February 4, 2002

2:38 PM

UCSF's Legacy Tobacco Documents Library -- a library of formerly secret tobacco industry internal documents -- goes live this week. It's a searchable archive of fifty years of "scientific research, manufacturing, marketing, advertising and sales of cigarettes" including a lot of inadvertently humorous material.
posted by jessamyn (3 comments total)

Great find, jessamyn. It'll be a monument to self-delusion and procrastination, fudging and bullshitting, lying and obfuscating.

"The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library serves as a free and permanent home for more than 24 million pages."

Future historians have it easy. Me, I went looking, with the wrong motives, for the zany advertisements. Serves me right I didn't find them. ;)
posted by MiguelCardoso at 4:16 PM on February 4, 2002

Thanks, jessamyn. And may I also recommend this search site for tobacco company and related documents.

Our tireless friend Anne Landman also creates a daily post of some new damning document she culls from the tobacco companies themselves. For example, she recently uncovered a memo from Philip Morris detailing plans for good deeds in the Middle East: "Work to develop a system by which Philip Morris can measure trends on the issue of Smoking and Islam. Identify Islamic religious leaders who oppose interpretations of the Quran which would ban the use of tobacco and encourage support for these leaders."

Dontcha just love free enterprise? I mean, why worry about trivial things like public health if the stockholders are happy, eh?
posted by fold_and_mutilate at 8:11 PM on February 4, 2002

As always, Jessamyn, you rule. Somewhere in the basement is my collection of old cigarette ads ("Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet!" "Doctors say--Chesterfield is smoother," etc.). Now I don't even have to walk downstairs.
posted by Sidhedevil at 9:44 PM on February 4, 2002