Daily Doc: BAT, Nov 20, 1978: BAT: 'We really need something for people to die of.'
Daily Doc: BAT: "We really need something for people to die of."
Title: A PUBLIC RELATIONS STRATEGY FOR THE TOBACCO ADVISORY COUNCIL; APPRAISAL AND PROPOSALS PREPARED BY CAMPBELL JOHNSON LTD
BAT, Nov 20, 1978
Bates #: 109881385/1407
February 28, 2001
This document, from British American Tobacco, discusses how the industry should handle the increasing onslaught of anti-smoking sentiment worldwide, and suggests that the tobacco industry should band together to respond to these threats uniformly:
"The industry's response needs, in consequence, to have many facets, but to be balanced and co-ordinated, and, above all, to be unanimous...."
One chilling passage mentions the "social cost" issue, and offers an argument in favor of smoking that the industry acknowledges it could never use publicly :
"...with a general lengthening of the expectation of life we really need something for people to die of. In substitution for the effects of war, poverty and starvation, cancer, as the disease of the rich, developed countries, may have some predestined part to play. The argument is obviously not one that the tobacco industry could use publicly. But its weight, as a psychological factor in perpetuating people's taste for smoking as an enjoyable if risky habit, should not be under-estimated..."
The document also discusses threats that other drugs, like marijuana, pose to the industry.
Many of the strategies discussed in this document are in use today.
CITATION
Title: A PUBLIC RELATIONS STRATEGY FOR THE TOBACCO ADVISORY COUNCIL; APPRAISAL AND PROPOSALS PREPARED BY CAMPBELL JOHNSON LTD
Company: British-American Tobacco Company (BAT)
Type of Document: Report, general proposal
Author Corporate author, Campbell Johnson LTD
Recipient: N/A
Date: 19781120
Site: University of California San Francisco (UCSF) tobacco document site
Tobacco Control Archives | UCSF Library
Page Count 23
Bates No. 109881385/1407
URL:
Legacy Tobacco Documents Library
Litigation Usage:
Search Criteria: "Marijuana" on the UCSF BAT site
Quotes:
[from page 2 of the document]:
...The [threat to the industry of the anti-tobacco movement] is a profound one, going deep into an unusually wide variety of related issues -- medical, political, financial, moral, social and commercial. The industry is challenged from many directions, and the opposition to its activities has become increasingly conscious of an international as well as a national potential. The industry's response needs, in consequence, to have many facets, but to be balanced and co-ordinated, and, above all, to be unanimous....
[from pages 4-5 of the document]:
...Many people have more than a sneaking sympathy for the implications of the views expressed in a 'Times' leader at the time of the second Royal College of Physicians report...In commenting on the alleged economic costs to the nation of the ill effects of smoking [the article] asked whether the Royal College of Physicians had taken account of the savings in support and medical attention after retirement in those cases where death before retirement had been induced by smoking...[The article stated,] "It is part of this gruesome equation that tobacco has the social function of limiting the number of elderly dependents that the economy must support." ...This last point, a brutally realistic one, implies that, with a general lengthening of the expectation of life we really need something for people to die of. In substitution for the effects of war, poverty and starvation, cancer, as the disease of the rich, developed countries, may have some predestined part to play. The argument is obviously not one that the tobacco industry could use publicly. But its weight, as a psychological factor in perpetuating people's taste for smoking as an enjoyable if risky habit, should not be under-estimated...
[from page 11-12]:
The Drugs Challenge
Drug rivalry constitutes a fifth challenge [to the tobacco industry]...In some places it seems as if, in the case of marijuana at least, a certain degree of toleration now exists. In this country, a Campaign to Legalise Cannabis has lately become active...It is indeed, commonly asserted by its supporters...that marijuana carries no health risks comparable to those of tobacco... There is obvious danger that, if more restrictions are placed on tobacco and if the marijuana habit notches up further small advances in legality, many people may switch from one to the other in their search for a form of escape from our neurotic civilisation...As a drug of relaxation, tobacco could yet be a boon for mankind in a stressful world....
[from page 17]:
The close links which have been forged over many years [by the tobacco industry] with the Government, Members of Parliament, scientific contacts, the medical establishment, academic and professional circles, the trade unions and others (inlcluding the media) should be assiduously preserved and extended. Through them, the industry is in a position to discuss and influence, often without publicity, most of the issues in which tobacco is involved....
[from page 18]
Hitherto the industry has amowed a 'low profile' policy, preferring not to take part in loaded public debates on the smoking issue and thus denying the media, in particular, the opportunity to capitalize on 'confrontation' situations. If a more positive line is now favoured, it must be realised that the media will still be eager to interview representatives of theindustry in a way that will put them on the defensive. They must be ready...to deflect questions in the style of a skilled politician, answering constructively and int he way that best allows them to make their own points. This willustry's new, positive attitude--the pursuit of initiatives which it generates itself, rather than reaction to the initiatives of others....
...The tactics to be amowed...suggest that every effort be made to avoid concentration on the health issue or on the special moral stigma attached to the manufacturers for marketing a perfectly legal product. Instead, spokesmen should...quietly insist that there is no moral or practical necessity for the manufacturers to be explicit on this point: consumers have all the information they need to decide the question for themselves....Other positive points, including the connection between smoking and social and mental relaxation, should be made whenever antiestéticasible...
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