TOBACCO INSTITUTE SHUTS DOWN OPERATION

WASHINGTON -- For more than 40 years, it was a model trade group, defending
its industry with vigor and money, lots of money. It gave thousands of
campaign dollars to friendly lawmakers, flew them to expenses-paid golfing
weekends at lavish resorts and once paid a Washington researcher $10,000 to
write a letter to a medical journal.

But the Tobacco Institute, the industry's trade group, as of Friday, is no
more. It is closing its downtown offices for good -- a symbol, the industry
claimed, of tobacco's efforts to show it has changed.

``Of all the things that have been in Washington, what could be a more
pronounced symbol of change than closing the Tobacco Institute?'' said Scott
Williams, an industry spokesman.

In its heyday, the institute became a lightning rod for tobacco's critics
because of its non-stop defense of smoking and efforts to question any
research that suggested adverse health effects from smoking. In recent
years, it doggedly fought Clinton administration efforts to treat tobacco
like a drug and to resist efforts -- from county courthouses to
statehouses -- to increase tobacco taxes.

To former Minnesota attorney general Hubert H. ``Skip'' Humphrey III, the
Tobacco Institute and its industry-funded companion, the Council for Tobacco
Research in New York, were the twin ``mechanisms of past lying and
conspiracy'' the industry had used to fool the public. When the state
attorneys general threatened to sue the industry over smoking injuries, one
of their first demands was that both organizations be abolished.

In its 1997 agreement with the states, the industry offered to shut down
both. After Congress failed to ratify the pact last year, it appeared the
Tobacco Institute would live to fight again. But the industry had agreed to
close the research center, and it didn't have the fight to keep its trade
group alive.

``It was a matter of time,'' one former Tobacco Institute official said. And
by late last year, the industry decided as part of a settlement with the
states that the institute would fold Jan. 31.

Williams said ending the association had long ``been on the list of things
the industry can do in a tangible way to illustrate it is changing.''

The association's 60 employees were given severance packages, and by this
week most had left the office. ``There are no plans to reformulate it'' with
another trade group, said Tommy J. Payne, a senior vice president at R.J.
Reynolds Tobacco Co. in Winston-Salem, N.C.

``I do think that during the time when the trade association did well, it
did provide an effective forum for the industry,'' said Brennan Dawson, a
former institute spokeswoman who is now a Washington vice president for
Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp.

Faced with multiple lawsuits from the states, the industry increasingly has
turned to politically connected law firms and its in-house lobbyists, such
as Dawson and Payne, to make tobacco's case in Washington. The price for
their services is not cheap, but then industry supporters point out that
tobacco has never skimped on money when promoting its cause in Washington.