Newswise — A Mayo Clinic tobacco researcher and his colleagues present findings in the latest issue of The Lancet journal that detail the British American Tobacco (BAT) company's efforts to conduct surveillance on visitors to its document depository. These findings indicated that the company impeded access to the archive collection despite a court order to open its records as part of a legal settlement reached in 1998 in Minnesota.
The 1998 State of Minnesota settlement with the tobacco industry required British American Tobacco to provide public access for 10 years to the eight million pages in its document depository located near Guildford, England, and to any company documents produced to the Minnesota depository. While the Minnesota depository is managed by an independent third party, British American Tobacco's Guildford depository is run by the company. Starkly different from the Minnesota depository, the Guildford depository is extraordinarily more difficult to access, search and obtain requested documents, writes Richard Hurt, M.D., director of the Mayo Clinic Nicotine Dependence Center.
Dr. Hurt and coauthors, Monique Muggli, M.D. and Eric LeGresley, M.D., write that British American Tobacco's approach to running the depository amounts to concealing what is supposed to be public information contained in the Guildford depository. Newly produced British American Tobacco documents from subsequent litigation, dating from 1996 to 2001, disclosed the company's efforts to gather intelligence on visitors and their work. The authors assert that British American Tobacco has acted to make access to information more difficult by delaying document production requested by public visitors and refusing to supply requested documents in an electronic format despite, in the company's own words, the establishment of "big time imaging" capabilities at the Guildford depository.
British American Tobacco's law firm reported on the daily activities of depository visitors to the company. Despite assurances to the contrary, these depository visitor reports show that British American Tobacco apparently tracked the database searches of visitors. These activities raise ethical issues about British American Tobacco and/or its legal counsel observing the work of lawyers and researchers representing health and government bodies, Dr. Hurt says.
"Given this new evidence, we assert that British American Tobacco is incapable of operating its depository in the spirit of the Minnesota settlement and should therefore be divorced from its operation," theauthors write. "We recommend that the company provide its entire document collection electronically to interested parties thus allowing greater access to the public health community as has been done in the U.S."
During testimony in 2000, the former chairman of British American Tobacco, Martin Broughton, told a United Kingdom House of Commons committee that the scanning and subsequent placement of the Guildford collection online "would be an extreme effort for absolutely no purpose whatsoever," adding that "there is no indication to me that serious researchers are showing any interest in the papers "¦" New documents show that not only did the company recognize the importance of research undertaken by visitors, but also invested substantial resources and undertook numerous scanning projects during that time.
The analysis of newly-produced documents from ongoing litigation also describes these instances:
*Rating company files for their "sensitivity" and the identification of "Hot Docs" requested by visitors.
*A document rated as highly sensitive by BAT's lawyers was altered -- references in one document discussing the company's marketing to "illiterate, low-income 16-year-olds" were changed to the less controversial age of 18.
Visitor access to documents at the Guildford Depository includes these conditions:
*Restriction of opening hours (six hours per day compared with 10 hours per day in Minnesota)
*Limitation of the number of visitors
*Monitoring people by video cameras
*Requiring users to search files manually because of a crude indexing of documents -- this is done at file level only, with files typically consisting of hundreds of pages
*Failing to provide photocopies at the depository (with requests for photocopies often taking a year or more to process)
*Refusals by British American Tobacco to supply requested documents in an electronic format
*Refusals by British American Tobacco to supply some documents based on unchallengeable claims of "privilege" asserted by its lawyers
*The depository now contains 181 fewer files (over 36,000 pages in British American Tobacco's estimate) than it did in January 2000.
Also in the same issue of The Lancet, researchers from London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine accuse British American Tobacco of operating the Guildford Depository as a "hostile archive, providing only minimal compliance with the letter of the Minnesota agreement while disregarding its spirit." Researchers from London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Mayo Clinic have been visiting the depository for several years and ordering copies of the documents. In the past two years a consortium including Mayo Clinic and the University of California, San Francisco, has ordered copies of the entire collection which will be scanned and indexed in preparation for the launch of the unrestricted public Web site later this year.
The Lancet is an international general medical journal published in Oxford, England. Its articles feature original contributions that advance or illuminate medical science or practice, or that educates or entertains the journal's readers.
RSS