The spider’s web of the tobacco lobby in Italy| Tabaccologia

Abstract

In this special issue of Tabaccologia, dedicated to the conspiracy, deception and interference of the tobacco industry (Big Tobacco) to safeguard its business, we republish the article: “The spider’s web of the tobacco lobby. Deep throats. What smokers (and non-smokers) don’t know”, which was published in Pneumorama in 2006, in the aftermath of the “ope legis” declassification of the confidential and top secret documents of Philip Morris (PMI) and other US sisters. The publication of this article was not easy due to the diffidence and lack of courage of some directors such as that of the Italian Review of Respiratory Disease. Everything that was written was supported by documents that were made public and published in print and online until 2010. Since then, the tobacco companies’ websites have been carefully cleaned of tens of millions of often compromising documents; however (and thankfully) the University of San Francisco, in a surprise move, has saved everything on the their web site. But I was not discouraged. I then presented the article to Antonio Schiavulli, then publisher and director of Pneumorama, who with courage and determination, took it upon himself to publish it, with the superstitious promise that... In case of any legal “trouble”, he would bring me oranges every day! As you can read, the article, later published on Pneumorama [1] and which we are republishing here in two languages, takes a journey into the Italian connivance, at the political, mass media and scientific levels with SMEs. For thefirst time, we understood why we had to wait 50 years for a real and effective anti-smoking law.

The spider’s web of the tobacco lobby Deep throats. What smokers (and non-smokers) don’t know

Jeff Wigand’s dramatic statement against the tobacco industry before the Mississippi State Court helped open Pandora’s Box on the confidential and top-secret documents of the U.S. tobacco in dustry. Millions of documents were declassified as “ope legis”, with an obligation for the industries con cerned to put them online on their respective websites by the end of 2010. Thanks to this, we have finally come to know the deceptions, lies and conspiracies that have been hidden for 50 years. The infiltration into the vital ganglia of the life of the country has not spared our country either, and for the first time it has been clear to us why for 50 years it has not been pos sible to have a clear and uninterpretable anti-smoking law.

Introduction

There is a “very powerful lobby that has very high economic margins that moves in defence of the big interests that revolve around smoking”. For this reason, “the tobacco multinationals have concealed data on the danger of what they produced”. These are the statements of the former Minister of Health Girolamo Sirchia, reported in a courageous article by the journalist Maria Zagarelli on the front page of L’Unità on November 13, 2002. Courageous because, with documents in hand, light was shed on the political, economic, and journalistic level of the connivances and deep throats in the pay of the tobacco multinationals. To be honest, as we also reported at the same time in issue 1/2003 of Tabaccologia, they also made use of experts who tried to find out what was being demonstrated, through studies and research, on the effects of smoking [2]. Among the outstanding names there were the Swedish Prof. Ragnar Rylander, from the University of Geneva, and Prof. Giuseppe Lojacono, of Perugia University, Director of the Italian Society of Epidemiology and Director of the journal Epidemiology and Prevention, uninterruptedly from 1997 until his death in 1999. An action of intelligence and espionage carried out by these “deep throats”, against those who studied the devastating effects of cigarettes on health.

The site

All this scenario, with strategies and reference names for the different levels, becomes dramatically clear and evident if you try to type [3]. All you need is a good knowledge of English and a certain curiosity about the topic in question. A veritable treasure trove of information that experts involved in tobacco smoking cessation can no longer ignore. It is a website with a simple interface, but with a search engine that gives access to an immense archive of more than 32 million pages of declassified documents, too many even for the most enthusiastic of enthusiasts. This site was created in 1998 by decree of a Minnesota Court, thanks to paragraph IV of the Attorneys General Master Settlement Act, the lawsuit was signed following the trial that saw Philip Morris (PM) in the dock against the insurance companies Blue Cross/Blue Shield, which sought compensation for the money often spent on medical treatment by smokers. In short, if it had been up to the multinationals, those documents would have remained confidential with all their secrets on research, investments, contracts, relations with politics, with politicians, the scientific world, and the mass media of the planet. Instead, the judge went down hard: the obligation to publish applies to all past and future documents up to 2010 for all public and private documents: a real “St. Patrick’s well” represented by an immense archive.

The political and mass media level

An essential link in PM’s strategy is the world of communication in order to facilitate the “sweetening” work of enlisted politicians and to disorient public opinion on second-hand smoke by dictating the timing and intensity of interventions.

