Hidden histories of internal tobacco industry research

A useful way to investigate the specific ways in which the tobacco men have responded to the health concerns surrounding tobacco is to uncover the history of internal industry Research & Development. This paper will present the extent to which the industry understood the harms of smoking, the extent to which they hid their knowledge of the subject, and the reasons why. By tracing the industry's internal research and responses to particular hazards from the initial studies as early as the 1930s through the mid-1980s, when many research laboratories were shut down or moved overseas amid concerns of litigation, one can construct a historical understanding of the ways in which tobacco manufacturers thought about and responded to health concerns. This paper highlights a cast of characters ranging from research scientists hoping to develop ways to make cigarettes safer to industry managers who dismissed this same research— and public health—in the interest of business. Industry executives made the conscious choice not to act on the results of their own scientific investigations, but it is their customers who had had to live with—and die from—that decision. Knowledge of the industry's longstanding but unpublished research efforts can accelerate tobacco control policy in making cigarettes safer, and the FDA can choose to regulate constituents of tobacco knowing that there have already been decades of research by the industry.