Register for email alerts and news feeds:
This journal | BMJ Group
rss
Tobacco Control 2006;15(Supplement 4 ):iv1-iv3; doi:10.1136/tc.2006.018473
Copyright © 2006 by the BMJ Publishing Group Ltd.

EDITORIAL

Putting truth into action: using the evidence for justice

D Douglas Blanke1, Hubert H Humphrey, III2

1 Tobacco Law Center, William Mitchell College of Law, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA
2 School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
D Douglas Blanke
Tobacco Law Center, William Mitchell College of Law, 875 Summit Avenue, Saint Paul, Minnesota 55105-3076, USA; doug.blanke@wmitchell.edu

Keywords: depositions; litigations; testimony; tobacco documents

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The World Health Organization (WHO) calculates that, over the course of the 20th century, tobacco industry products claimed 100 million victims.1 With no disrespect to the statisticians in Geneva, we’d put the toll at 100 million and one. In the tobacco epidemic, as in all of history’s wars, the first casualty was truth. For half a century, it lay beneath a mountain of cover-ups, distortions and lies. And we’re still digging out.

Fortunately, facts are stubborn things. They have a way of prevailing, sooner or later, against even the most sophisticated of corporate conspiracies. Sooner or later. That’s the problem, of course, because, in the end, buying time is what this conspiracy is about. "Doubt is our product," as a candid Brown & Williamson document puts it.2 A decade of doubt means billions of dollars in profits. Not to mention 50 million victims.

TRUTH MATTERS

That’s why the truth matters, and matters . . . [Full text of this article]


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati    What's this?

This Article

Services
Citing Articles
Google Scholar
PubMed
Bookmark with

Register for free content

The full back archive is now available for all BMJ Journals. Institutional subscribers may access the entire archive as part of their subscription. Personal subscribers will also have access to all content when logged in. Non-subscribers who register have free access to all articles published before 2006 right back to volume 1 issue 1. Register here to access the free archive of all BMJ Journals.

Don't forget to sign up for content alerts so you keep up to date with all the articles as they are published.