And so here is the doc. n° 2501021775 (“strictly confidential”), under the acronym “Ph Morris Corporate Service Inc”, Italian branch, talking about a journalist, very well connected in government circles, friend of politicians: the budget allocated to her by the PM is 250 million Italian lira “For the delicate work she achieves!”. Another document concerns a French journalist, the wife of a well inserted columnist in the “right” circle with friends in the government and in the various Italian centres of power. The lady is on the list of collaborators of the PM with the task of “organizing dinners, trips, meetings with political figures”. Documents concerning the most important political groups, environmental and cultural formations and movements emerge, too. The entire cost of this massive political operation for the early 1990s was 150 billion Italian lira, with the stated aim of “increasing our network of political contacts and promoting the PM as a socially active company: sponsorship of exhibitions, cultural events and even scientific conferences on the environment“. In this case, for decency’s sake, the sponsorship of scientific events took place through the holding company’s subsidiaries, in which the problem of second-hand smoking regularly played a secondary role. 1993 was a year of strong investment on the political front for the PM “to gain a favourable space for our business” (doc. n° 250102177), i.e., more contacts: the Prime Minister was contacted six times between Rome and Genoa; 13 Ministers, 8 Deputy Ministers, 3 Editors of the most important political newspapers, 20 MPs, 3 Party Leaders and again staff of men of power, Bag carriers up to... “dwarfs and dancers” of not so distant memory. For what reason?

Confidentially, like the whole document, to “develop pro-smoking groups in the main Italian cities”. And yes, because the problems for Big Tobacco are there and with a growing trend: in fact, there have been 11 bills not yet approved (in the year 1993) and they will never be approved until the year 2000 with Health Ministers Veronesi at first and then Sirchia in 2005, and in the meantime a strong anti-smoking movement begins to grow. “Against this aspect - the document reads - we must concentrate all our efforts.”

What? For example, “alliances have been strengthened with the CGIL, CISL, UIL trade unions, with Confindustria and with FIPE (Italian Federation of Public Establishments)”, which, coincidentally, threatened to appeal to the highest level of judgment against the entry into force of the Sirchia law in public places (Law 3/2003). And so, it is hardly necessary to ask: for whose benefit?

In this case, we have no doubts, especially when we read in another document, that it is necessary to establish new and more important contacts in order to “have control over any future initiative”, because the efforts of all those who work in the business sector is to direct towards “the well-being of our Company, thus protecting our business from negative and dangerous laws”.

The medical-scientific level

Two researchers from San Francisco, Elisa Ong and Stanton Glantz, ripped the veil off the influence of the tobacco lobby in the medical-scientific world in 2000, in the pages of the Lancet [2,4], referring to documents 2501341817/23 also on the PM website (). A veritable bombshell was thus dropped on the various and protean attempts of the PM to pollute scientific research. The PM was very worried about the European multicentre study IARC in Lyon (International Agency for Cancer Research) on the carcinogen capacities of second-hand smoking, which in 1993 was beginning to enter the full operational phase, and which could have led the various governments to enact restrictive regulations regarding tobacco smoking [2 ,4]. It was necessary to “influence the formulation of the conclusions and the official communication of the results; publish the conclusions of the study as late as possible; counteract the potential impact of the study on government policies, public opinion, the actions of private entrepreneurs and the owners of public places”. To this end, PM spared no expense: if the IARC invested a budget of between 1.5 and 3 million US dollars in ten years (1988-1998), the tobacco magnates spent the same amount of money in a single year, 1993, and twice as much in the following year (!).

