Legacy Tobacco Documents Library: About the Collections

About the Collections


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	Collections Master Settlement Agreement Companies British American Tobacco Bliley Canadian Trials Liggett & Myers Mangini ("Joe Camel") Multimedia Pollay Advertising Collection Research Collections Tobacco DATTA UCSF Brown & Williamson US Department of Justice US Smokeless Tobacco


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Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) Collections

Internal documents from the major US tobacco industry companies and organizations comprise the bulk of the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library. These documents were made available through litigation brought by the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) that resulted in the Master Settlement Agreement (1998). For more information on the Master Settlement Agreement, please access the UCSF Tobacco Control Archives Litigation section as well as the excellent analysis of the MSA from the Tobacco Control Resource Center entitled Multistate Master Settlement Agreement.

As a result of the MSA, the following collections will continue to be updated as documents become available through the industry web sites:

American Tobacco
Brown & Williamson
Council for Tobacco Research (CTR)
Lorillard
Philip Morris
RJ Reynolds
Tobacco Institute

British American Tobacco Company (BAT)

The British American Tobacco (BAT) collection contains close to 7 million pages of internal corporate documents related to British American Tobacco Company (BATCo) and its parent, BAT Industries PLC.

For further information, please access the BAT Collection page.

Formerly maintained in a separate digital library, the British American Tobacco Documents Archive, the BAT collection was integrated into the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library in July 2008.

Bliley

The Bliley collection is a special collection comprised of documents that defendants in State of Minnesota v. Philip Morris, et al, claimed were privileged or otherwise protected from disclosure. A Special Master appointed by the Court determined that the documents were not privileged or were subject to the crime fraud exception to attorney-client privilege; the Court subsequently adopted those findings and ruled that the documents be produced. While the companies disputed that ruling in court, Congressman Thomas Bliley, the Chairman of the House Commerce Committee, subpoenaed the documents in question and soon after receipt posted them on the Commerce Committee web site. A concise history of this collection appears in a ruling by the U.S. District Court, District of Columbia (212 FRD 421 DDC 2002).

For ease of searching, the Bliley documents have been integrated into the industry collections from which they originated.

The Tobacco Products Liability Project Research Collection contains Bliley documents which have added indexing that focuses on underlying legal context.

For tips on finding these Bliley documents, please access Finding Special Collections on the Search Tips & Tricks page.

The Bliley collection was added in July 2005 and updated in 2009.

Canadian Tobacco Trials

The Canadian Tobacco Trials collection consists of court records (transcripts, depositions, exhibits) from two major national Canadian trials - the 1989 Tobacco Products Control Act (TPCA) Trial and the 1997 Tobacco Act Trial.

Canada's first serious attempt to regulate tobacco marketing and the tobacco industry began with the passage of the TPCA in 1988. Recognizing the threat that this legislation posed to tobacco marketing, the industry challenged the legislation later that year. The Supreme Court of Canada overturned the TPCA by a narrow margin of 5 - 4 in 1995. The federal government responded to the Supreme Court by introducing Bill C-71, the Tobacco Act in 1996. The bill was designed to reduce tobacco consumption by: introducing significant restrictions on tobacco advertising; banning tobacco sponsorship of certain events; giving the federal government the authority to regulate tobacco products and packaging; and banning sales of tobacco to minors. The legislation passed in 1997. Soon afterwards, Canada's major tobacco companies filed constitutional challenges to the Tobacco Act. In 2007, Canada's Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the law by a vote of 9 - 0 decision.

Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada compiled these documents into one collection.

The Canadian Tobacco Trials collection was added in April 2010.

Liggett & Myers

In 1997, Liggett & Myers, the smallest of the five major tobacco companies, became the first to settle lawsuits in 22 states and to help state prosecutors litigate against the nation's biggest cigarette manufacturers by providing evidence of industry strategies and tactics. Because of their early compliance with prosecutors, L&M was not included in the Master Settlement Agreement stipulation for creation of company document web sites, meaning these documents exist nowhere else in electronic format.

The Liggett & Myers collection was added in July 2007.

Mangini ("Joe Camel")

This collection consists of internal documents from the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company, produced as part of the discovery process in the 1994 civil case Mangini v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. A majority of the documents span the period 1970s - 1990s, when RJ Reynolds Tobacco developed the Joe Camel advertising campaign in an attempt to maintain market share.

For more information on the internal documents produced in the Mangini case, please access "A Review of R.J. Reynolds' Internal Documents Produced in Mangini vs. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, Civil Number 939359 -- The Case that Rid California and the American Landscape of Joe Camel".

The Mangini collection was added in July 2002.

Multimedia Collection

The Multimedia Collection includes information about more than 7,500 tobacco industry video and audio tapes related to advertising, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and scientific research of tobacco products as well as materials gathered and produced by tobacco control advocates.

Many of the acquired videos are available for immediate viewing at the Internet Archive. For more information, please access the Multimedia Collection page.

The Multimedia Collection was added in June 2006 and will be continuously updated as more resources become available.

