Tobacco archive opened up to public scrutiny

10 June 2004

A project that will make millions of pages of documents relating to a transnational tobacco giant available to the public was launched in May 2004.

The Guildford Archiving Project aims to upload internal corporate documents from British American Tobacco (BAT) onto an independent public website run by the University of California, San Francisco’s (UCSF’s) Kalmanovitz Library.

The documents are housed at the Guildford Depository in the UK, which was established following litigation brought against several tobacco companies in the state of Minnesota. The Minnesota Consent Judgment of 1998 ruled that these internal tobacco industry documents must be made available to the public, for ten years, via the creation of two depositories: the largest at Minnesota, and the other, containing an estimated 8 million pages, at Guildford.

The Guildford Depository, operated by BAT itself, opened in February 1999. Visitors immediately found the conditions of access highly problematic. Given the Depository’s scheduled closure in 2009, the Guildford Archiving Project was launched in 2001 to secure and expand public access to these documents. The project – a joint undertaking by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UCSF and the Mayo Clinic, with funding from the Wellcome Trust and others* – has been operating confidentially since 2000.

The documents in the Guildford Depository offer a unique insight into how the tobacco industry has operated since the early 20th century and especially over the past two decades, as well as future strategies – notably in the developing world. It is hoped that publication of documents on the web will enable countries to protect themselves from industry tactics and reduce the devastating health and economic impacts of tobacco use.

Writing in the Lancet (vol. 363 May 29, 2004) researchers from the London School and Mayo Clinic have outlined some of the problems they have faced trying to use the Depository. For example, it is only open for six hours a day and offers a very crude indexing system. BAT has tracked visitors’ electronic database searches and analysed their research and potential litigation mindset.

Requests for photocopies have regularly taken a year or more to process, and BAT has refused numerous requests for electronic copies of documents. BAT has also refused to supply some documents based on claims of ‘privilege’, which cannot be challenged and which the researchers believe may have been used inappropriately.

Even more disturbing are indications of document alteration. Researchers have evidence that in one document, references to “illiterate low-income 16 year olds” in the Middle East were changed to the less controversial age of 18 years.

In addition, material in the depository may be vulnerable to accidental damage. For example, the researchers describe the inadvertent deletion of the contents of an audiotape (which had been requested by researchers for a second time), which demonstrated that BAT intended to market a “cheap cigarette” to “dirt poor little black farmers”. Another example of the potential vulnerability of the Depository's contents is that its index now contains 181 fewer files (over 36 000 pages at BAT’s estimate) than BAT indicated to the Health Select Committee in January 2000; this discrepancy has not yet been explained.

Researchers from the London School have now requested photocopies of the entire collection from BAT. These are being scanned and indexed in preparation for web publication. The first batch of over 1 million pages will be available for public access from September 2004.

Documents secured so far have already cast light on marketing to young people, efforts to influence scientific research and public policy, smuggling of cigarettes, and price fixing.

*The archiving project is funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute, Cancer Research UK, Health Canada and the American Heart Association.

External links

Guildford Archiving Project: Details from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
British-American Tobacco Document Collection: Documents from the Guildford Depository at the University of California, San Francisco