http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/16/6/1070.fullIn 1994, heads of the major U.S. tobacco companies testified before Congress that the evidence that cigarette smoking caused diseases such as cancer and heart disease was inconclusive, that cigarettes were not addictive, and that they did not market to children. Less than 1 month after this testimony, a box containing confidential documents from the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation was delivered to the University of California at San Francisco. What was revealed in these documents was evidence that the tobacco industry had for decades known and accepted the fact that cigarettes caused premature death, considered tobacco to be addictive, and that their programs to support scientific research on smoking and health had been a sham (1-6).
The release of these documents provided a roadmap for future document discovery, fueling a wave of litigation against the tobacco industry. In 1998, lawsuits filed on behalf of state governments resulted in the Master Settlement Agreement, which included as one of its key provisions the requirement to post over 30 million pages of industry documents online (7).
In 1999, the federal government filed its own suit against the tobacco industry for violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. In August 2006, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler concluded that “…the tobacco companies conspired to violate the substantive provisions of RICO…and…in fact violated those substantive provisions” (ref. 8, see page 2).
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