BIG TOBACCO PAID SCIENTISTS TO CRITICIZE SMOKE REPORT

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- A letter-writing campaign organized by the tobacco
industry misled the public about the health effects of secondhand smoke,
anti-smoking activists and some scientists say.

The tobacco industry paid 13 scientists more than $156,000 for writing
letters and manuscripts to discredit studies linking secondhand smoke to
lung cancer, including a 1993 Environmental Protection Agency report,
according to documents examined by the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

"It's a systematic effort to pollute the scientific literature. It's not a
legitimate scientific debate," said Dr. Stanton Glantz, a professor of
medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and author of the
1996 book "The Cigarette Papers."

In some cases, tobacco industry lawyers edited the letters before they were
sent to publications.

"What we have is massive evidence of a propaganda machine being run by
lawyers, directed by lawyers, most of them external to the industry," said
Jim Repace, a former senior policy analyst for the EPA.

The Tobacco Institute paid $10,000 to Nathan Mantel, a biostatistician at
American University in Washington, for a letter printed in a 1993 issue of
the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Pioneer Press said.

The letter criticized a study linking secondhand smoke to cancers in
nonsmokers that JAMA published in 1992. A small note at the bottom said,
"support for the analyses contained in this letter came from the Tobacco
Institute. The views expressed are Mr. Mantel's and do not necessarily
reflect the views of the Tobacco Institute or the American University."

Editors of some of the publications targeted by the tobacco industry said
that while some of the authors disclosed ties to the tobacco industry, the
editors were unaware those authors were paid thousands of dollars to write
the letters.

Officials of the Tobacco Institute and the two law firms that handled the
letter-writing project, Covington and Burling of Washington and Shook,
Hardy & Bacon of Kansas City, declined comment or didn't return calls.

The documents are among the millions of pages of tobacco industry material
made public as a result of Minnesota's recent lawsuit against cigarette
makers. The suit was settled in May when the industry agreed to pay $6.6
billion to the state and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota.

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)