Legacy Tobacco Documents Library

The Smoking Gun
A treasure trove of damning evidence against Big Tobacco has been unearthed at UCSF
By Matt Smith
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This immense trove is home to thousands of stories, dating from the 1920s, about the myriad ways the tobacco industry employed scientists, lobbyists, activist front groups, marketing experts, and other operatives in the most expensive, aggressive, and long-lasting public and political campaign in American history. The players and ideas developed in this effort now populate any corner of American public life where distorting the truth has the potential to advance power or profits. Until now, however, these documents were searchable only under topic headings. Researchers had to read them page by page to find the obscure, juicy parts.
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The newly searchable database shows this evolution. Karl Rove's favorite expert on "Astroturf" got his start as a hack pushing the phony Big Tobacco campaign to stop kids from smoking. A marketing guru famous for parsing for Detroit the psychology behind the desire for gas guzzlers earlier produced a report for Philip Morris concluding that anti-youth-smoking messages can actually help hook teens on smokes.