Tobacco Industry Influence on Policy Making

Institution:
Investigator(s):	Stanton Glantz, Ph.D.
Award Cycle:		Grant #: 18XT-0088	Award: $0
Subject Area:
Award Type:

Abstracts

Initial Award Abstract

To reduce the burden of tobacco-induced disease requires understanding how the tobacco industry maintains a social and policy environment favorable to smoking. When the tobacco industry has deemed its strategies successful in the past, it replicates and builds on them. Where it identifies setbacks, public health authorities can learn where to exploit this public health advantage. To understand a microbe, one might study its genetic code. To understand the tobacco industry and how it continues to evolve, we have an ongoing written record of its research and decision making process in the form of over 51 million pages of previously secret internal tobacco industry documents available at the online UCSF Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (and other sources). Exploiting this documentary evidence is invaluable, on an on-going basis, for anticipating the industry’s future strategy and for helping guide future public health strategy.

This application uses case study methodology to address tobacco industry influence on science and policy making in the emerging US and global regulatory environment. Specific aims are: (1) Describe and assess the tobacco industry’s evolving strategies to influence the conduct, interpretation, and dissemination of science and how the industry has used these strategies to oppose tobacco control policies, with particular emphasis on how these efforts relate to emerging national and international product regulations by the US Food and Drug Administration and its counterparts in other countries. (2) Analyze evolving tobacco industry strategies to oppose tobacco control policies at the local, state, and international level, including efforts to undermine implementation of the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. While this research makes systematic use of digitized tobacco industry documents as a data source, we will also triangulate with other sources (including government records, media coverage of issues discussed in the documents, the academic literature and interviews with key informants) to confirm whether plans described in the documents were actually implemented and to assess their effect.

By identifying and analysing these industry tactics, our research helps California, US and global tobacco public health policy makers anticipate and counter industry activities (as defined in the TRDRP This proposal is in the “Public Policy and Economics for Tobacco Use” area), increasing the likelihood that tobacco control initiatives will succeed in protecting human health.