Drive to Fight Anti-Smoking Efforts Reported

The tobacco industry has been waging a sophisticated, secret campaign to undermine efforts by the World Health Organization to combat smoking around the globe, the agency charges in a scathing report being released today.

The detailed, 240-page report accuses the tobacco industry of working to pit other United Nations-affiliated agencies against the WHO, of trying to “discredit” the WHO and cut its budgets, and of hiring supposedly independent experts who grossly distorted scientific research results into the effects of smoking.

It also charges that tobacco companies secretly placed their own so-called consultants at the Geneva-based WHO to monitor the agency’s anti-smoking activities, secretly monitored meetings and obtained confidential documents.

The report, commissioned by the WHO last fall, was written by former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David A. Kessler and three other international experts on public health and government relations. Much of its information comes from tobacco company documents made public through U.S. court proceedings.

One chapter details a 1988 plan headed by Philip Morris Cos. Inc. Chief Executive Geoffrey Bible--who was then head of the company’s international tobacco arm--to attack WHO anti-smoking initiatives worldwide. The report concludes that many aspects of the effort, called the Boca Raton plan, are still being implemented.

“The tobacco companies’ own documents show that they viewed WHO, an international public health agency, as one of their foremost enemies,” the report concludes.

In addition, the report details ways in which the industry created and used “ostensibly independent quasi-academic, public policy and business organizations.”

“The documents also show that tobacco company strategies to undermine WHO relied heavily on international and scientific experts with hidden financial ties to the industry,” the report concludes.

David Davies, a vice president with Philip Morris International, said Tuesday that some company documents highlighted by the WHO “do not reflect an approach that today we would adopt with WHO. . . . They are the product of a polarized and unproductive environment in which few solutions were sought, and conflict prevailed over consensus. Philip Morris regrets this.”