HOW TOBACCO FIRMS AND THE WEB CREATED A NEW DAY IN DISCLOSURE

A little over a week ago, an amazing thing happened online. A "first
installment" of millions of pages of internal tobacco industry documents hit
the World Wide Web on an industry-created Web site.

More than 30 million pages of industry documents have been collected by the
state of Minnesota and that state's Blue Cross and Blue Shield in their
landmark lawsuit against the tobacco industry.

The companies agreed to make the documents public, in the biggest way. These
days, that means online. Anyone with a computer, a modem and the right
software could peek into 60 years of history behind what must be America's
most controversial industry -- a capability no other mass medium can
practicably offer.

It's not the first time that tobacco documents have made their way out of
the industry's vaults. Decades of lawsuits produced occasional paper leaks
from the secretive industry, and now and then whistleblowers would slip
damaging memos to reporters. But for pioneering tobacco reporters such as
Morton Mintz of The Post, getting good stories meant a great deal of
scrambling and digging; it was probably more than a little lonely.

And now I can simply call stuff up on my screen that I would have killed for
just five years ago.

How did everything change so much, and so fast?

Things began to break open in 1994, when the Food and Drug Administration
started looking into regulating tobacco products and journalists began to
dig with new vigor. Boxes of documents spirited away from the Brown &
Williamson Tobacco Co. made their way into print, with blunt memos from high
corporate officials saying things like "We are, then, in the business of
selling nicotine, an addictive drug."

A series of dramatic hearings in the House of Representatives put the
industry and its practices on display, and FDA investigators turned up
evidence that the industry precisely adjusts the levels of nicotine in
products and might have even altered the nicotine to make it more readily
absorbable by the body, increasing its kick.

Specially bred, high-nicotine tobacco plants were revealed and youth
marketing strategies discussed. States and private lawyers began filing
suits against the industry based on novel theories of addiction and fraud;
more whistleblowers came forward, and more industry papers emerged in court
discovery and out of retired executives' basements.

Through it all, the industry denied any wrongdoing -- but its world had
clearly changed, and the old game plan no longer worked. By 1997, the
industry was looking to settle the new wave of suits against it and
pronounced itself willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars and make
a number of public health concessions in exchange for protection against
some kinds of lawsuits. Bills based on that settlement proposal are being
taken up by Congress.

Increasingly, the newly revealed documents made their way onto the
burgeoning World Wide Web, which was coming into its own just as they were
really beginning to tumble out. The University of California at San
Francisco library put the Brown & Williamson documents online as part of its
tobacco control archives.

"I wish we could say we were brilliant," jokes UCSF professor Stanton
Glantz, the anti-tobacco activist who led a review of the documents and
coauthored a book, "The Cigarette Papers," on them. In fact, said UCSF
archivist Robin Chandler, they originally decided to put the B&W papers on
the Web so that more scholars could study them at the same time.

It kicked off a trend. When Rep. Thomas J. Bliley (R-Va.) received several
thousand documents from industry turncoat Liggett Group, his office put them
on the Web as well. Now it seems only natural that this latest industry
cache of millions of pages would be similarly open to the wired public.

The implications of this are much, much broader than making life easier for
journalists. The materials that once might have come exclusively to a single
reporter are now available to all Web surfers, all of whom could potentially
have the same worldwide audience. It's like being Matt Drudge -- but with
facts, not rumors.

Clifford Douglas, an anti-tobacco activist who brought evidence of industry
nicotine manipulation to the attention of the FDA and the press, told me
that the changes are equally stark for activists. In the past, he would
carefully court whistleblowers over coffee in the bowels of Union Station;
now many of them contact him by e-mail and ship digitally scanned documents.
"That personal contact was very rewarding, but it isn't necessarily the most
efficient or effective process for getting that information and getting it
out to the public," Douglas said.

Going to the new mega-tobacco site can be frustrating, however. The search
systems for finding companies' papers vary, and the documents require free
viewing software that can translate the .tif format. Also, only a fraction
of the promised documents are online so far. But once you get past the
initial problems, it's an exhilarating experience -- a little like being
given the keys to a sanctum sanctorum.

Why have the companies aired their documents? In no small part because they
had to: Many of them were already coming out in the Minnesota case, and
members of Congress had demanded to look at what was in the companies' files
before they would sign on to any legislation that they might regret later.

The companies see disclosure as a way of breaking with the past. "This is a
clear demonstration of the companies' commitment to a new day," said Scott
Williams, a spokesman for the industry on settlement matters who planned the
Web site.

"This is, ultimately, going to be an incredible research tool" for scholars
and historians, Williams added. The central site also sports detailed
descriptions of the June 1997 agreement, discussion of criticism of the
agreement and more.

In an odd twist, the individual company Web sites state that the documents
concern the production of cigarettes and note that some parents may "wish to
restrict access by their children to these materials." So each cigarette
maker registered its site with the Internet screening companies whose
products are more commonly used to block porn.

So go. Explore. You might find something that no one has noticed before. As
Williams said, it's a new day.

A postscript to my Feb. 16 column on hunting through libraries for
information about Colonial dances: When readers wrote in last week with
phone numbers for online access to local library catalogues, one mentioned
that using Arlington County's online catalogue was difficult enough to
require calling the library for guidance.

Andrea McGlinchey of the Arlington Central Library brings us up to date: Its
catalogue has been on the World Wide Web since last summer, at
http://www.co.arlington.va.us/lib/

John Schwartz's e-mail address is schwartj@twp.com

Places to Go

Web sites on the tobacco controversy are too numerous to list all of them
here. But many sites link extensively to others, so it won't take long for
you to find everything you need. The new industry trove can be found at
http://www.tobaccoresolution.com. Find the original Brown & Williamson
documents at http://www.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco/bw.html. The Liggett
papers: http://www.house.gov/commerce/TobaccoDocs/alternate.html.

There are also volunteer efforts to assemble press reports and information
on tobacco issues: visit Tobacco BBS at http://www.tobacco.org; activist
Gene Borio spends about eight hours a day searching for news articles and
creating a library of tobacco resources. For anti-tobacco activists,
http://www.smokescreen.org is a clearinghouse. Pro-tobacco sites include
http://www.forces.org and http://www.speakup.org. Follow the Minnesota trial
at http://www.mnbluecrosstobacco.com/home.html, and other state suits at
http://www.stic.neu.edu.

© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company