Original articleAvoiding “Truth”: Tobacco Industry Promotion of Life Skills Training
Section snippets
Methods
We analyzed internal tobacco industry documents available online (legacy.library.ucsf.edu and ltdlftd.library.ucsf.edu) using standard techniques [26]. Exhaustive searches were conducted using the snowball method from May 2004 to October 2005, beginning with the keywords “life skills training,” “LST,” and “positive youth development,” followed by searches of key individuals (e.g., Botvin) and organizations (e.g., Princeton Health Press) identified in the initial searches. We also searched
Choosing Life Skills Training
A memorandum from Haney H. Bell (Lorillard Tobacco Associate General Counsel) on April 29, 1998 to Dr. A. W. Spears (Lorillard CEO) explains that because of the collapse of the global settlement, the tobacco industry had set up a Task Force on youth smoking [16] consisting of executives from the major U.S. tobacco companies. According to Bell, Mike McGraw, the chief legal officer for British American Tobacco (BAT) and its American subsidiary Brown and Williamson (B&W), began the initial Task
Discussion
PM and B&W’s promotion of the Life Skills Training program in the United States is a continuation of its longstanding strategy of promoting “youth smoking prevention” programs [1] to compete with tobacco control programs run by states and other public agencies. There are several reasons that the LST program may be acceptable to the tobacco industry. Relatively little of the LST program is focused on reducing tobacco use directly. In contrast to a program like TNT that focuses exclusively on
Acknowledgment
This research was supported in part by National Cancer Institute grants CA-61021 and CA-87472.
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