Coughing Up Blood Money: "Before they quit or die"

Source: Flickr

It’s fairly common knowledge that the tobacco industry has engaged in nefarious practices, such as secretly verifying the addictive quality of nicotine and strategizing how best to get kids to smoke. If you take a moment to read some of the actual memos and reports that chronicle these goings on, I think you’ll find it’s much worse than you imagined.
The once-secret documents of the tobacco industry are available at Tobacco Documents Online.

As part of the Master Settlement Agreement between the States and the tobacco companies, the industry was required to make the documents used during the trials available. They posted the documents on their websites, but searching required going to several different sites, each with a different interface.
That same agreement required the industry to turn over a snapshot of their sites as of July, 1999. Tobacco Documents Online (TDO) spent over a year standardizing the document descriptions to allow uniform searching, and through the American Legacy Foundation, obtained tapes of the document images. TDO offers powerful searching across all the companies, access to high-quality images, OCR, and the ability to collect and annotate documents. The tools here have been built for document researchers, and are available to anyone with a web browser.

Registering at the site is free and gives you optimized search speeds and OCRs of scanned documents.
A 1985 RJ Reynolds memo is about “Marlboro Vulnerability.” RJR sells Camels. They had been competing with the Marlboro Man since the 1960s. How can they attract young male consumers to Camels? The memo summarizes two brain storming sessions. Here are just a few ideas from the nine page memo. (Note: FUBYAS is short for First Usual Brand Young Adult Smokers.)
• Music: “Everyone felt that the best thing that could ever happen to an RJR brand would be for a rock singer to smoke it.”
• Sex: “Create a brand for ‘studs’.”
• Freedom/Rebellion/Defiance: “A week’s vacation for FUBYAS parents, to get them out of the house, and a free clean up crew just before they return.”
• Living on the Edge: “Make non-filters ‘in’ again. Not only are they potent and disgusting but they differentiate the men from the women – something that is increasingly difficult to do.”
Another way to approach this wealth of documents is through SourceWatch’s TobaccoWiki. This is a collaborative website where users read the tobacco industry documents, extract and summarize interesting content, and arrange the information by category. One of my searches turned up another 1985 report from RJR explaining why it’s a good idea for store owners to let kids steal cigarettes.

A 6% pilferage rate … equates to an average loss of 5,400 cigarettes each week– or almost 290,000 cigarettes each year–from a single grocery store. If just one half of these cigarettes make it to kids who smoke ten cigarettes each, and just 1/4 of them go on to be regular smokers, then the pilferage from this single store will recruit over 3,000 new smokers each year. At an average smoking rate of 1 1/2 packs a day, each smoker stands to generate about $36,000 –or, if the group is taken in aggregate, many hundreds of millions of dollars– for the industry, state and federal governments before they quit or die. All from just one store.

I swear I’m not making this up.