Dispelling the Myths About Tobacco

Internal Industry Documents Targeting Women

Contents • Welcome Letter • Seven Deadly Myths • Education & Outreach Activities • Help With Quitting • Making the Media Work for You • Documents Tragetting Women • More References & Resources

Entire Document in Adobe Acrobat Format (PDF - 1121K)

As part of its settlement agreements with a number of U.S. states, the tobacco industry was forced to disclose millions of pages of internal documents, many of which are now publicly available on the World Wide Web. These documents have provided important information, including ways in which tobacco industry marketing has targeted girls and women. The continuing challenge for people concerned about public health is how to search these documents, locate and analyze the most relevant and revealing ones, and use them for effective tobacco control.

Searching Tobacco Industry Documents: Basic Information, Steps, and Hints

CDC has created a Web site to make searching internal industry documents easier (Tobacco Industry Documents). The Web site has three main searchable components:

4B Index—A compilation of indexes developed and provided by each of the tobacco companies that were defendants in the State of Minnesota vs. Philip Morris, Inc., et al. trial. The 4B Index contains objective indexing information on the 27 million pages of documents provided during litigation.

Minnesota Select Set—A subset of approximately 380,000 pages of documents that were considered most relevant by the attorneys in Minnesota's case against the tobacco industry. This component of the Web site provides text-searchable access to a valuable portion of the tobacco industry documents.

Guildford—British American Tobacco Documents—A subset of the Minnesota Select Set that contains approximately 7 thousand documents that attorneys for Minnesota thought related best to their trial and to the population of Minnesota. Although this is an interesting and informative cache of documents with global relevance, the selection process means that some types of documents are not represented. For instance, because Minnesota does not have a large Hispanic or African American population, few documents relating to these groups were chosen.

The Web site also contains links to all of the major document sites at Tobacco Industry Documents. On this page, you can find direct links to a number of document sites, including the following:

Brown & Williamson (the U.S. subsidiary of British American Tobacco)*
www.bw.aalatg.com

Council for Tobacco Research*
www.ctr-usa.org/ctr

Lorillard Tobacco Company*
www.lorillarddocs.com

Minnesota Blue Cross/Blue Shield*
Tobacco Litigation

R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company*
www.rjrtdocs.com (when you reach the site, the URL will read
www.rjrtdocs.com/rjrtdocs/main.dms?tab=home)

Philip Morris*
www.pmdocs.com

The Tobacco Institute*
www.tobaccoinstitute.com

University of California ad in San Francisco's Brown & Williamson Collection*

U.S. Committee on Commerce document Web site

Other Important Sites

www.tobaccodocuments.org*
A meta-site that allows you to search multiple Web sites at once, as well as to look at various collections that researchers have compiled.

www.ash.org.uk/links/industry.html*
Links to document sites and compilations of quotes from industry documents.

British American Tobacco Documents:

British American Tobacco was allowed to place its documents in a separate repository in Guildford, England, rather than placing them online. A limited subset of these documents can be found online at:
www.cctc.ca/Guildford.nsf/1_MainFrameWeb?OpenFrameSet*

Getting Started*

The Philip Morris site (www.pmdocs.com) is one of the easiest for beginners to use and contains a large number of useful documents. Becoming proficient with this site first will help advocates better understand the sites that are more difficult to navigate.

The best way to explain how to use the document sites is to start with an example. Let's say you want to know about Philip Morris's marketing plans in Florida. If you go to the Philip Morris document site, www.pmdocs.com, and type in the word "Florida" as your search criterion, you will find that this search returns 0 documents. This is because Philip Morris's Web site is case sensitive. Instead, type in FLORIDA (all in caps). This search returns 1,778 documents clearly too many to look through. To narrow down your search further, add the phrase "& MARKETING" to the search criterion. (Remember to use the symbol "&" instead of the word "AND.") A search of "FLORIDA & MARKETING" returns 255 documents. This is much smaller, but still an unwieldy number. Let's say you first want to look at confidential documents regarding marketing in Florida. Add the words "& CONFIDENTIAL" to the search criteria, so that it reads "FLORIDA & MARKETING & CONFIDENTIAL." This search returns 10 documents, including memos about marketing cigarettes at Black Expos in Jacksonville, Florida (www.pmdocs.com/getallimg.asp?if=avpidx&DOCID=2042390465 ), and Fort Lauderdale, Florida (www.pmdocs.com/getallimg.asp?if=avpidx& DOCID=2044750345).

Bear in mind that the search engines on the sites are only able to search the indices of the documents, not the entire text. Thus, those documents that contain the term "FLORIDA" in the indices, but not in the text, will appear in a search for that term. Not all documents returned will be pertinent to your particular topic. For example, the above search will also return information on a confidential "PROJECT FLORIDA" that Philip Morris implemented in Switzerland.

Search Tips and Tactics
While searching, keep a pad of paper handy to record code names of special projects, interesting terms, employee names and titles, and other words of interest that could aid in later searches.

Keywords: Aside from specific search terms, here are some generic key words to keep in mind:

• "Memo" (written correspondence between company employees)
• "Plan" (can help you find state- or countrywide marketing plans, or overall corporate plans)
• "Letter" (written correspondence usually with people outside the company)
• "Publication" (articles published in journals or other periodicals)
• "Article" (usually a newspaper or magazine article)
• "Telex" (the industry's word for E-mail in earlier documents as well as overseas telexes. More recent documents use the term "E-mail.")
• "Confidential" To help find the most confidential information, you can also try adding the terms "attorney work product" or just "work product" to your search criteria. Some of the most sensitive documents were given this designation in an attempt to shield them from the public.

