This issue of Tobacco Control contains four papers reporting revelations found in the 26 million page “haystack” of tobacco industry internal documents open to researchers and the public on the world wide web.1 Anne Landman, who since August 1999 has daily posted document gems on the Smokescreen website,2 summarises evidence on how the tobacco industry intimidates and retaliates against companies which introduce smokefree policies or otherwise seek to advance public health in ways the industry does not like.3 Connolly and colleagues describe how the tobacco industry has used chemicals to mask the smell of environmental tobacco smoke, adding yet further ingredients to the chemical cocktail that is the modern cigarette.4 Belinda O'Sullivan and I provide a chronology of the transnational companies' ambitions to break into the stratospheric tobacco killing fields of the Chinese market,5 and Ruth Malone and Edith Balbach offer invaluable guidance to those new to document searching on traps for young players.6

In 1999, the National Institutes of Health in the USA requested applications from researchers wanting to research the documents. Four large grants have been awarded, with work commencing in July 2000. A second round of applications is now being assessed. This very welcome project will see a huge amount of scholarship on the documents, some of which will certainly find its way into Tobacco Control. Already one supplement is being planned. Since our first issue, the journal has given high priority to exposing tobacco industry mendacity and the often duplicitous public relations spin that supports it. In 1995 we instituted Play it Again, a section now edited by Gene Borio. Over the past five years, this section has featured many hundreds of embarrassing quotes from the industry, often made in forums where they thought no one would be …