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Address 530 Parnassus Ave, San Francisco, CA 94143, USA Similar UC San Francisco (UCSF), UCSF Library, UCSF Center For Tobacco, Library & Center For Knowledge, Gleeson Library | Geschke |
The UCSF Truth Tobacco Industry Documents (formerly known as Legacy Tobacco Documents Library) is a digital archive of tobacco industry documents, funded by Truth Initiative and created and maintained by the University of California, San Francisco. The Library is a part of the larger UCSF Industry Documents Library which also includes the Drug Industry Document Archive. TTID contains over 14 million documents produced by major tobacco companies and organizations, many of them internal strategic memoranda made public as a consequence of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. The documents deal with the tobacco industry’s advertising, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and scientific research activities for the last century. Researchers, journalists, students, and activists interested in tobacco control issues and public health policies use the Library extensively to investigate tobacco industry strategies.
Contents
History
In 1994, the Attorneys General of four states—Mississippi, Minnesota, Florida, and Texas—separately filed lawsuits against the tobacco industry in an effort to secure reimbursement for health care expenditures arising from tobacco-related illnesses. During the course of this litigation, 42 other states joined in similar legal actions. In 1998, a Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) was signed by the Attorneys General of 46 states and the nation's five major tobacco companies: Philip Morris, R. J. Reynolds, Lorillard, Brown & Williamson, and the American Tobacco Company. The MSA effectively settled the outstanding lawsuits by requiring yearly payments by the tobacco companies to the states and placing restrictions on the advertising and marketing of tobacco products. The MSA provisions also created and currently fund the Legacy for Health, an anti-smoking advocacy group, which in turn funded the creation of the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library as well as its ongoing maintenance and collection activities.
As part of this Master Settlement Agreement, the U.S. tobacco companies were ordered to release the internal documents produced for the case for public access in both a physical depository in Minnesota and on their own document websites. The international tobacco company, British American Tobacco, was not ordered to provide a document website but they were required to deposit documents into a depository in Guildford, England. The National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) provides oversight and enforcement of this operation. In 2006, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ruled in a separate case that the nation's top tobacco companies violated racketeering laws, misleading the public for years about the health hazards of smoking. These companies were convicted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO Act). Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds filed an appeal but Judge Kessler's ruling was upheld. As a result of this case and its appeals, the companies are now obliged to make available any documents produced for litigation on smoking and health until 2021.
In 2002, NAAG gave the UCSF Library a large number of document index records and images with which to create the LTDL. Currently, documents are added to the MSA collections through the use of spidering (also known as "web crawling") applications that identify and download index records and document images directly from the tobacco companies’ websites.
Collections
The Library collects and maintains the internal documents of the tobacco companies and their trade organizations that were a party to the Master Settlement Agreement as well as documents from other litigation or companies not party to the settlement. Among the documents are more than 8,000 tobacco industry video and audio tapes including recordings of focus groups, internal corporate meetings, depositions of tobacco industry employees, government hearings, corporate communications, and commercials. Many of the acquired tapes are available for viewing or listening on the Internet Archive at the UCSF Tobacco Industry Videos Collection.