Code names and acronyms: As you will discover when you start searching, the companies use code names and acronyms for many of their campaigns, internal studies, and research projects. Examples are names like "Project 16," "Operation Down under," and "FUBYAS" (R.J. Reynolds' acronym for "First Unbranded Young Adult Smokers," a term used to refer to youth). These code names and acronyms can help you zero in on a particular project while excluding many extraneous documents.

Bates numbers: The courts have placed a unique "Bates number" on each page of every document. These identifying numbers are stamped on the page, usually vertically, on the lower left corner of each document. Record the Bates numbers of important documents to use as references and to make them easier to find again.

Names of employees: Note the names and titles of the employees on the documents that you find. Often, one executive is put in charge of a company's political or marketing activities in a certain part of the country or world. Searching for documents authored by this person can reveal a cache of information about how the industry acted in certain localities. In addition, these executives usually turned in regular reports ("weekly report" or "monthly report") to their headquarters about their division's activities. These reports can be valuable sources of information.

Storing Documents for Later Use
The Philip Morris, Lorillard, and Tobacco Institute sites all allow you to "bookmark" documents on your computer's hard drive. You should bookmark any documents that you think are particularly important or that you might need in the future. To do this, hit the "view all pages" button, and then in your browser click the "add bookmarks" button. If you are using Internet Explorer, it will prompt you to type an identifying phrase into the "bookmark properties." With Netscape, you will have to go into the "edit bookmarks" section to type in the phrase. If you do not add an identifying phrase, your bookmarks will just say "image viewer" and will not reflect the contents of the document you are saving, or even the title.

Where to Go for Further Help
The search instructions posted at each site contain basic information, such as how to properly format search terms. Always read these instructions before proceeding. Consult the examples offered within them as your first step in addressing problems.

You may also be able to get assistance from other experienced researchers by joining the tobacco industry document discussion lists "doc-talk" and "intldoc-talk" on the Web. To sign up for these lists, go to www.smokescreen.org*.

Technical Requirements
Internet Connection Speed: A modem and phone line that support a 28.8 kbps baud rate should be adequate for viewing documents without being so slow as to be completely frustrating. At this speed, an average page of text should take between 5 and 7 seconds to load, while a 50-page document could take 6 to 8 minutes to load. Higher speed Internet connections (such as DSL, ISDN, satellite, or wireless services) offer faster download times but cost more and generally are only available in major urban centers. A satellite Internet connection is now available in rural localities, where access to in-ground high-speed lines does not exist. Satellite connections are more expensive, but as of now are the only option for people in remote locations. At the time of this writing, only one satellite company supplies high-speed Internet access.

Processing Speed: A minimum of 32 MB of random-access memory (RAM) is recommended for viewing documents. Upgrading the amount of RAM is relatively simple on most computers.

Software: To view the documents, you will need a recent version of a Web browser, such as Internet Explorer (www.Microsoft.com/downloads/search.asp?)* or Netscape Navigator (home.netscape.com/computing/download)*, which can be downloaded for free. You will also want a copy of Adobe Acrobat, a file-viewing program for portable document format (PDF) files that can also be downloaded for free (www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html).* The Brown & Williamson Web site requires its own unique viewer (MIF), which you can download for free at this site.

Other Frequently Asked Questions
Q. How do I find a document if I only have the Bates number?

A. If, after typing in the Bates number on the appropriate site, you get the response "no records match your search," you'll need to try substituting a wildcard symbol (*) for the last digit in the Bates number. If that doesn't work, try substituting two wildcards for the last two digits of the number. The idea is to find numbers that are very close to the one you're looking for. Some sites respond to entering the Bates number of the starting page instead of the number for the entire document.

Q. Do all the sites respond to narrowing searches by using the symbol "&"?

A. No. On some sites you have to use the word "and" to indicate the search term. Read the search directions on each site to find out whether words or symbols are used for terms like "and" or "not."

Q. How should I search for phrases like "Philip Morris"? Do I type in "Philip Morris" or "Philip and Morris"?

A. To find every occurrence of the company name "Philip Morris," you would type it exactly the way the name of the company appears. To find the words exclusively where they appear together, put quotation marks around the phrase ("Philip Morris"). Likewise, if you want to find every occurrence of the two-word phrase "political strategy," type the two words together just like that, with quotation marks around them. However, if you want to find every document with both the words "political" and "strategy" contained somewhere in the description but not necessarily together, enter as the search criteria "political & strategy."

Q. What about my privacy? Will the tobacco companies know it's me searching?

A. Visiting some of the sites will result in markers (or "cookies") being imbedded into your browser, which tells the companies where people go on the site and what they view. Currently, this information cannot be linked back to an individual, but cookies can be set up to identify the Internet service provider you are using. All browsers allow you to either block cookies or delete them after every session.

Q. Is there any way to copy the text of a document into my word processor?

A. No, outside of retyping it verbatim. You should print documents out directly from the site while you are online. For those sites that allow you to view and print documents in PDF format, using this format will result in the best possible copy. You can also save the document to your computer in PDF format by clicking on the "save" icon. A scanner can be used to scan in the text from a printout, but the character recognition software is still somewhat crude.

Q. I've tried searching for a particular word or phrase but get nothing. How can I have a more productive search?

A. Be creative. Think of every other phrase that could possibly turn up something on the subject for which you are searching. Most importantly, read what you do find carefully. The more you read, the more terms you will discover that will return a productive search. Take note of the authors' names and the jargon and acronyms that the companies use to refer to particular regions, projects, and marketing techniques, and then start searching for documents with those words and names.

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This page last reviewed October 13, 2004

United States Department of Health and Human Services
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion
Office on Smoking and Health