Exposing Mr Butts' tricks of the trade
- 1Department of Cancer Prevention, Epidemiology & Biostatistics, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, New York, USA
- 2Faculty 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{at}Roswellpark.org
- 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 thousands of pages of documents. The following year Williams, who had been a heavy smoker himself, was diagnosed with a serious heart ailment. He contacted the Wyatt firm and informed them that he had retained some of the documents and would return them. However, he blamed his heart condition on the stress induced by what he had read about smoking in those documents and threatened to sue the Wyatt firm for his health problems unless they settled. Instead, the Wyatt firm filed a civil action against Williams, for theft of the secret tobacco documents.
In 1995, Glantz and his colleagues published a series of articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association2–6 and then a book, Cigarette Papers,1 summarising what was learned from that box of documents and related documents then available from scattered other sources. These reports provided the first real glimpse into …
