EDITORIAL

The case of Philip Morris

Working to make a disease

Ruth E Malone

Correspondence to:
Ruth E Malone, RN, PhD, Professor and Vice Chair, Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, 3333 California Street, Suite 455, San Francisco, CA 94118, USA; ruth.malone@ucsf.edu

---

Philip Morris’s "extreme makeover"

---

Keywords: Philip Morris; corporate social responsibility; tobacco industry

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

Three years ago, I attended a public talk at the University of California, Berkeley School of Business. The topic was corporate social responsibility, and the speaker was David Greenberg, senior vice-president and chief compliance officer at Altria, parent corporation of tobacco giant Philip Morris. Greenberg was a smiling, somewhat self effacing guy about my own age, and he began his talk by saying how he appreciated our willingness to listen, because he wanted to tell us some things about his company that "might surprise" us.

Greenberg said the organisation had recently done a lot of soul searching and realised it needed to change—there was a new "openness" in "Altria’s journey," as Greenberg put it, in which the organisation had "outed ourselves." He alluded to "almost religious" battles within the corporation about the "new" stance of "responsibility," as part of which Altria/Philip Morris finally admits (on . . . [Full text of this article]

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

This article has been cited by other articles:

• Apollonio, D. E., Malone, R. E. (2009). Turning negative into positive: public health mass media campaigns and negative advertising. Health Educ Res 24: 483-495 [Abstract] [Full Text]