Fri, Sep 19, 2003 page9

• In quiet town, big tobacco company keeps its skeletons

  • By Jamie Doward / THE GUARDIAN
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  The ultra-modern, glass-fronted building has no name and no number. To enter the two-story office block in a nondescript business park in Guildford, southern England, you have to have made an appointment weeks in advance.

  Outside the building stands a uniformed security guard. Inside, a CCTV camera tracks your moves and staff can watch you from behind a two-way mirror. A helpful minion points out the bathrooms before laying out the ground rules. There is to be no photocopying of documents. All requests to obtain copies of documents have to go through a City law firm.

  This is the library that houses the archives of British American Tobacco (BAT), the UK's largest tobacco company, valued on the London Stock Exchange at a fraction under ?13.5 billion. This is the library assembled by the biggest team of paralegals in UK history. It contains 41,000 files -- a total of 8 million pages -- that chronicle how the tobacco industry has anticipated every threat to its existence for the past five decades.

  And buried within the forests of information is a document that stands out from the rest. It shows how, during the 1980s, BAT was so concerned that it would lose market share to illegal drugs that it examined strategies to give its products a more `rebellious' image.

  The previously undisclosed internal presentation made to BAT shows that the company had become concerned that the drugs market could eat into its profits and discussed a number of ways to arrest the possible slide. Written in 1985 by a senior BAT adviser, David Creighton, the document, entitled Structured Creativity Group Presentation, predicted that in the future cigarettes would face "competition with cannabis, glue-sniffing and possibly hard drugs -- heroin and cocaine."

  It concludes: "We must find a way to appeal to the young, who want to protest, so that the product image and the product will satisfy this part of the market. The cigar and pipe market has an `old' image. Cigarettes will follow as something `my father and grandfather did.'"

  The BAT depository has been in operation since 1999, following a ruling in a Minnesota court which forced BAT to make its archives open to the public -- the result of a high-profile case brought by a group of US smokers. Not many people are aware of the library's existence. In written evidence to the House of Commons in 2000, the company noted that "of the 220 days the depository has been open, it has been visited on only 133 days."

  Most of the visitors were lawyers from overseas looking for evidence to use in US lawsuits. Sometimes they got lucky, sometimes they left frustrated.

  Many of the documents are undated, making it difficult to work out their relevance to any potential lawsuit. In addition, BAT has declined to index them, making it difficult to establish any sort of chronology.

  "It's much more difficult to look through BAT's archives than those of the US tobacco firms," said Anne Landman, a researcher for the American Lung Foundation in Colorado.

  "You can't do it online. You have to do it physically: go to Guildford and look through it. You have to fill out forms and wait two months to get hold of the documents. Only then do you have the right to put it online. BAT won't put the documents on the Internet," she said.

  "It's far more restricted than in the US," she said.

  So while other tobacco firms have been acutely embarrassed by confidential memos and internal presentations appearing in public, BAT has enjoyed a relatively quiet ride over the past four years.

  There was a flurry of interest and a smattering of headlines when the library was forced to open its doors, but since then the number of visitors has apparently declined, leaving the documents to gather dust.

  For BAT, this is just as well.

  Landman said: "BAT's files are more revealing in their language [than the files of their American counterparts]. Tobacco firms in the US have long been worried about the threat of litigation and their legal experts have trained them in their use of language. So, for instance, in the late 1970s, they stopped using words such as `teenagers' and replaced them with `young adults.' But British tobacco firms didn't engage in this policy so heavily."

  Indeed. The documents in the depository show that one of BAT's subsidiary companies spent considerable time and effort pondering what to do about teenage smokers.

  In the late 1970s, Imperial Tobacco surreptitiously interviewed teenage smokers in an attempt to understand what made them smoke.

  "The recruiting qualifications were that the respondents be aged 16 or 17, attending high school, and smokers of five cigarettes or more per day. Recruiting was carried out in such a manner that the respondents had no idea the subject was to be smoking," one document states.

  Using hidden video cameras, the survey identified a fatalistic side to youngsters' nature, which anti-smoking groups have accused the tobacco firms of encouraging.

  "It is amazing how fatalistic these young people were about smoking and health. A few clearly did not wish to live to ripe old age," one interviewer noted.

  The 110-page study concluded: "Ads for teenagers must be denoted by a lack of artificiality, and a sense of honesty ... If freedom from pressure and authority can also be communicated, so much the better."

  One of the key findings of a later survey, conducted in 1982, continued the theme, concluding that smoking appealed to youngsters' rebellious nature: "Rebelliousness and boldness, beyond curiosity, accounted for many early trials."

  The reports jar with BAT's public image today. A BAT spokeswoman said: "We are working with governments, parents, teachers, retailers and others to tackle under-age smoking. It is important to us and we take it very seriously. We are running youth smoking prevention campaigns in 130 countries."
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