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Exposing Mr Butts' tricks of the trade

¹ Department of Cancer Prevention, Epidemiology & Biostatistics, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, New York, USA
² Faculty of Commerce and Business Administration, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

Correspondence to:
K Michael Cummings, PhD, MPH, Department of Cancer Prevention, Epidemiology & Biostatistics, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Elm and Carlton Streets, Buffalo, New York 14263, USA;
Michael.Cummings@Roswellpark.org

Keywords: tobacco documents; tobacco industry

Abbreviations: BAT, British American Tobacco; B&W, Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company; NCI, National Cancer Institute; UCSF, University of California at San Francisco

On 12 May 1994, an unsolicited box of what appeared to be tobacco industry documents was delivered to Professor Stanton Glantz at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF).¹ The return address on the box was listed as "Mr Butts". As it turned out, the box contained a collection of internal industry studies and reports that had been copied by a paralegal working for the law firm representing the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company (B&W). The paralegal, Dr Merrell Williams, had been hired in 1988 by the law firm of Wyatt, Tarrant and Coombs to review millions of pages of memoranda, reports, and research studies related to B&W and their parent affiliate British American Tobacco (BAT). The goal of the exercise was to identify material that was perceived to be "critical" in terms of litigation risk for the company. Williams was laid off in 1992, but retained copies of . . . [Full text of this article]

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