TOBACCO INDUSTRY SCHEME ALLEGED

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 the results of scientific
research into the effects of smoking.

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

The report, commissioned by the WHO last fall, was written by former Food
and Drug Administration commissioner David 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. 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 today.

"The tobacco companies' own documents show that they viewed WHO, an
international public health agency, as one of their foremost enemies," the
report concludes. "The documents show further that the tobacco companies
instigated global strategies to discredit and impede WHO's ability to carry
out its mission."

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. "Perhaps most
disturbing, the documents show that tobacco companies quietly influenced
other U.N. agencies and representatives of developing countries to resist
WHO's tobacco control initiatives."

David Davies, a vice president with Philip Morris International, said last
night 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."

The WHO's assertions of undue influence are based on selected excerpts from
more than 35 million industry documents that have been made publicly
available in the U.S. litigation, he said.

"While many of these documents reflect adversarial positions and often
confrontational attitudes on both sides, we do not believe that they
substantiate a conclusion that Philip Morris obstructed WHO's health
messages about tobacco or its tobacco control initiatives," Davies said.

"We recognize that there is an atmosphere of mistrust and confrontation to
which we may have contributed," Davies concluded. "But if we move beyond
the past, there is a genuine possibility for practical solutions and
progress."

While U.S. tobacco companies claim to have changed their ways in recent
years, "it is not enough for tobacco companies to now begin acting
'responsibly' in the U.S., if they continue to use unacceptable strategies
and tactics in the rest of the world," the report states.

Much of the report seeks to document tobacco industry efforts to undermine
WHO anti-tobacco activities in the developing world. In particular, it
accuses the industry of working to convince the U.N. Food and Agriculture
Organization that poor nations should not emphasize anti-smoking efforts
because tobacco is such a potentially lucrative cash crop.

The 1988 Boca Raton meeting is highlighted as an example of how the
industry sought to fight anti-tobacco efforts.

The "action plan" that followed, the report says, "is a master plan for,
among many goals, attacking WHO's tobacco control programs, influencing the
priorities of WHO Regional Offices, and targeting the structure, management
and resources of WHO. The Plan identified 26 global threats to the tobacco
industry and multiple strategies for countering each."

"That top executives of tobacco companies sat together to design and set in
motion elaborate strategies to subvert a public health organization is
unacceptable and must be condemned," the report's executive summary
concludes.

The head of the committee that wrote the WHO report is Thomas Zeltner,
director of the Swiss Office of Public Health. The other committee members,
besides Kessler, are Anke Martiny, a former member of the German
parliament, and Fazel Randera, inspector general of intelligence for South
Africa and a former member of that country's Truth and Reconciliation
Commission.