Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy. (Author Unknown Brown&Williamson Records 4)

On December 14, 1953 the eight heads of almost every major American cigarette manufacturer except Liggett met at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. They agreed they faced a crisis because of mounting scientific evidence which was now being spread in the popular press. With a view to working together to fight the evidence that damned their product, they would turn to public relations as they had done successfully in the past.  The next day they met with John Knowlton, founder of the firm Hill & Knowlton, who created a plan to cast doubt on any scientific findings linking cancer to cigarette smoking (Brandt The cigarette century: the rise, fall, and deadly persistence of the product that defined America 165). As in the past, the cigarette companies would not use just straightforward advertising, where their own self-interest would be obvious. Hill proposed creating an industry group that would appear to sponsor research into smoking, but would actually either promote scientists with a skeptical view of evidence linking cancer and smoking, or would sponsor research in the basic causes of cancer, thereby diverting work away from the study of cigarettes. They would cite ideas of fairness and "two sides to every story" implying that there was no consensus among researchers about the link between smoking and cancer. They would call for more research as a way to imply that the studies to date were insufficient or flawed in some way. They would use a veneer of scientific method to subvert the acceptance of science (--- The cigarette century: the rise, fall, and deadly persistence of the product that defined America 165-167).

The formation of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee was announced in A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers.


The early choices being made by the heads of the cigarette companies in how they would frame this work is evident in an early draft with edits from the conspirators. Medical researchers who had found links between smoking and cancer would not be of "unquestioned professional standing" but simply "professional standing." Those scientists who could be found to contest the smoking-cancer link would be lauded as "eminent doctors and researchers." And since they knew that there would only be a handful of such researchers, they would not be numbered but would simply be "many." Most tellingly, the editors deleted the phrase "We will never produce and market a product shown to be the cause of any serious human ailment."

See the entire edited draft. 



Through the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, the industry spent millions sponsoring research to support their claim that no link between smoking and cancer could be proved. Scientists were recruited and received fees from the tobacco institute to do research that would help raise doubts, at least in the public, about cancer research. They found a few skeptical scientists, generally not from medical fields, who would dispute research linking cancer and cigarettes. They positioned this as controversy in the scientific community, when in fact medical researchers had reached consensus on the link between smoking and cancer. (Brandt Inventing conflicts of interest: a history of tobacco industry tactics 65). An example was Theodore Sterling, a mathematician and early computer science professor.  In 1978 he published "Does Smoking Kill Workers or Working Kill Smokers? or the Mutual Relationship between Smoking, Occupation, and Respiratory Disease" raising a claim that emphasis on cigarettes as a cause of illness may hurt workers: 

Thus, the relationship between smoking, occupation, and disease needs serious clarification. Smoking appears to have been used to divert attention away from the effects of occupational and environmental exposures to toxic substances (Sterling 437).

Nothing in the published article identifies the financial relationship of the author to the tobacco institute, later identified in the court case against tobacco (Glantz 296). This type of payment and resulting publication was not as common as research that appeared in non-peer reviewed journals. A common ploy for disseminating such research was to fund symposia, to pay researchers to attend, and to pay to publish the material (Bero 203). The industry research arm also funded research at universities aimed mainly at finding alternative causes of cancer (Kluger 362). The result was that the industry could point to just a few studies that ran counter to the preponderance of evidence linking cancer and smoking, thereby implying a controversy that did not really exist.

The tobacco industry was relatively successful in this campaign for many years. In 1999 the cigarette manufacturers were sued by the United States government Department of Justice. In 2000 part of the government's claim was allowed to go forward under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. In 2006 Judge Gladys Kessler found the "Defendants have engaged in and executed - and continue to engage in and execute - a massive 50-year scheme to defraud the public, including consumers of cigarettes, in violation of RICO." Appeals went on for many years, but finally the court ruled in 2018 that tobacco companies  had to post these statements on cigarette packages: 

Smoking kills, on average, 1,200 Americans. Every day.
More people die every year from smoking than from murder, AIDS, suicide, drugs, car crashes, and alcohol, combined.
Smoking causes heart disease, emphysema, acute myeloid leukemia, and cancer of the mouth, esophagus, larynx, lung, stomach, kidney, bladder, and pancreas.
Smoking also causes reduced fertility, low birth weight in newborns, and cancer of the cervix.

The case had gone on so long Judge Kessler had retired.