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Thursday, January 12, 2017

More New RJ Reynolds Documents Added

245 new documents were posted to IDL today!

These include:

Also, as the new year gets underway and our work is enjoying a broader scope, please check out the new donation page to learn more about ways to give to the Industry Documents Library.
Thursday, December 15, 2016

40K New BAT Documents Posted

The Industry Documents Library added 44,718 new tobacco documents today.
In addition, we have added 2 new publications to the Tobacco Documents Bibliography.
Tuesday, December 06, 2016

Article Spotlight: Tobacco industry use of flavourings to promote smokeless tobacco products

The 2009 US Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act prohibited candy, fruit, alcohol and spice flavors in cigarettes, as flavors make cigarettes easier to smoke and increase youth appeal...but smokeless tobacco was not included in this regulation. The authors analyzed tobacco industry documents related to the development and marketing of flavored smokeless products (including moist snuff, snus, loose leaf and chewing tobacco) in the USA to investigate the use of additives in smokeless tobacco and who the target audiences were for these flavored products.

Kostygina G, Ling PM. Tobacco industry use of flavourings to promote smokeless tobacco products. Tobacco Control 2016 Nov;25 (Suppl 2):ii40-ii49.
Key Documents from the UCSF Truth Tobacco Industry Documents:
Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Article Spotlight: Soda and Tobacco Industry Corporate Social Responsibility Campaigns: How Do They Compare?

In light of the soda tax propositions that were on the ballot in California and elsewhere, we are revisiting an important and relevant paper from 2012 for our Article Spotlight:

Dorfman L, Cheyne A, Friedman L, Wadud A, Gottlieb M. Soda and Tobacco Industry Corporate Social Responsibility Campaigns: How Do They Compare? 2012 June. PLoS Med 9(6).

This 2012 paper, published in PLOS Med, compared the tobacco and beverage industries’ Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) tactics, and found striking similarities. The authors found that "soda CSR campaigns echo tobacco CSR in their focus on the consumer and in their likely intent to thwart regulation." Because sugary beverages are implicated in the global obesity crisis, major soda manufacturers have recently employed elaborate, expensive, multinational corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns. These campaigns are very similar to the tobacco industry's use of CSR as a means to focus responsibility on consumers rather than on the corporation, bolster the companies' and their products' popularity, and to prevent regulation.


Key Documents from the UCSF Truth Tobacco Industry Documents:

Thursday, November 17, 2016

39,000+ Confidential RJR Documents Released and Posted

This month, IDL staff added a large set of new, previously confidential documents and rolled out our new Data Set; the entire database of IDL metadata and OCR text in downloadable files (in case you needed some light reading of 14 million+ records over the holidays). Keep reading for details...

39,642 new tobacco industry documents were added to the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents archive today:

API and Data Sets - Wondering how to download large batches of IDL records at once? How about the entire corpus of documents in IDL for use in data analysis or digital humanities projects? For researchers who would prefer to work with Industry Documents Library (IDL) metadata and OCR text from within their own database systems, these files are now available for download. Please consult our API and Data Set page for more information.

Thursday, October 27, 2016

8000+ New Documents Posted - New BAT and Previously Confidential RJR

8,297 new documents were added to the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents today:

  • 2511 RJ Reynolds documents - these were originally classified as confidential but have been de-classified and are now public

  • 6384 newly acquired British American Tobacco documents - When BAT announced they were closing their document depository in Guildford, England, last year, the IDL team made an attempt to acquire any documents that were missing from our BAT holdings. We identified approx. 45,000 documents that had not been previously ordered/acquired. This is the first batch.

  • 17 recently captured and preserved websites for our CA Tobacco Control web archives. These websites are related to the current California Proposition 56 tobacco tax ballot measure and include official "Yes on Prop 56" and "No on Prop 56" campaign websites and videos.

In addition, we have added 6 new papers and publications to the Tobacco Documents Bibliography.
Monday, October 03, 2016

Article Spotlight: Industry efforts to shape understanding of tobacco-attributable deforestation

Every month, we highlight a newly published article along with a few key industry documents used by the author(s):

Lee K, Carrillo Botero N, Novotny T. 'Manage and mitigate punitive regulatory measures, enhance the corporate image, influence public policy': industry efforts to shape understanding of tobacco-attributable deforestation Global Health. 2016 Sep 20;12(1):55-016-0192-6.

The percentage of deforestation caused by tobacco farming reached 4% globally by the early 2000s but was substantially higher in countries such as China (18 %), Zimbabwe (20 %), Malawi (26 %) and Bangladesh (>30 %). Transnational tobacco companies (TTCs) have argued that tobacco-attributable deforestation is not a serious problem, and that the industry has addressed the issue through corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives such as reforestation. The authors reviewed the tobacco industry documents as well as the existing literature on tobacco and deforestation in order to understand how the industry framed this issue and sought to undermine economic policy: by emphasizing the benefits of production in low and middle income countries, by blaming alternative causes of deforestation, and claiming successful forestation efforts on their part.

Key Documents from the UCSF Truth Tobacco Industry Documents:

  • The WHO reported woodfuel curing requires one tree per 300 cigarettes. To counter these concerns, the industry initiated a "pro-active strategy" against "WHO’s propagandist views" focusing on "common interests" between the industry and farmers and claiming economic solidarity with tobacco farmers in the developing world.
    https://www.industrydocumentslibrary.ucsf.edu/tobacco/docs/#id=xhlh0196
    https://www.industrydocumentslibrary.ucsf.edu/tobacco/docs/#id=kghy0085

  • The ITGA (International Tobacco Growers Association) published an editorial in its in-house journal, Tobacco Forum, which claimed there were many other industries responsible for this deforestation. It stated: "A lot of nonsense is promulgated about the use of wood by tobacco farmers. Typical of such misinformation, an article published in the UN Department of Information’s 'Development Forum'...claimed that 'perhaps one out of every eight trees worldwide is used for curing tobacco'. The fact is that the tobacco industry as a whole accounts for significantly less than 1 % of all wood consumed in the developing world, not all of which is used for curing. The tobacco industry is only one of many industries which use wood as fuel."
    https://www.industrydocumentslibrary.ucsf.edu/tobacco/docs/#id=zjkn0198

  • The industry rejected the idea that transnational tobacco company activities in developing nations were to blame for deforestation and instead blamed the lack of government action: "Where Third World governments have generally encouraged the development of tobacco, their forestry departments have often been slow to recognize the need for reforestation. Tobacco companies have, therefore, taken the initiative, encouraging farmers to plant trees either individually or on a cooperative basis, even providing free seedlings for both depleted forestland and new land..."
    https://www.industrydocumentslibrary.ucsf.edu/tobacco/docs/#id=yrfv0037

  • The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control's Alliance Bulletin in 2001 reports: "In Uganda, BAT has been planting the fast growing eucalyptus trees to replace depleted indigenous species like the shea butter tree whose oil is used in cooking in many parts of Northern Uganda. The eucalyptus is an anti-social thirsty tree. Its fast growth rate places a great demand on the soil water and nutrients, while its fallen leaves contain chemicals that discourage the growth of other vegetation near the tree"
    https://www.industrydocumentslibrary.ucsf.edu/tobacco/docs/#id=ltlj0054