Act III, Scene 1: Patrolling the Paper Trail
"Direct lawyer involvement is needed in all BAT activities
pertaining to smoking and health from conception through every step of the
activity."
Wells memo, 6/12/84, 1830.01,
p.2
"No. 430: Among things of interest, the project apparently
intends to investigate the retention of smoke particles in the respiratory
tract. Such data could be used by the plaintiff."
"BAT Science,"
Wells, 2/17/86, 1824.03, p.1
The last scenes of this 40-year-long drama took place in the document rooms
of law offices. The late seventies and eighties was the era of lawyers and
lists. B&W became obsessed with lawsuits, especially in the late eighties,
when the family of Rose Cippollone won the first damage award--later to be overturned--against a tobacco company for lung cancer. A siege mentality took over. Lawyers
now decided who could know what about which studies, depending on how the
results made tobacco products look, and they asked not to be told at all
about research they judged to be too sensitive. ("BAT
Science," Wells, 2/17/86, 1824.03 ; also
Kendrick
Wells' handwritten revisions of a white paper on smoking and health, 1833.02,
and his explanations
of those changes, 1833.02.
A really strange document is 1833.02,
in which Wells hand-edits a summary of the smoking and health "debate"
until it's nothing more than a public relations exercise. At this point, Wells is even
censoring which data his own scientists are allowed to see. On the last
page of 1824.03 is the famous list of "excluded projects." It's basically a long list of things they will claim they don't know about.
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