Among the beneficiaries are the public relations agencies Burson Marsteller and the Italian SCR Associates, among the newspapers the Sunday Telegraph of London and a myriad of Italian and foreign researchers. The core and purpose of the Whitecoat project (the temptation to rename a dirty operation with a clean name is irresistible) was to know in advance the results that were emerging and then insinuate doubts about scientific correctness. So, delegations of experts in the pay of the tobacco task force went to Lyon to propose meetings with research managers, then reporting to the parent company, which in turn was ready to churn out press releases of the opposite sign. Real Trojan horses to steal in advance the secrets and moves of IARC researchers. And it is at this point that the deep throats begin to come out of the confidential documents of the PM’s website, veritable national embarrassments. Every European nation had at least one “deep throat” in the medical-scientific field. If for Switzerland, for example, it was Professor Rylander, for Italy it was Professor Lojacono. And this is where the Italian side of this story begins... In fact, Ong and Glantz claim that the most detailed information on the IARC study came to the PM through SCIR Associates, whose consultants included the “former Giuseppe Lojacono, former professor of health economics at the University of Perugia”. Lojacono had visited IARC several times in his role as Editor-in-Chief, from 1977 to 1999, of the Journal Epidemiology & Prevention (E&P), the official organ of the Italian Scientific Society of Epidemiology, acting incognito in the Italian and European scientific world, without ever declaring his activities and affiliations with the tobacco industry, so much so as to surprise even his colleagues in the Society and Journal [6,7]. And it was the same E&P journal that with courage and professionalism revealed the Lojacono-Philip Morris affair to the general Italian healthcare public [6-10]. Typing the entry Lojacono (with an in the search) on the website of the PM () yields 62 documents available, as of May 31, 2005 [3]. [Editor’s note: since the scandal broke out on the web there is no longer any trace online of articles and photos of the mole Lojacono].

It thus appears that for 10 years, from 1988 to 1998, Lojacono was the scientific consultant to the Agency that was in charge of public relations for the tobacco industry in Italy. On behalf of this Agency, the Editor-in-Chief of E&P participated in conferences, monitored the Italian scientific production, collected information and promptly reported, through the SRC, to PM & Partners (Reynolds, Rothmans, Insalco, BAT, Italtabacchi, etc.). A diligent official described him as “active at the journalistic level, who has good contacts with the WHO and the then Director Nakashima, who personally knows Tomatis, Director of IARC, and who disagrees with what the Surgeon General has expressed on second-hand smoking and on nicotine addiction” (doc. 2501152054/64). The Surgeon General, it should be remembered, who in 1986 declared that second-hand smoking “causes diseases, including lung cancer, in healthy non-smokers”, while in 1988 he wrote that “cigarettes and other forms of tobacco are addictive. Nicotine is the addictive substance.”

But Lojacono, although he was not the only anti-IARC whistleblower (Angelo Ceriol of Istoconsult srl), was not a bad deal for Big Tobacco. In fact, he reported on the inclinations of the Italian scientific community and public opinion on smoking. The reports underline the propensity of Italian epidemiologists to deal with risk factors present in the workplace, in the urban environment and in food, concluding that by virtue of this vocation “The Italian scientific community, or at least part of it (...) has already made and can continue to make significant contributions to raising national awareness of the problem of passive smoking” (doc. 2501356124). Thus, together with the “network of informers, which was mostly made up of journalists, the exchange with the tobacco industry was transversal and continuous”. Of course, the tobacco industry, with their staggering turnovers, has never had any difficulty in producing counter-information research, stirring up controversy, and disseminating scientific literature with pro-tobacco disinformation [6]. And so, when the IARC emergency arises, the PM already has a vast network of scientists and consultants ready in Europe, willing, like deep throats, to put their skills at the service of the tobacco industry, often maliciously. On the other hand, the fact that many “benevolent” scientific works on second-hand smoking were undermined by the influence of the tobacco multinational industries had already been denounced by two Californian researchers in JAMA in 1999 [7]. But now the problem was more devastating for the entire tobacco profit system.

Thus, the PM carried out its own research and funded studies by respected researchers, hoping for results that can be used in the implementation of one of the most effective tactics: contrasting data with data, study with study, to trigger and fuel endless controversies with the aim of disorienting public and political opinion on the smoking problem. All this had an easy time thanks to the acquiescence of some journalists and politicians who made up the powerful political-media level of the tobacco lobby. And the results are there for all to see. In this way, it has been possible to have a heavy impact with striking or sometimes minimal but continuous disinformation campaigns on public opinion, so that we currently find ourselves with smoking patients and a large part of public opinion who regularly underestimate the damage caused by smoking in favour of environmental damage. The overwhelming majority of the public is convinced that environmental pollution is much more harmful than smoking. If we think back for a moment to the last two decades, despite the importance that air pollution has for the health of individuals and the survival of the planet, we realize the excessive overdose of environmentalism that we have suffered at all levels: TV, newspapers, environmental party formations and new age naturist associations self-replicating at a continuous pace. The result is precisely what Big Tobacco hoped for: to shift the cultural and attention spotlight from the harms of smoking, first and second-hand, to those of outdoor pollution.