Big Tobacco’s Pandora’s box| Tabaccologia

Abstract

It has been nearly 30 years since the ending of the tobacco trial in Minnesota and the signing of the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) by 46 general attorneys from the United States and the U.S. tobacco industry. The Minnesota agreement exposed the tobacco industry’s long history of misleading marketing, advertising, and research and ultimately imposed the industry to change its business practices. The provisions for disclosure of public documents that were included in the Minnesota Agreement led to the disclosure of approximately 70 million pages of documents and nearly 20,000 other multimedia materials. In fact, other document archive is comparable to it as far as dynamicity, voluminosity and mis à jour is concerned. Only a few individual events in public health history have had such a dramatic effect on tobacco control as the public disclosure of previously secret internal tobacco industry documents. With the deposition of Jeffrey Wigand of B&W Co. in front of a US Court, a Pandora’s box, full of lies, scams and deceptions perpetrated by the tobacco industry (Big Tobacco) for over 50 years, was opened. It became an authentic gold mine for researchers, full of confidential and top-secret news on cigarettes. They discovered for instance that Big Tobacco was aware since the early 60’s that nicotine was addictive and then, not content with that, they invented a way to make it totally penetrating the blood, treating tobacco with ammonia. Big Tobacco’s guiding rule was to spread misinformation to create and feed doubt. There are numerous deceptions that come to the surface: light cigarettes, second hand smoking, air quality, enlistment of deep throats in all sectors and testimonials especially in the film field, up to the concealment of the presence of Polonium 210 in tobacco.