Looking inside the tobacco industry: revealing insights from the Guildford Depository

Decades after the health risks of smoking became known, a key turning point in tobacco control efforts came in the 1990s when internal documents of the tobacco industry began to be made public for the first time. Initially disclosed by company insiders uncomfortable with industry activities (Glantz et al. 1996), millions of pages of documents were then released following landmark American litigation (Glantz & Balbach 2000). What these collections contained surprised even the most hardened tobacco control advocates. The documents revealed ‘decades of deceit’ (Ciresi, Walburn & Sutton 1999), including the tobacco industry's awareness and manipulation of nicotine addiction, overt targeting of young people and women, involvement in smuggling and extensive and often covert efforts to undermine tobacco control across…