REVIEWOpen Doorway to Truth: Legacy of the Minnesota Tobacco Trial
Section snippets
CREATING “SKELETONS” IN THE CLOSET: THE DOCUMENT DEPOSITORIES
The terms of the Minnesota settlement provided for the creation of 2 publicly accessible document depositories: one in Minneapolis, MN (Minnesota depository) and the other in Guildford, England, near London (Guildford depository) (Table 2). The Minnesota depository contains materials from all defendants, whereas the Guildford depository contains only materials produced to the Minnesota plaintiffs from the defendant BAT.13 At their sole expense, the settling tobacco industry defendants were
Tobacco Defendants Based in the United States
Although the Minnesota settlement required the tobacco defendants to deposit their hard-copy documents in depositories, the MSA obligated the settling tobacco parties to make their documents available online until June 30, 2010.28 In effect, most of the documents produced by US-based defendants and placed into the Minnesota depository have also been posted on industry-created Web sites, with the exception of oversized and electronic materials that the MSA requires to be deposited in Minnesota.16
INFLUENCE OF THE TOBACCO DOCUMENTS
The response of the tobacco control community to the release of the documents has been profound. However, comprehensive document research would not have occurred without the availability of mechanisms for researching and disseminating the findings from the documents on their public release in Minnesota.
Faced with a treasure trove of documents previously hidden from public view but in an inaccessible format, in 1998 US President Bill Clinton issued an executive memorandum mandating that the
TOBACCO DOCUMENTS AND THE WHO
Document disclosures resulting from the Minnesota litigation have had an extraordinary influence on the global regulation of the TTCs under the leadership of the WHO. In the late 1990s, former WHO Director General Gro Harlem Brundtland launched a landmark inquiry into the tobacco industry's efforts to undermine global tobacco control, as evidenced by tobacco documents made public in Minnesota.44 The 2000 WHO expert report concluded:
At the most fundamental level, this inquiry confirms that
TOBACCO DOCUMENTS IN LEGISLATIVE AND PARLIAMENTARY INVESTIGATIONS
The internal documents of the tobacco industry have also been used in parliamentary and legislative hearings. In July 1999, the UK House of Commons Health Select Committee24 reviewed documents made public by the Minnesota settlement, set forth nearly 60 recommendations for reducing the health burden of tobacco use, and urged the government to act on its recommendations.24 In the United States, tobacco documents have informed policy makers about the TTCs' internal strategies regarding
LITIGATION
The publicly available internal corporate records of tobacco companies are also a valuable resource for litigation efforts. In particular, Minnesota's document discovery allowed access by every litigant in cases brought after the Minnesota settlement to 35 million pages of internal records and thousands of documents stripped of privilege by the Minnesota court through its application of the crime-fraud exception to the doctrine of privilege.37 The importance of the Minnesota settlement has been
UNANTICIPATED DOCUMENT FINDINGS
Although a primary goal of the Minnesota litigation was “to expose the industry's decades-long campaign of deception by revealing the industry's secret research in smoking and health, addiction and nicotine manipulation,”77 the documents revealed much more than the industry anticipated. The tobacco defendants' plan to overwhelm the Minnesota plaintiffs with truckloads of documents back-fired, as reported by the WHO:
The idea—what lawyers call “papering”—was to simply bury the relevant
CONCLUSION
Few single events in the history of public health have had as dramatic an effect on global tobacco control as the public release of the tobacco industry's internal documents in the Minnesota tobacco trial and through the MSA. The tobacco industry's own words have reverberated through court rooms, public hearings, and media outlets across the globe, and this decade of truth has forever affected health policy worldwide. In fact, one of the legacies of the tobacco documents may be the end of
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This work was supported by National Institutes of Health grant R01 CA90791, “Tobacco Industry Documents on Environmental Tobacco Smoke-The Next Front” from the National Cancer Institute.
The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Cancer Institute.
This article is freely available on publication because the authors havechosen the immediate access option.