Karen Butter, deputy director of the library and the university’s Center for Knowledge Management, had scanned all the documents onto a CD-ROM to accommodate the demand.
At that point, B&W started placing its own demands on the library, according to Ms. Butter. “First they told us that the materials were stolen, and they strongly requested that we return the box of materials to them. Secondly, they wanted a list of people who had used the collection. That’s against not only library policy, but I think California state law. We don’t release who has used materials.”
At the same time, she says, B&W’s lawyers also hired private investigators to watch people who were using the documents. “It wasn’t too difficult to spot them. When two men are sitting outside the room with cameras and cellular phones, it’s kind of a sign that they’re not students or faculty.”
“It was just a colossally dumb move on their part,” says Mr. Glantz. “The press went nuts over it, and I think any sort of lingering doubts that anybody in the university had were resolved.”
The battle over the fate of the Cigarette Papers, and, in a sense, Stanton Glantz’s career, had begun. The university now had to decide whether it would fight a legal battle against big tobacco -- a challenge that even ABC News had shied away from when it issued a public apology for the way it presented an investigation of tobacco companies on its “Day One” program.
“I think the feeling among all of those making the decision was that this is an issue that really goes to the core of the university’s mission,” says Christopher M. Patti, university counsel. “To back down if there was no legal requirement that we do so would not have been acceptable.”
B&W’s legal position was weak from the beginning, he says. “They were taking the position that this was essentially a dispute about property. They were claiming that the papers had been stolen, and that our possession of them constituted what’s called in law ‘conversion.’ It would be the same if someone stole a television set and gave it to you. The owner of the television set would have a right to it.”
Mr. Patti says the university never considered property to be the issue. “In fact, the copies of these documents that were in the library were made on a university copier, using our paper and our supplies. So what we’re talking about here was information. And that raised significant First Amendment issues, because the information in these documents was of extraordinary public significance.
“Our argument,” he says, “was that putting them in the library was publication of the documents in exactly the same way that The New York Times’s and The Washington Post’s printing of the Pentagon Papers back in the ‘70s was publication of those documents.”
Mr. Glantz picks up the story: “In the end, it was brilliant,” he says. “I should claim that we did it because we were smart. But I didn’t sit down and think, ‘Boy, if I put this in the library and we get sued, then we’ll have a much stronger First Amendment claim.’”
That’s exactly what the university had. In May 1995, just over a year after the Butts box arrived, the Superior Court for San Francisco County ruled that the documents should be made available for public review.
In June, the state’s Court of Appeal refused to grant Brown & Williamson a temporary restraining order preventing the release of the documents. Later that month, the California Supreme Court rejected another B&W appeal.
Less than 24 hours after the final appeal was exhausted, the library began posting all of the tobacco-company documents on its World-Wide Web site (http://galen.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco/). When The Cigarette Papers is published later this month, a hypertext version of the book with links to other documents is planned for the Web site as well.
By the time the courts made their decisions, Mr. Glantz and his co-authors had submitted five papers to the Journal of the American Medical Association. Each article carried this note: “This work was supported in part by grant CA-61021 from the National Cancer Institute.”
The articles went beyond health discussions and held up the tobacco industry for inspection, including how the companies did research, how they allegedly suppressed information, and how they allegedly manipulated data to influence legislation.
Those articles drew attention to other papers published under the same $600,000 grant. In those articles, Mr. Glantz reported on studies of tobacco-industry campaign contributions to state legislators and the voting records of these legislators on tobacco-control initiatives. To some in Congress, this was the final straw.
In August, the House of Representatives approved a bill that would eliminate funds for Mr. Glantz’s grant. A report accompanying the bill said Republican lawmakers were disturbed to learn that the National Cancer Institute had supported the research on campaign contributions. This project did not “properly fall within the boundaries of the cancer institute’s portfolio,” the report said.
Several months earlier, a group calling itself the “130/10 Club” had placed an ad in The Washington Times denouncing the cancer institute for supporting Mr. Glantz’s work. Several newspapers have reported that the 130/10 Club was a creation of the American Smokers Alliance, which in turn was established by Philip Morris, the world’s largest cigarette maker. (Last week, however, a Philip Morris spokesman denied that the company had any tie to the alliance.)
Congress is still debating whether to cut off support for Mr. Glantz’s project. As a precaution, he has applied for, and received, a grant from the American Cancer Society to help continue financing his research.
“The work has not only survived, but I’m actually in better shape,” he says. “I’ve got a bigger research project under way then I did when I started. I think that’s important -- not just for me, but for the academic community generally -- that this assault was not only fought off, but that I actually came out of it better off. I’m hoping that will deter future assaults on the academic community.”
The last major hurdle for The Cigarette Papers was finding a publisher. By the time an agreement was reached with the University of California Press, the project had been turned down by more than two dozen other publishers. “Most of the publishers had admitted to a great deal of interest,” recalls Naomi Schneider, executive editor of the California press, “but because of the potential legal problems with the book, and the possibility of being sued by a tobacco company, the big publishers were unwilling to take it on.”
However, the courts had ruled in favor of the university in disseminating the information to the public, she says, and the possible impact of the book was too big to ignore.
With so much behind him, Mr. Glantz is optimistic. “I think we’re at a nexus,” he says. “If the public-health community gets a little bit smarter and musters the political will and the stomach to do what they should have done in the ‘60s, I think we’re in a position to eliminate tobacco as a public-health problem in the next 10 years. In 10 years, we could have tobacco use about where marijuana use is now. But there are always going to be people who use tobacco, just as there are always people who are going to snort cocaine.”
“Periods of great danger are also periods of great opportunity. Like getting these documents, the least-dangerous thing for me to have done would have been to throw them in the recycling bin. It could have all played out much worse than it did.
“The real question in my mind,” says Mr. Glantz, “is what everybody else is going to do with it. I mean, we’ve handed them the tool, and what are they going to fashion with it?”