The RICO Case against Tobacco. 1999 Sep to 2005 Sep: The USA's DC District Court issued its Amended Final Opinion in the Racketeering Influences and Corrupt Organisation (RICO) case against the US tobacco companies. This 2000 page document includes:
- 155. A May 1, 1972 memorandum from Fred Panzer, a public relations specialist with the Tobacco Institute, to Tobacco Institute President Horace Kornegay began by describing past industry action:
For nearly twenty years, this industry has employed a single strategy to defend itself ... it has always been a holding strategy, consisting of creating doubt about the health charge without actually denying it … advocating the public’s right to smoke without actually urging them to take up the practice ... encouraging objective scientific research as the only way to resolve the question of health hazard. Panzer went on to discuss a proposed public relations campaign -- The Roper Proposal -- designed to persuade the public that "cigarette smoking may not be the health hazard that the anti-smoking people say it is because other alternatives are at least as probable" (emphasis omitted). The proposed campaign would suggest two such possible alternatives:
(1) the constitutional hypothesis, i.e., smokers differ importantly from nonsmokers in terms of heredity, constitutional makeup, lifestyle, and stress; and
(2) the multi-factorial hypothesis, i.e., other factors such as air pollution, viruses, food additives, and occupational hazards contribute to diseases for which smoking is considered a cause.
- 156. In order to issue public statements regarding smoking and health, the Tobacco Institute contracted with numerous scientists to conduct research on related issues. Such consultants included Salvatore DiNardi, Gio B Gori, Larry Holcomb, Alan Katzenstein, Peter N Lee, Maurice LeVois, Mark Reasor, Sorell Schwartz, Murray Senkus, David A Weeks, Lawrence Wexler, Philip Witorsch and Raphael Witorsch. [1]
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