Pollay Advertising Collection

Richard W. Pollay was Curator of the History of Advertising Archives, University of British Columbia, when first asked to contribute his historical knowledge in tobacco litigation (Cipollone v Liggett et al, 1988). Over the next 20 years his knowledge of tobacco marketing was shared in many trials and with many governments, and he wrote many articles for peer reviewed journals, US Surgeon General Reports and National Cancer Institute Monographs based upon his own research and access to corporate documents, such as at UCSF. During this time he amassed a collection of over 10,000 examples of cigarette print advertising, as well as brand reels of TV ads from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Upon his retirement from active teaching, the originals of these materials, believed to be the largest such collection by far, were transferred to the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History at Duke University (Durham, NC). In 2000, Dr. Michael Cummings and Roswell Park Cancer Institute headed up the lengthy process of scanning and indexing the slides of cigarette print advertising, many of which were first housed on the Tobacco Documents Online website and now reside permanently on the LTDL.

Some of Professor Pollay's most requested papers on Cigarette Marketing and Advertising are available for download through the Sauder School of Business, University of British Colombia.

The Pollay Advertising Collection was added in 2009.

Selected television cigarette advertisements were added to our Multimedia Collection in April 2011.

Research Collections

Includes exemplary documents collected and grouped by various persons and institutions in the course of conducting research on specific topics. Many of these collections were previously hosted by Tobacco Documents Online (TDO). Also includes the small collection on the Japan Tobacco International (JTI) smuggling case.

For more information and descriptions of each collection, please access the Research Collections page.

The Research Collections were added in 2009 and 2012.

Tobacco DATTA: Depositions and Trial Testimony Archive

Tobacco Depositions and Trial Testimony Archive (Tobacco DATTA) contains transcripts and exhibits from tobacco-related litigation, collected from a variety of sources by the Center for Tobacco Use Prevention and Research in Okemos, Michigan.

Transcripts are unedited and in their original form. Some are rough copies and others may be marked as "confidential" although they no longer retain that status.

In addition to transcripts, DATTA contains exhibits from the case United States Department of Justice vs. Philip Morris, et al.

A further source of deposition documents can be found in the "Industry-Provided Depositions" special collection within the TDO Research Collections.

The DATTA collection was added in September 2004 and updated in 2011.

UCSF Brown & Williamson

Thousands of pages of the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation documents were donated unsolicited to the UCSF Tobacco Control Archives in 1994. These documents consist primarily of scientific studies on the addictive nature of nicotine and other health effects of tobacco smoke. Brown & Williamson sought to permanently remove the disputed material from the Library with a suit filed in San Francisco Superior Court. The University of California contended that all of the documents were in the public domain and should be available to scholars and other interested parties. On May 25, 1995, the Superior Court ruled that these documents should be made available for public review. Brown & Williamson appealed that decision, and on June 23, 1995, the Court of Appeals refused a temporary restraining order preventing release of the documents. On June 29, the California Supreme Court rejected the company's appeal allowing UCSF to release the documents.

For more information on the San Francisco Superior Court suit filed by Brown & Williamson, access the UCSF Tobacco Control Archives Litigation section.

The UCSF Brown & Williamson collection was added in July 2002.

United States Department of Justice

The United States Department of Justice collection is a special collection of documents that defendants in United States v. Philip Morris, et al., No. 99-CV-2296 (D.D.C. filed Sept. 22, 1999), initially withheld from production to the United States on grounds of privilege or other protection. Over the course of numerous privilege challenges by the United States, the defendants withdrew their privilege assertions for many documents and voluntarily produced them in response to the United States' discovery requests. Separately, the court held that a number of documents were not to be protected by attorney-client privilege and the defendants were ordered to produce these documents. This collection includes both voluntarily-produced documents and documents produced subject to court compulsion.

The documents considered for this collection were first compared against documents already in the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library to avoid duplicates. Thus, the absence of a particular document from this special collection - at least if it is already present in another part of the library - does not indicate whether it was or was not produced in United States v. Philip Morris, et al.

The United States Department of Justice Collection was added in September 2007.

US Smokeless Tobacco (USST)

The US Smokeless Tobacco collection contains internal corporate documents from the United States Tobacco Company, the largest manufacturer of moist snuff smokeless tobacco products in the US and producer of the well-known brands, Skoal and Copenhagen. Many of the documents were made available through the Smokeless Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement's provision for public access to company documents. In addition to documents access, the Smokeless Tobacco MSA provides for restrictions on advertisements and brand name sponsorship; prohibition of youth targeting and the use of cartoons; limitations on lobbying practices; bans on youth access to free samples; and payments of millions of dollars over a 10 year period to the National Public Education Foundation. The Smokeless Tobacco MSA can be viewed in its entirety at California's Office of the Attorney General - http://ag.ca.gov/tobacco/ssa.php

Many documents were originally scanned by Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI) and given to the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library in 2008.

The USSTC Collection also contains a small set of documents from the 2007 Wisconsin Smokeless Tobacco class action settlement case, Feuerabend v UST, Inc, regarding product placement and marketing practices. These can be found by searching within the USSTC Collection for usage:Feuerabend.

The United States Smokeless Tobacco Company collection was added in July 2008 and updated in August 2009. Documents will be added as they become available.