In the first of a three-part series, the Post looks at formerly secret documents that reveal the tobacco industry's once hidden agenda We are here to do something radical. To look at a problem. To achieve a solution. Nothing should be withheld.' Thus begins a sprawling account of a high-powered brainstorming session organised by cigarette colossus Philip Morris and dubbed Project Down Under, for the June, 1987, think-tank's antipodean provenance.
Details of the meeting are revealed in a once-confidential Philip Morris document, a minuted note of a top-level strategy, and among more than 30 million pages - some of which reveal the tobacco industry's darkest secrets - prised from the companies' own files and posted on the Internet as a result of litigation in the United States during the past 12 months.
The memo points to the genesis of an international scheme that has now blown up in the face of the tobacco industry like an exploding cigar. A scheme that involved the channelling of millions of dollars from the industry's war chest through a range of innocuous-sounding organisations in an attempt to procure helpful science, then merchandise the findings to ease fears over the effects of second-hand smoke and win major concessions from the public and private sector over bans.
The stakes were huge: this was the 1980s, when objections by non-smokers to other people's smoke were becoming increasingly strident. By drawing pie-charts showing when and where the average smoker lit up, the tobacco industry calculated bans in work places, aircraft, restaurants and other venues would result in a dramatic plunge in the number of cigarettes smoked. People would have less time to puff. And that would lead to billions of dollars in lost revenue.
Several key documents tell the story of how a coterie of tobacco big-wigs and American lawyers drew up a pan-industry plan to target scientists throughout Asia, the US and Europe in an effort to wrest back control of an issue on which they had decided to make a last-ditch stand. That issue was passive smoking, or, to use the industry-preferred euphemism, Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS).
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), ETS is a mixture of the smoke given off by the burning end of a cigarette, pipe or cigar and the smoke exhaled from the lungs of smokers. It cites the possible health effects as eye, nose and throat irritation, headaches, lung cancer, and heart disease. It says children exposed to ETS face increased risk of lower respiratory tract infections, such as bronchitis and pneumonia, ear infections, build-up of fluid in the middle ear, increased severity and frequency of asthma episodes, and decreased lung function.
In January 1993, the EPA published a controversial report designating ETS as a human carcinogen more dangerous than asbestos, benzene or radon, and estimated passive smoking was responsible for about 3,000 American lung cancer deaths each year. The tobacco industry hit back hard, accusing the EPA of putting its own spin on statistics to justify a political vendetta against tobacco.